Jean Toomer

He was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. in 1894, the son of Nathan Toomer (1839-1906), a mixed-race freedman, and his third wife Nina Elizabeth Pinchback (1866-1909), also of mixed race, whose parents were people of color free before the Civil War.

Toomer's father, the senior Nathan, was born into slavery in Chatham County, North Carolina, and sold when young to Col. Henry Toomer. Nathan worked for Henry Toomer as a personal valet and assistant before and after the Civil War, learning the ways of the white upper class. He later took his former master's surname after emancipation.[2] Nathan Toomer married and became a farmer in Georgia; he and his wife had four daughters.

After the death of his first wife, Nathan married Amanda America Dickson, a mixed-race woman whose inheritance from her white planter father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored woman in America."[3] She died intestate in 1893 after about a year of marriage. After a legal struggle with her children, which did not end until years after his third marriage, Nathan received almost no inheritance.[3][2]

Later in 1893, the widower Nathan at age 54 married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, a wealthy young woman of color. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of people of color who had been free before the Civil War. Her father, P. B. S. Pinchback, was of majority European heritage, from several nationalities, and also of African and Cherokee descent. Born free in Mississippi, he was raised by his white planter father. After his father's death in 1848, he and his mother moved to the free state of Ohio. Pinchback served as an officer in the Union Army in Louisiana.

After the war Pinchback stayed in Louisiana, where he became a Republican politician during the Reconstruction era. He served briefly as governor of Louisiana, the first African American to serve as governor of any U.S. state. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1872 and 1873, respectively, but lost challenges to his seats by Democrats in Congress. In 1891-1892, white Democrats had regained control of the Louisiana legislature and were imposing Jim Crow laws; the Pinchbacks left the state and moved to Washington, D.C., where they easily became part of the elite class of people of color.[3][4] P.B.S. Pinchback was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but ultimately acquiesced in her choice.[3]

After frequent travels, the senior Nathan Toomer abandoned his wife and son, and returned to Georgia. Unable to pay alimony, he was seeking to gain some of his late second wife's estate. Nina divorced him and took back her name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents. At that time, angered by her husband's abandonment, her father insisted they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather.[5] The boy also was given a variety of nicknames by various family members. He saw his father once in 1897 in Washington, DC after he had gone to Georgia; the father died in 1906.[3]

As a child in Washington, Pinchback attended segregated black schools. (He did not take the name Jean Toomer until starting his literary career.) When his mother remarried and they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, the youth attended an all-white school. After his mother's death in 1909, when he was 15, Pinchback returned to Washington to live with his maternal Pinchback grandparents. He graduated from the M Street School, a prestigious academic black high school in the city with a national reputation.[6]

Between 1914 and 1917, Pinchback attended six institutions of higher education (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. His wide readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures he attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing.[7]

After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some short stories and continued writing during the volatile social period following World War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots of whites attacking blacks occurred in numerous major industrial cities during the summer of 1919, which became known as Red Summer as a result. People in the working class were competing after World War I for jobs and housing, and tensions erupted in violence. In Chicago and other places, blacks fought back. At the same time, it was a period of artistic ferment.

Toomer devoted eight months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject.[7] Some of his early writing was political, and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call. His work drew from the socialist and "New Negro" movements of New York.[4] Toomer was reading much new American writing, for instance Waldo Frank's Our America (1919).[8] In 1919, he adopted "Jean Toomer" as his literary name, and it was the way he was known for most of his adult life.[9]

By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications. He wanted to be identified only as an American.[6][7] Accurately claiming ancestry among seven ethnic and national groups, he gained experience in both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified as a Negro writer. He grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new Negro writers.[10]

As Richard Eldridge has noted, Toomer

"sought to transcend standard definitions of race. I think he never claimed that he was a white man," Mr. Eldridge said. "He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life."[11] William Andrews has noted he "was one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black."[11]

In 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia. Southern schools were continuing to recruit teachers from the North, although they had also trained generations of teachers since the Civil War. The school was in the center of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where his father had lived. Exploring his father's roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white.[3] Seeing the life of rural blacks, accompanied by racial segregation and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South, led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African American and with his father's past.

Several lynchings of black men took place in Georgia during 1921-1922, as whites continued to violently enforce white supremacy. In 1908 the state had ratified a constitution that disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by raising barriers to voter registration. Other former Confederate states had passed similar laws since 1890, led by Mississippi, and they maintained such disenfranchisement essentially into the late 1960s. That exclusion was challenged and eventually overcome after Congress passed laws to enforce constitutional voting rights.

