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Jean Toomer's Eternal South
- The Southern Literary Journal
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 36, Number 1, Fall 2003
- pp. 74-89
- 10.1353/slj.2003.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
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The Southern Literary Journal 36.1 (2003) 74-89
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Jean Toomer's Eternal South
William M. Ramsey
"how curiously, painfully creative is the South!"
—letter to Waldo Frank, ca. Nov. 1922
I
"This book is the South," declared Waldo Frank in the 1923 foreword to his friend Jean Toomer's Cane (Frank 138). Toomer's fresh, new treatment of southern folk, he averred, made Cane "a harbinger of the South's literary maturity" (139). Yet neither man was southern. Frank was a white northeasterner who had visited the South on three occasions then wrote a bad novel, Holiday, ineptly interpreting southern culture and lynching. For his part, Jean Toomer visited the Deep South only twice, totaling less than three months. Nonetheless his own anonymous review of Cane, intended for publication in The Call, emphasized his achievement in depicting the South. 1 Noting the emergence of contemporary regionalists such as Frost, Sandburg, Masters, and Sherwood Anderson, he claimed that in the South, too, "a splendid birth was imminent" (Jones, Selected Essays 11). As to Cane, despite its inclusion of considerable material not set in Georgia, he emphasized that it all "is so evidently Southern in content" (15).
As I will argue, Toomer's authorial stance actually was both in and outside the South, and this bivalent rhetorical perspective made possible Cane's unique creative vision. Of course, in most obvious respects Toomerwas neither southern nor rural. Until age fourteen he lived in white [End Page 74] neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, and New Rochelle, N.Y. Entering the University of Wisconsin passing as white, he began to define himself as a member of no one racial group but as an American amalgam. Matriculating a few years later at CCNY, he gave his name not as Nathan Eugene Toomer or Eugene Pinchback (earlier names he went by) but for the first time as Jean, listing his heritage as a "French Cosmopolitan" (Krasny 42). In the southern interlude giving birth to Cane, Toomer worked in Sparta, Georgia, from October to November of 1921 as substitute principal at a black vocational school. Feeling conspicuously dislocated in Georgia, he was both repulsed and enchanted by what he saw. One further week in the South (Spartanburg, S.C.) came in the fall of 1922, when he and Frank came to examine southern black conditions more fully. 2
Yet Toomer had grown up always highly aware of the South. His father had come from Georgia, though in Jean's infancy he abandoned the family. After the desertion, Toomer was raised in the home of his maternal grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, a prominent black Republican who in Louisiana had worked to enlist blacks to fight for the Union, who in Reconstruction served as acting governor of Louisiana, and who in Washington remained an influential activist voice. In the Pinchback household, Jean absorbed a knowledge of family past and racial politics that later made him knowledgeably articulate on historical racial issues. Though Toomer did not equate Washington with the South, referring only to the Georgia stories as his southern ones, he knew by family and social experience the post-War, black cultural infusion that added to Washington's partly southern flavor. Indeed in his review of Cane he argued that even the northern, urban stories have "a pervasive sub-tone which is distinctly of the South" (Jones, SelectedEssays 14).
Toomer's keen sense of southern ancestry fed into a profound, complex psychological response to Sparta, Georgia. Writing to Frank, he declared: "The visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth I have done. I heard folksongs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I heard many false accounts about, and of which, till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly into life and responded to them" (qtd in McKay 47). In his unpublished autobiography "On Being an American" he explained similarly: "Here were cabins. Here negroes and their singing. I had never heard...