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6. “A Small Man in Big Spaces”: The New Negro, the Mestizo, and Jean Toomer’s Southwest
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157 “A Small Man in Big Spaces”: The New Negro, the Mestizo, and Jean Toomer’s Southwest EMILY LUTENSKI 6 Taos is an end-product. It is the end of the slope. It is an end-product of the Indians, an end-product of the Spaniards, an end-product of the Yankees and puritans. It must be plowed under. Out of the fertility which death makes in the soil, a new people with a new form may grow. I dedicate myself to the swift death of the old, to the whole birth of the new. In whatever place I start work, I will call that place Taos. —Jean Toomer, “A Drama of the Southwest (Notes)” A photograph of Jean Toomer taken by noted photographer Marjorie Content, his second wife, shows him posed at a table, his typewriter—replete with sheet of paper—before him (Figure 6.1). The portrait seems deliberately constructed, with the posed look of a book jacket. The ream of paper next to the typewriter and the books on the shelf in the background are perfectly placed. The writer sits pensive, hand under his chin, contemplating his work. Words are barely visible on the sheet of paper exiting the typewriter; the distance from which the photograph has been taken obscures them. They are faint, apparitional, and illegible. The year is 1935, more than a decade after the publication of Toomer’s opus, Cane (1923). Cane has long been considered the harbinger of New Negro literature. The letters and memoirs of well-known actors in the Harlem Renaissance, such as Wallace Thurman and Arna Bontemps, often reach back to Cane’s publication as the moment in African American literary history when an experimental, modernist , New Negro aesthetic was born. Often these writers lament that Cane was both Toomer’s first and last published piece of avant-garde creative writing—and, many have argued, his first and last piece of New Negro writing. After Cane, he distanced himself both figuratively and geographically from the foment of black political, artistic, and cultural self-determination that tended to characterize figure 6.1. Jean Toomer in Taos, by Marjorie Content (circa 1935). Photograph courtesy of Jill Quasha on behalf of the Estate of Marjorie Content. Copyright the Estate of Marjorie Content. [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:53 GMT) “A SMALL MAN IN BIG SPACES” 159 the movement in Harlem, throughout the United States, and internationally.1 Toomer, indeed, fell notoriously silent after the publication of Cane. The mystery of this silence has long perplexed literary critics. When viewed in light of this literary biographical narrative, Content’s 1935 photograph of Toomer thoughtfully pondering his next phrase seems almost pathetically contrived, little more than a fantasy of authorship for a writer who had already failed by this date. Yet the possibility of the photograph as documentary evidence remains—a compelling possibility, given the brief assertion by scholars Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr that it was 1935 when Toomer reengaged with “a radical analysis of the politics of his time,” albeit “not . . . an open discussion of racial matters.”2 In essence, Content’s photograph—and Toomer scholarship—represents the artist dichotomously. On one hand, Toomer is the writer of Cane and as such is conceived of as politically engaged, racially conscious, and aesthetically experimental . This Toomer—like many of the New Negro writers who came after him— looks back to the southern past, the history of slavery, and black folk tradition as sources for emergent, modernist, New Negro sensibilities.Yet, on the other hand, there is a less celebratory Toomer who lurks post-Cane. He is thought not to be a poet but to be a psychologist or a philosopher who falls hopelessly under the spell of his spiritual mentor, George Gurdjieff, making Toomer less a “race man” and more a mouthpiece for the “harmonious development of man” described by Gurdjieff’s psychological system. After Cane, Toomer is said to have left the New York literary scene behind. In doing so, he distanced himself from white avantgardists , such as Waldo Frank or the editors of the literary magazine Broom, who fostered his early work under the auspices of a primitivist fascination with black culture. This was a period when (as Langston Hughes puts it in The Big Sea [1940]) “the Negro was in vogue” as a salve to soothe the ills of white overcivilization. And he also leaves the burgeoning literary movement in Harlem behind—protesting his inclusion in...