Building the "Blue" Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer's "The Blue Meridian"

Toomer's vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in "The Blue Meridian" (1936) has its precursor in Cane's closing chapter, the short drama "Kabnis," and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience.¹ Kabnis's ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, "My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—"; "And black," retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there "Aint much difference between blue and black" (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a linguistic term "blackness" constructs the "whiteness" of Americans who have expunged blackness from public record. That Kabnis's language becomes increasingly inflected by dialect further underscores a corresponding psychological transformation that results from the pervasiveness of biracialist discourse. Proximity to his ancestral past has proven dangerous to Kabnis. The "soil whose touch would resurrect him" (98) ends up forcing him to identify with and to become one with the downtrodden of his race. As the prototype for Toomer's "blue" race, Kabnis exemplifies this struggle, and perhaps documents the failure, to create a new language that redeems and preserves transracial or biracial difference within the conventional differences of "black" and "white." Toomer's entire literary career can be understood as an attempt to come to terms with, if not to escape, his imprisonment in a racialized body—a body that serves as a sign marking its ineradicable difference from racial purity idealized in turn-of-the-century Anglo-Saxon America—and to discover language adequate to the formulation of a new American transracial type of which he felt himself to be the "first articulate member" (Jones, 58).

In "The Blue Meridian" (1936) the "universal man" is the primary emblem of Toomer's synthesis of evolutionary biology and mysticism. In this work, Toomer conceives of the "blue" race—a synthesis of African, Anglo-Saxon, and American Indian races—as the signal metaphor of his complex position on his own racial composition. As an alternative to the racial typecasting of which he felt himself and other racial types to be the victims, Toomer developed his concept of the racially indeterminate "blue" race, a new classification authorized by his fusion of language from a variety of esoteric and scientific sources, including psychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science. At the heart of Toomer's poem is his advocacy of deliberate racial blending, disparagingly known as "miscegenation," as a means to transcend the boundaries of race ideology and fulfill evolutionary progress toward human perfection. Among the poem's "white," "black," and "red" "meridians"—the physical and psychological boundaries that symbolize the three primary races indivisibly joined in Toomer's genealogy of the American race—only the "blue meridian," a synthesis of all three, signals the fulfillment of Toomer's quest for racial transcendence and American cohesion in the new configuration of a nation of "red," "white," and "blue" individuals living in harmony. As Toomer sees it, the "universal man" that he imaginatively characterizes in "The Blue Meridian" as the "man of blue or purple / Beyond the little tags and small marks"² of cultural labels is not simply another classification, but an inevitable product of natural evolutionary forces, a view Toomer shares with nineteenth-century evolutionary theorists as well as other African-American writers, including Charles W. Chesnutt and Pauline...