Cane

PENGUIN

CLASSICS

CANE

JEAN TOOMER (1894–1967) was born and raised chiefly in Washington, D.C., in the household of his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, the first African American to serve as governor of a state, Louisiana. A writer, educator, and spiritual seeker, Toomer blazed like a comet through the literary firmament with the appearance of Cane (1923), which awed and inspired African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance and later. Toomer partook of both black intellectual traditions and the leftist and avant-garde cultural radicalism of Greenwich Village. Finding his creative imagination fired by southern black folk life during a brief stint as principal of a black industrial school in northern Georgia, he wrote a series of poems, sketches, stories, and plays in the early 1920s, many of which he composed into his modernist masterpiece. He considered it a lyrical swan song to a form of life that would soon die in the modern desert, while contributing essentially to the advent of a new American culture and people. Following Cane, Toomer made a spiritual journey through various psychological and religious experiments for which he was an admired proponent and teacher, until finally harboring in the Society of Friends.

ZINZI CLEMMONS was raised in Philadelphia by a South African mother and an American father. Her debut novel, What We Lose, earned her a spot on the 2017 National Book Award 5 Under 35 list and was a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard First Book Prize finalist. Clemmons lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at Occidental College.

GEORGE HUTCHINSON is Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture in the English department at Cornell University. He is the author of The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White; In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line; and Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s. He also edited The Cambridge Companion to the Harlem Renaissance and co-edited Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race since 1850.

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First published in the United States of America by Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1923

Published in Penguin Books 2019

Introduction copyright © 2019 by George Hutchinson

Foreword copyright © 2019 by Zinzi Clemmons

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Ebook ISBN: 9780525505464

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Toomer, Jean, 1894–1967, author. | Clemmons, Zinzi, writer of foreword. | Hutchinson, George, 1953– writer of introduction.

Title: Cane / Jean Toomer ; foreword by Zinzi Clemmons ; introduction by George B. Hutchinson.

Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, 2019. | Series: Penguin Classics | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029324 | ISBN 9780143133674 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Social life and customs—Fiction. | African Americans—Southern States—Fiction. | Racism—United States—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / African American / General. | FICTION / Classics. | FICTION / Literary.

Classification: LCC PS3539.O478 C3 2019 | DDC 813/.52—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029324

Cover illustration: Xia Gordon

Version_2

Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by ZINZI CLEMMONS

Introduction by GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Suggestions for Further Reading

A Note on the Text

CANE

Dedication

Karintha

Reapers

November Cotton Flower

Becky

Face

Cotton Song

Carma

Song of the Son

Georgia Dusk

Fern

Nullo

Evening Song

Esther

Conversion

Portrait in Georgia

Blood-Burning Moon

Seventh Street

Rhobert

Avey

Beehive

Storm Ending

Theater

Her Lips Are Copper Wire

Calling Jesus

Box Seat

Prayer

Harvest Song

Bona and Paul

Kabnis

Appendix I: Publication History

Appendix II: 1923 Foreword by Waldo Frank

Notes

Foreword

Originally published in 1923, Cane was written in an era not so different from ours, and Jean Toomer embodied the prevailing artistic movements of his time and context—modernism and the Harlem Renaissance—as both a writer and an individual. His literary experiments with fragmentation and hybridity placed him firmly alongside James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. At the same time, he also found fellowship among luminaries such as Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston, who committed themselves to dynamically representing African American experiences on the page. Though not usually acknowledged in the historical record, or given his due in the mainstream canon, Toomer deserves to be considered a respected figure in both movements.

These artistic movements occurred against the backdrop of the Great Migration, a decades-long period, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when thousands of blacks fled the agrarian South for industrialized labor in the north and west. This migration occurred—much as it is in the Middle East now—because blacks were escaping increased racialized terror resulting from state actions such as the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which legalized separate but equal, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that brutally upheld segregation.

