Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution

Introduction

Introduction In the literature of the Socialist movement in this country there is to be found a rational explanation of the causes of race hatred and, in the light of these, a definite solution, striking at the very root of the evil, is proposed. It is generally established that the causes of race prejudice may primarily be found in the economic structure that compels one worker to compete against another and that furthermore renders it advantageous for the exploiting classes to inculcate, foster, and aggravate that competition. . . . Demagogues may storm and saints may plead, but America will remain a grotesque storm center torn by passion and hatred until our democratic pretensions are replaced by a socialized reality. —Jean Toomer, “Reflections on the Race Riots” It is a symptom of weakness when one must bring God, equality, liberty, and justice to one’s support. It follows that the working classes, particularly the dark-skinned among the working classes, are still weak. Witness Russia. The Bolsheviks no longer say, “We do this because it is just, but because it is just under the circumstances, i.e., expedient. Because it furthers our purpose, this purpose being to remain in power—at whatever cost.” If the workers could bellow, “We Want Power,” the walls of capitalism would collapse. They are as yet too weak for that. They give cat-mews for “freedom.” . . . If the Negro, consolidated on race rather than class interests, ever becomes strong enough to demand the exercise of Power, a race war will occur in America. —Jean Toomer, journal, 1922–23 As I vaguely glimpse and feel it, it seems tremendous: this whole black and brown world heaving upward against, here and there mixing with the white. The mixture, however, is insufficient to absorb the heaving, hence it but accelerates and fires it. This upward heaving is to be symbolic of the proletariat or world upheaval. And it is likewise to be symbolic of the subconscious penetration of the conscious mind. —Jean Toomer to Horace Liveright, 9 March 1923 Readers routinely scan rapidly through the epigraphs to critical studies, assuming that the chunks of quotation highlight key features of the argument to come. 2 Introduction When we reencounter these quoted passages, we experience a flash of recognition that affirms both their original importance and their subsequent centrality to the argument in process. Epigraphs thus conventionally—and somewhat redundantly—gesture toward presence, rather than absence, toward typicality, not anomaly. I ask readers to glance back over the three quotations reproduced above. The first is taken from an article Jean Toomer published in the Socialist New York Call in the wake of the race riots in Washington, DC, and Chicago during the “red summer” of 1919. The second appeared in the journal he kept while he was creating Cane. The third, written to Toomer’s publisher Horace Liveright while Cane was awaiting publication, describes the novel gestating in Toomer’s mind.Bracketing the period during which he conceived and birthed Cane, these statements indicate that the writer who penned the first major text associated with the New Negro (later Harlem) Renaissance admired the Bolsheviks and held high hopes for world revolution, even as he despaired at the racial divisions in the U.S. working class. The Toomer we hear in these epigraphs is not familiar to most readers of Cane and Toomer’s other Cane-era writings. He does not enthuse about “America” as the site of cultural pluralism or future racial amalgamation; rather, it is victory in the class struggle against capitalism and imperialism, the attainment of “power” in a “socialized reality,” that will put an end to racial division. Whether the “black and brown world heaving upward” will manage to “mix” with the white in a “proletariat or world revolution” is, it would seem, at least as much a matter of political alliance as of biological fusion. While it could be argued that the cluster of left-inflected utterances reproduced above is reflective of a political standpoint that was only tenuously connected to the consciousness that produced Cane, I propose that Toomer’s 1923 masterwork cannot be understood apart from the upsurge of postwar antiracist political radicalism and its aftermath. The violent class struggles that signaled 1919 as a possible revolutionary conjuncture, coupled with the compensatory ideological paradigms adopted by various political actors and cultural producers as insurgency devolved into quietism, supply not just the context, but the formative matrix, from which Toomer’s text emerged. The expectations and desires that...