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C h a p t e r f i v e Colored Me Toomer  Hurston If what we call “race” in the United States entails an ongoing crisis of figuration, perhaps it is best to begin with a poem by Jean Toomer (1894–1967), entitled “Portrait in Georgia”: Hair—braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope, Eyes—fagots, Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters, Breath—the last sweet scent of cane, And her slim body, white as the ash of black flesh after flame. Something is looked at here; we are being offered a portrait. Hair—Eyes—Lips— Breath: the nouns that open four of the first five lines give us parts of a body. But the immense compression of the performance, the swiftness of the comparisons, and the decision to cast it as a sentence fragment all work to defeat the intelligence almost successfully and to argue that only poetry—and poetry asking us to work this hard to unpack it—can capture and contain the human situation Toomer here attempts to convey. Parts of a body, followed by dashes. The dashes here work like equal signs. Hair (it is “braided chestnut” hair) is “coiled like a lyncher’s rope.” Eyes=fagots. Lips are “old scars.” Breath is “the last sweet scent of cane.” The fifth comparison, of “her slim body” to the color of ash, receives no dash. Five comparisons, with one “like” and one “as.” Two similes, three metaphors. Where do these comparisons come from? They can only arise from an eye and a mind looking at and thinking about “her slim body.” The body is female, a “her.” It has braided chestnut hair, so it is probably—almost certainly—white. But who is the gazer? And from what sort of history and standpoint does that gazer’s excruciatingly bittersweet motive for metaphor arise? “Portrait in Georgia” is the last poem in the first section of Cane (1923), the section exploring the fate of women in the South. It is positioned directly before “Blood-Burning Moon,” Toomer’s lynching story. By the time we get to the poem, Colored Me 69 then, we know that women are on Toomer’s mind, and we have learned a lot about how they are seen. Toomer concurs with Laura Mulvey’s claim that woman is “tobe -looked-at-ness.” Stories like “Becky” (“No one ever saw her”) and “Carma” (“she feels my gaze”) continually advert to the drama of the male gaze. In “Fern,” Toomer even posits a female character able to resist and redirect it. When a glance rests on Fern’s face, it “thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes.” “Wherever they looked, you’d follow them and then waver back.” Fern’s resistance to being possessed sexually or visually is embodied in “the nail in the porch post just where her head came which for some reason or other she never took the trouble to pull out.” An adaptive version of Prufrock’s pin, which fixes him like a bug to a wall, and a forecasting of the nail on which Kabnis will hang the robe of his old self on the last page of Cane, Fern’s nail is the unassailable token of an identity she conserves and will not surrender to the depredations of the gaze. Of course, the dynamic in “Fern” stands in ironic relation to the dynamic in “Portrait in Georgia,” since the short story envisions a black woman being looked at by a black man. “What white men thought of Fern I can arrive at,” the narrator admits, “only by analogy.” The brilliance of the poem flows from Toomer’s decision to require its reader to examine the object of the gaze and then to reason back to the identity of the gazer. This process allows us to act out the complex associations and terrifying consequences attendant on the unidentified gazer’s point of view. “Portrait in Georgia” can in fact be read as a poem about the responsibilities and dangers of reading, where the central text offered up by the culture to the reading eye is the white female body. The body here is read from the top down: from hair, to eyes, to lips. The reading culminates in a fusion of the four synecdoches into a whole, a “body.” And this body is reminiscent, a sight that generates a simile. It is “white as the ash / of black flesh after flame.” The poem ends in fire...

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