In light of this, Toomer also devoted much time and thought—possibly even more than his writing—to how he constructed his own identity. Toomer was of black and white heritage, and appeared racially ambiguous. New research by the scholars Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests that he passed for white at various points in his life. In the same essay, Byrd and Gates noted, Anticipating the curiosity, confusion, and misunderstanding that his body, speech, and appearance would engender, and no doubt seeking to escape the boundaries imposed upon persons of African descent, Toomer tells us he formed his own ‘racial position’ before leaving what he would have us believe was a ‘special’ race world of Washington, D.C.¹

Toomer’s racial position, as described in his journals, was an aristocracy . . . midway between the white and Negro worlds composed of mixed-race people. This position would later inspire him to imagine a new race for himself, an extension of his actual position in Washington, D.C.—a midpoint between blacks and whites from which he could communicate with both. He called this new race American, and it was both an invention and a foreshadowing of one of the many ways in which race is reimagined today.

Between 1929 and 1967, following initial publication in 1923, Cane fell out of print. Since then, editions were published in 1969, 1975, 1988, 1993, 2011, and today. In 2010, new research on Toomer was revealed. Cane is having another moment today, and it doesn’t seem coincidental. After the failure of post-racialism and the shortcomings of the first black president (increasing inequality, the worsening economic situation of African Americans) have been aired, Cane’s importance has again been recognized.

In the wake of Barack Obama’s election, the term post-racial emerged to potentially characterize the moment Americans found themselves in. With the election of a black president, and the country’s demographics tilting toward a majority-minority, it felt like we might have shed those old, constrictive notions of race. We had broken through a barrier, shattered a glass ceiling, and certainly none of those old prejudices could survive in this brave new world. Today, post-racial feels like a quaint artifact of a more hopeful time, a time we dared to imagine ourselves beyond the country’s many deep-seated racial tensions and frequent outbursts of violence.

Toomer, in his work and life, is one of the truest illustrations of post-racial. In her essay on multiracial identity and the new American president, Speaking in Tongues, Zadie Smith invents a homeland for post-racial, mixed-race people like Toomer, called Dream City. She describes Dream City as a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I.

Though she arrives at this point through different means, Smith implicitly connects multiracial identity to Toomer’s own racial position. Both are middle points from which dialogue between black and white can happen—a parallel construction to Toomer’s Americans. She explains why this is true: In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white.

Smith doesn’t define Dream City as post-racial, but it is clear that this is the space popular culture was attempting to find post-2008 but never could. Barack Obama—because of his racial position, she implies—came close. But Dream City never actually existed in real life—except, perhaps, in that genius slogan from the Obama campaign, Yes We Can! This special place was only ever tangible in the imaginations of its would-be citizens.

•   •   •

I first discovered Cane when I think many black intellectuals do—in college. There was an unmistakable atmosphere, a buzz, that accompanied this book. My fellow classmates and professors spoke about it in hallowed terms. For black intellectuals and academics, we who find inordinate pleasures in obscure objects, this was a hidden gem, a treasure. Cane’s obscurity lent to its legend. This was a book too unusual for high school, its author too controversial and contradictory for your typical college class. This was a book that was approached only by the avant-garde and questioning, its format too confusing for the average reader; its pages would only yield to the open-minded. In short, it was a well-kept secret.

Nevertheless, Cane feels not so obscure now, but it has not lost its magic. The early aughts, when I was an undergraduate, were a particularly poor moment for representation of people like me. We held works of art like Cane against the commercialized images of blackness we were used to seeing stand in for us, our thoughts, our artwork. No, in the past few years, Cane has become increasingly relevant. It even feels, now, retrofitted to this precise historical moment.

At the turn of the century, roughly when Toomer wrote Cane, the world was experiencing rapid advances in technology, politics, philosophy, and art. The United States went through a Great Depression and then, in close succession, two world wars. In the past twenty years, we have seen the largest recession since 1929, escalating conflict in the Middle East, and a resulting refugee crisis whose effects have been felt, in one way or another, in most countries on earth. The internet and social media have drastically changed how we interact, consume media, shop, and even date. New powers are emerging, which means that new ethnic conflict will not be far behind.

