Jean Toomer, Sojourner: Striking Experience in the South and Southwest

He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited. … He never, ever wrote anything approaching the originality and genius of Cane. … I believe it’s because he spent so much time running from his identity.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (qtd. in Lee)

They will come southwestward, not on horseback or in a covered wagon but driving a motor-car. Even so they will strike experience here, as man ever does when his heart is freshly given to a place.

—Jean Toomer (Drama TS 5)¹

Nearly nine decades after the publication of Cane (1923), reading Jean Toomer is still problematic. Alice Walker offers one way to reconcile Cane’s place in African American literature and Toomer’s debated status and consent to a black identity when she concludes that Toomer “would want us to keep [Cane’s] beauty, but let him go” (65). Respecting Toomer’s cherished work and apparent wishes is an appealing idea, but Walker’s solution deepens the problem, for it collides with familiar practices of canon-making by imagining that a work can win a place in an ethnic literature irrespective of the identity of its author. Such separation of writer and work may not be possible, judging by the tendency to conflate Cane’s style, setting, and subject matter with Toomer’s racial identity.

Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., focus on Toomer’s identity in the introduction of the new Norton critical edition of Cane, and their introduction also serves as the afterword to the new authoritative text from Liveright that is likely to be the most readily available classroom edition for years to come. In these essays and elsewhere, Gates and Byrd argue that after the publication of Cane, Jean Toomer decided to pass for white. Although they acknowledge Toomer’s role as a “pioneering theorist of hybridity,” they dismiss his writing about a new American race as justification for his passing (“Song” xxxviii).² The story of Toomer passing is now ascendant and sits unopposed in the Liveright edition despite a considerable scholarly tradition of disagreement over the matter.³

To claim that Toomer passed requires scholars to establish that he had one proper community of origin and belonging and show he then abandoned it. Arguments about Toomer’s passing frequently employ an unacknowledged set of secondary parameters, in addition to race, when trying to place his community of origin. Gates and Byrd build on a long tradition of misreading Toomer in terms of class, region, and culture, therefore encouraging the misapprehension that he belonged to the community he portrayed in the first and third sections of Cane. I add issues of region and class to the analysis of race in Cane’s reception to reveal the constructedness of the regionalist credentials that the passing narrative naturalizes too readily. Situating Toomer in relationship to the rural Georgia settings of Cane reveals a continuity in his career that can encompass the New Mexico work from the 1930s produced from a similar position.

Strong parallels between Kabnis in Cane and Toomer’s unpublished 1935 play, A Drama of the Southwest, allow us to recognize and celebrate Toomer’s talents in the context of his true position as a particular kind of outsider to the communities of the rural South and the desert Southwest. In A Drama of the Southwest, Toomer examines the desires of an entire taxonomy of outsiders who come to Taos: tourists in search of novelty, male and female artists, and neonatives who stay and become hosts and patrons to other newcomers. A Drama of the Southwest is a self-conscious staging of the quest for experience in Taos and describes the problematic nature of the roles available for entering this land. I use the word sojourner for the elusive role that the play seeks because this term acknowledges motion while taking its origin and emphasis from the act of temporarily staying in a place. Over the years, scholars have paid much attention to Toomer’s passing, running, fleeing, and exile; I propose shifting attention to the way he dwelt in new...