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Chapter 2 The Tight Cocoon Class, Culture, and the New Negro Be still, be still, my precious child I must not give you birth! —Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Maternity” (1922) [W]ith the Negro’s emergence into self-knowledge is the discovery of the falsity of his former illusion that the white American is actually free. —Jean Toomer, “The Negro Emergent” (1925) It has often been argued that Jean Toomer found his Negro identity in Cane only to lose it soon thereafter. He was presumably dismayed by Horace Liveright’s decision to “feature Negro” in the publicity for Cane; distressed at Waldo Frank’s identifying Toomer as a Negro in his preface to Cane; and furious when Alain Locke included in The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) some of the sketches and poems from Cane without Toomer’s permission, thereby affirming Toomer’s public persona as a person of African descent at a time when Toomer was in rapid retreat from self-identification as a black man. Some commentators have viewed these reactions as links in a long chain of denials of African American ancestry that would eventually result in Toomer’s moving over the color line. Others have argued that, as a member of Washington’s “blue-veined” elite—and sufficiently light-skinned to have “passed” since his youth—he had never felt black in the first place; his post-Cane movement away from self-identification as a Negro was a return to a previous norm. Still others, viewing Toomer as a racial deconstructionist avant la lettre, have highlighted his increasing frustration with friends and colleagues, black and white alike, who were proving unable to comprehend his attempted formulation of an “American race” that would transcend inherited racial classifications altogether. Critics generally agree that the ossifying racial dualisms of the 1920s compounded Toomer’s dilemma: he was seeking to reformulate race and evade racial binarism precisely at a time when reinforcement of the color line was becoming a national obsession. Whether adjudged tragic, opportunistic, or heroic, however, Toomer has been routinely 52 Part I viewed as a reluctant recruit to the New Negro cultural movement of which he has been viewed, in paradoxical retrospect, as the first significant participant.1 I argue here that Toomer’s racial self-identification during the Cane period was not nearly as problematic as has often been proposed. It is clear that, even before he entered into the period of intense activity that produced Cane, he had been attracted to the project of positing a composite “American race” that would supply an identity beyond dualism and biological essentialism. His life in Washington and various northern cities had also sheltered him from the grittier aspects of African American life. When he traveled into the Deep South in 1921 and discovered an unexpected sense of kinship with its dark-skinned peasantry, however, he was by no means wholly unprepared for the experience. Not only had his exposure to the Socialist analysis of racism furnished him with a theoretical framework within which to situate his perceptions of Georgia’s peasantry. In addition, as a youth he had lived in a Negro neighborhood and attended all-black schools; as an adult, he had experienced interchanges with members of Washington’s Negro intelligentsia who not only shared his interest in the sociology of race but also had ties with the left. It was primarily in correspondence with white writers and editors that Toomer stressed his chameleonlike ability to move between and among racial groups. But when he lived among African Americans—of whatever hue—Toomer did not equivocate about his membership in the group. During the Cane years, Toomer was a New Negro, albeit one striving to define that identity on his own terms.2 As with Toomer’s connection with American socialism, it is important to read forward through Toomer’s life and writing if we wish to ascertain with some accuracy his relationship to the New Negro Movement. Too often critics have imposed on the Toomer who wrote Cane the Toomer they discerned in later years—whether race traitor, proto-deconstructionist, or mystic seeking psychic wholeness. I situate Toomer’s ideas about race and racial identity in the matrix of the postwar debate over the New Negro. As has been widely acknowledged, the New Negro, originally identified as a Marxist militant, gradually devolved into the culture-making hero of the New Negro Renaissance celebrated in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology; the term New Negro was a highly protean...

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