Toomer, like the other residents of Dream City, like those who foolishly thought the post-racial moment had arrived, was punished for his imagination. Jean Toomer never wrote another book after Cane; he was too busy chasing the ghost of his identity. His moment never arrived, until perhaps today. Cane is not a perfect book. It doesn’t provide solutions. I’m unsure there are solutions to what problems ail us today. But that was never the point of this book. Cane gestures toward the heavens, allows us to look beyond what lies before us here on earth. We may not have achieved a post-racial America, but Cane encourages us to look beyond what is in front of us, to imagine a world beyond the one we live in today.

ZINZI CLEMMONS

Introduction

Jean Toomer’s Cane was greeted in 1923 by influential critics as the brilliant beginning of a literary career. Presenting an unprecedented perspective on the South generally and on black southerners in particular, it inspired African American writers and would-be writers, pointing the way forward—away from shame about the past and present of black southern folk culture, toward pride in the beauty of blackness. Many stressed the authenticity of Toomer’s African Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being. His treatment of black characters contrasted starkly with both the stereotypes of earlier work by (mostly) white authors and the then-current limitations of African American problem fiction. As Montgomery Gregory pointed out in the new black magazine Opportunity, Toomer had avoided the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand.¹ Many agreed with the novelist and critic Waldo Frank’s statement in the foreword to the book: It is a harbinger of the South’s literary maturity: of its emergence from the obsession put upon its mind by the unending racial crisis—an obsession from which writers have made their indirect escape through sentimentalism, exoticism, polemic, ‘problem’ fiction, and moral melodrama. It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation.²

Key to the unusual features and effectiveness of Cane was the fact that its author was in rapid transition, vocationally, geographically, socially, and intellectually, between different identities. His unsettled position derived from both a complicated personal history and the unusual cultural moment and places in which he emerged as an artist. Cane exemplifies how the texts that do most to renovate literary traditions are often subversive of the very notion of tradition; their authors are not so much unitary figures inhabiting fixed cultural coordinates as people who straddle the threshold of social differences.

Born just two years after his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback—a former governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction—had moved from a palatial home in New Orleans to a smaller, though fashionable, house in Washington, D.C., Toomer never really knew the father for whom he was originally named.³ His mother, Nina, gave birth to him just nine months after a wedding of which her father disapproved, and then found herself abandoned when Nathan Pinchback Toomer (as Jean was first named) was only a year old. Nina moved back to her autocratic father’s home, on condition that she change the boy’s surname to Pinchback and his first name to anything other than Nathan (her husband’s name). Eventually, the first name became Eugene, after a godfather, but friends called the boy Pinchy. His mother called him Eugene Toomer; his grandparents, Eugene Pinchback. Ambiguity of identity and a strong intuition of the arbitrary nature of social labels came early to Toomer.

He would later represent the social world of his youth as peculiarly unmarked by racial consciousness, but he attended a colored primary school on U Street while his white friends attended a different school. After his mother’s 1906 remarriage, a move to a white neighborhood in New Rochelle on Long Island Sound, and then his mother’s death in 1909, Eugene returned at age fourteen with neither father nor mother to the Pinchback family in Washington, where his grandparents now lived in his uncle Bismarck’s home on Florida Avenue, in a mostly black neighborhood. He would later remember this milieu as one of a genuine distinction in culture, manners, and learning. Yet his family belonged to Washington’s colored aristocracy, a group that considered itself above most black people in manners and education. After graduating in 1910 from the famous, all-black M Street (later Dunbar) High School, he began consciously to think of himself as neither black nor white—or both black and white, belonging to both worlds and yet, because of that, removed from each. Because of his famous family, his friends considered him a Negro, but he decided to simply let people take him for what they wished while he maintained a sense of being outside their clumsy categories.

Toomer entered an agricultural program at the University of Wisconsin—where he was apparently taken by many for a Native American—but dropped out after only a year. His interest in modern scientific agriculture and agricultural technology, joined with what he later learned from Marxist sources, informs his notion of the transformation of the rural South that pervades Cane. The cane of the book is that of sorghum, a plant brought from Africa during the slave trade. Throughout the southeastern United States, the cane stalks of sorghum were crushed for their sap, which was then boiled to make molasses, the