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Chapter 4 All the Dead Generations Jean Toomer’s Dark Sister The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte I hoped that you Would help me tap the second stream And reverse my steps, the ages I have walked away Seeking I knew not what. You did not fail me. To the second station I did not arise, Hearing the strange accents Of our native language While those around me Call me dead. Dead to the first, I live to the second. And when I die where now I live, And all these people call me dead, Do you, dark sister, Not forsake me. —Jean Toomer, “Be with Me” At some point in the 1930s, Jean Toomer wrote a poem titled “Be with Me” that ends with the plea, “Do you, dark sister, / Not forsake me.” The poem’s address to this “dark sister” can be interpreted as a reference to the phases of transcendence set forth in the doctrines of George Gurdjieff. The poem can also be interpreted as an articulation of Toomer’s inner conflicts in the wake of his passing over the color line: the speaker, regretting having “walked away / Seeking I knew not what,” finds himself strangely suspended between life and death. What will be considered here is another, more specific and literal reading—namely, that Toomer did indeed have a “dark sister” (more precisely, a half-sister) to whom the unpublished poem pays oblique tribute. Her name was Mamie Toomer; she Chapter 4. All the Dead Generations 121 was the youngest of the four daughters of Nathan Toomer, Jean Toomer’s father, by his first marriage to an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry named Harriet. The history revolving around Mamie draws in a number of other family members : Amanda America Dickson Toomer, Nathan Toomer’s second wife and the heiress of a huge fortune; David Dickson, Amanda’s wealthy planter father; Julia Lewis, Amanda’s mother; Charles Dickson, Amanda’s younger son (and thus Jean Toomer’s stepbrother); and Charles Dickson’s wife, Kate Holsey Dickson, daughter of the prominent Colored Methodist Episcopal Church churchman, Lucius Holsey. The distinct possibility that Toomer pieced together significant parts of the family puzzle around the time of his stay in Sparta, Georgia, in the fall of 1921 invites speculation about the extent to which this knowledge inspired—or forced itself into—the outpouring of creativity that would result in Cane.1 Two methodological points are in order. First, as indicated by my provisional language in the preceding paragraph (“possibility,” “invites speculation”), the inferences and conclusions set forth in this chapter remain tentative. Most studies of Toomer that draw on his family history feature his relationships with four important figures: Nathan Toomer; Nina Pinchback Toomer, Jean Toomer’s mother and Nathan Toomer’s third wife; Jean Toomer’s maternal grandmother, Emily Hethorn Pinchback; and, above all, Jean Toomer’s maternal grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who had briefly served as governor of Louisiana at the end of Reconstruction and, after moving to Washington, DC, in the early 1890s, figured as a prominent presence among the capital city’s African American elite. While there has been considerable debate over what these relationships meant and how they might figure in a reading of Cane, the scholarship revolving around these figures has been able to draw on a documentary foundation consisting of more or less verifiable information. By contrast, the case for concluding that Toomer discovered various skeletons in the Toomer/Dickson family closets is based largely on triangulation among various texts; there is, so to speak, no smoking gun definitively establishing Toomer’s knowledge of all the different strands of family history described here. My reading of Natalie Mann at the end of this chapter should, however, indicate that Toomer’s creative processes entailed grappling with some painful family secrets. Part 2 of this book proposes that Cane cannot be fully understood without attention to Toomer’s felt need at once to express and repress a very personal history that hurt. Second, I am cognizant that this foray into Toomer’s family history complicates the notions of repression—and of the political unconscious—guiding this book. Heretofore the focus has been on the public historical forces shaping Toomer’s consciousness: the arrested dialectic of revolution and the various ideologemes to which this foreclosure gave rise. The political unconscious is, in this broadly social register...

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