The Race Question and the "Question of the Home": Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer's Cane

In Jean Toomer's 1922 play, Natalie Mann, the title character offers a startling comparison to measure the force of her aversion to the domestic ideals of her day. When a well-meaning Washington matron advises Natalie to forgo her bohemian commitment to free love and modern art for the august securities of domestic respectability, the young woman protests the silencing of her creative potential that such a choice would entail: "I would rather die outright, be burnt or lynched, than to build myself such a sepulcher, to cheat death by calling it home." ¹ The violence of Natalie's reply resonates throughout the play, whose privileged African American characters consistently subordinate the race question to the more pressing "question of the home" (NM, 89). At first glance, Toomer's more famous collection, Cane, written concurrently with Natalie Mann, seems to reverse the play's priorities, replacing stagey debates on domesticity with recurring tales of racist atrocity. But in fact the two questions prove inextricable for Toomer. Revisiting in both texts the deeply racialized connections between private probity and public power, Toomer indicts proponents of black respectability for jeopardizing the very project of African American self-emancipation they sought to oversee. At the center of a critique he develops most fully in Cane, he uses the mute and twisted body of the hysteric to expose an underlying continuity between the repressive regime of domestic respectability and the brutally oppressive order of Southern lynch law. At the same time, in ways suggested by the words of Natalie Mann with which I opened, Cane transforms the figure of the hysteric into a multivalent symbol of African American protest, remaking a body strangely shared by both the lynching victim and the victim of domestic propriety into a complex emblem of artistic, sexual, and social revolt.

Pairing Cane with Natalie Mann not only renders the former text's engagement with the contemporary politics of black respectability newly visible but also prompts a significant shift in the critical framework through which we regard both texts. Precisely because Natalie Mann stages its engagement with the politics of black respectability as a series of explicit debates between characters, critics have consistently recognized the play's polemical nature even as they have condemned the artlessness of its strategy. In contrast, critics have yet to read Cane against the literary and political discourses of Toomer's African American, middle-class contemporaries. In part, this critical oversight can be attributed to the greater subtlety, intricacy, and indirection with which Toomer pursues both his arguments and his art in Cane. The resulting difficulties posed by the text have been compounded in recent years by the critical attention paid to Toomer's vexed and ultimately abandoned identification with the African American community at large. But the exposition of Toomer's unorthodox acts of racial self-definition has been tempered by new evidence and arguments establishing both the depth of Toomer's involvement in a number of black middle-class literary and political circles and the larger impact that the cultural politics of the African American elite had on his formation. Yet even the critics who have undertaken this essential work continue to separate Toomer's literary experiments in Cane from the wider African American discourses and print communities without which, by their own account, Cane itself would not exist. An examination of Toomer's revisions of the lynching plot in Cane and Natalie Mann makes such a continued separation untenable: the centrality of anti-lynching activism to the contemporaneous politics of black respectability forms a necessary context for understanding both the sociohistorical conditions that shaped Toomer's emergence as a writer and the specific aesthetic and political terms of national black expression that he sought to formulate and to promote through the act of writing itself. ²

Indeed, for all their iconoclasm, Toomer's...