Poet and novelist Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was among the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and his 1923 modernist novel “Cane” inspired generations of Black writers and is considered a masterwork in African American literature. Yet he refused to identify as Black (or white).
His mission, as Cornell literature scholar George Hutchinson writes in “Jean Toomer: Writer for a New America,” was to awaken the United States to the formation of a new “American” race that would replace old racial categories.
In this critical biography, Hutchinson, the Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture in the College of Arts and Sciences, reveals how Toomer’s racial theory shaped both his literary genius and his personal struggles, including his relationship to his well-known novel and his lifelong effort to transcend race.
“Much of my work has dealt with American ‘racial culture,’ not only racism but structures of racial ‘feeling’ or common sense according to which most Americans understand themselves,” Hutchinson said.
“Racial identity is a coerced limit on and frequent stimulus to every American’s self-fashioning. Yet its maintenance depends on the abjection of ‘inter-racialness,’which often comports with both fetishization and scapegoating of interracial figures. ‘Cane’ deals with precisely this issue.”
Hutchinson, who is also the director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines and the George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, researched Toomer extensively while writing three books concerning the Harlem Renaissance, including “The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White” (1995). He also edited the 2019 Penguin Classics edition of “Cane.”
Hutchinson spoke with the College of Arts and Sciences about the book.
Question: Who influenced Jean Toomer’s ideas about race and his own identity?
Answer: It was mainly his own experience early in life of feeling “in-between,” being able to cross back and forth between “Black” and “white” communities, and at the same time not feeling like he fit completely in either. But he was also moved by the poetry of Walt Whitman, who wrote of a composite American identity that would ultimately restore humanity to unity with the natural world through a new “democratic” egalitarian way of being – “the races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,” as he wrote in “Passage to India.” Toomer took off from there.
Q: How does your critical biography add to our understanding of “Cane” and Toomer’s relationship to it?
A: The biography describes Toomer’s intellectual and psychological development, showing how he developed the idea of the “new race” well before he wrote “Cane.” Within that narrative, it shows how he cobbled “Cane” together as a literary collage out of poems, lyrical sketches, stories, and a play, most of which had appeared separately in avant-garde magazines. It also illuminates why the book can be plausibly interpreted as marking a pivotal contribution to what would later be called a “Black aesthetic,” even though Toomer insisted the book pointed toward the emergence of a new “American” people.
Q: What other work by Toomer deserves attention?
A: Toni Morrison considered the story “Withered Skin of Berries” equal to anything in “Cane,” and the play “Balo,” about rural “Black-white relationships,” deserves attention. Some people have hailed his book “Essentials,” a collection of aphorisms akin to Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet.”
Q: What key personality traits helped form Toomer’s life and literary trajectories?
A: Vulnerability had a lot to do with it. His father abandoned him and his mother within a year of his birth, and his mother died when he was 12. He was thereafter raised by his grandmother and grandfather, a famous “race man” (who looked white). While the family sank into poverty, Toomer struggled to find a vocation while developing a grandiose sense of himself as destined for a transcendent role appropriate for the scion of a distinguished family. Since he had lived on both sides of the color line, he considered himself the prophet of the “new race” he felt all Americans were destined for. Beyond the racial issue, his lifelong quest was for higher consciousness.
Q: Why didn’t Toomer’s vision of a united human race, with “differences reconciled,” gain traction either during his lifetime or after?
A: The main reason is the intransigence of anti-Blackness. Connected with this was the development of African Americans as a self-defined “people” with pride in their resilience and their epic history, and with a determination to “rise” as a group.
Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.