By Toomer's time, the state was suffering labor shortages due to thousands of rural blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. Trying to control their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration. It also established high license fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. Planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. This period was a formative experience for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and, while living in Hancock County, submitted the long story "Georgia Night" to the socialist magazine The Liberator in New York. [4][6]

Toomer returned to New York, where he became friends with Waldo Frank. They had an intense friendship through 1923, and Frank served as his mentor and editor on his novel Cane.[8] The two men came to have strong differences.[12]

Cane

During Toomer's time as principal of Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia, he wrote stories, sketches, and poems drawn from his experience there. These formed the basis for Cane, his High Modernist novel published in 1923. Cane was well received by both black and white critics. Cane was celebrated by well-known African-American critics and artists, including Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Toomer attributed the success of Cane to his African ancestry and his immersion in the black folk culture in rural Georgia.

Cane is structured in three parts. The first third of the book is devoted to the black experience in the Southern farmland. The second part of Cane is more urban and concerned with Northern life. The conclusion of the work is a prose piece entitled "Kabnis." People would call Toomer's Cane a mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner. Toomer is the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde.

The book was reissued in 1969, two years after Toomer's death. Cane has been assessed since the late 20th century as also an "analysis of class and caste", with "secrecy and miscegenation as major themes of the first section".[4] He had conceived it as a short-story cycle, in which he explores the tragic intersection of female sexuality, black manhood, and industrial modernization in the South. Toomer acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, in addition to other influential works of that period. He also appeared to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot and considered him to be one of the American group of writers he wanted to join, "artists and intellectuals who were engaged in renewing American society at its multi-cultural core."[8]

Jean Toomer's passport (1926)

Many scholars have considered Cane to be Toomer's best work.[13] Cane was hailed by critics and has been considered as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. But Toomer resisted racial classification and did not want to be marketed as a Negro writer. As he wrote to his publisher Horace Liveright, "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine."[14] Toomer found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, as did many authors.

Jean Toomer and Margery Latimer

In 1931 Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer in Wisconsin. During their travels on the West Coast following their marriage, their marriage was covered in sensational terms by a Hearst reporter. An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors about the commune they had organized earlier that year in Portage, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press outlets were aroused and Time magazine sent a reporter to interview them. Toomer was criticized violently by some for marrying a European-American woman.[18][19]

Latimer was a respected young writer known for her first two novels and short stories. Diagnosed with a heart leak, she suffered a hemorrhage and died in childbirth in August 1932, when their first child was born. Toomer named their only daughter Margery in his wife's memory.

In 1934 the widower Toomer married a second time, to Marjorie Content, a New York photographer. She was the daughter of Harry and Ada Content, a wealthy German-Jewish family. Her father was a successful stockbroker.[20]

Marjorie Content had been married and divorced three times. Because Toomer was a noted writer and Content was white, this marriage also attracted notice. In 1940 the Toomers moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 to 1940 about relationships between the genders, influenced by his Gurdjieff studies, as well as Jungian psychology.[20] He had fundamentally traditional views about men and women, which he put in symbolic terms.

In 1939 Toomer changed his name again, using "Nathan Jean Toomer", to emphasize that he was male. He may also have been reaching toward his paternal ancestry by this action. He usually signed his name N. Jean Toomer, and continued to be called "Jean" by friends.[9]

Toomer was majority white in ancestry and his appearance was "racially indeterminate".[11] As noted above, he lived in both black and white societies as he was growing up and during his life. He did not want to be bound by race and identified as an "American", representing a new mixed culture. Given his wide experiences, he resisted being classified as a Negro writer. But, his most enduring work was Cane, was inspired by his time in the rural South and the imaginative exploration of the early African-American world of his absent father.

In preparing a new edition of that work, scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd said in 2010 that, based on their research, they believe that Toomer passed for white at periods in his life. He never claimed to be white or black, saying that he was simply an American.[11] [21] They note that in the 1920 and 1930 censuses he was classified as white. (At that time, such data was provided by the census taker, often based on an individual's appearance, economic class, area of residence, neighbors, etc.) Toomer twice had been classified (or registered) as Negro, in draft registrations in 1917 and 1942. When Toomer married Margery Latimer, a European-American woman, in Wisconsin in 1931, the license noted both as white.[11] Other scholars disagree with Gates' and Byrd's interpretation of this documentation, while acknowledging that Toomer tried to stretch racial boundaries. William Andrews said, "If people didn’t ask," he said, "I expect he didn’t tell." [11]

Jean Toomer avoided identifying with clear categories of race. Instead, he wanted to be classified only as “American.”[22] His ambivalence toward race corresponds to his interest in Quaker philosophy. In his early twenties, he attended meetings of the Religious Society of Friends in Doylestown, a Quaker group.[23] Later he joined a meeting group there.

Quakerism connects groups of different believers under the respect for everyone’s belief of a creed. They encourage each other to be able to understand themselves and their own personalities. Jean Toomer’s Quaker belief connects to his writings on the place of the African American in the 20th century.[24] He also wrote essays on George Fox and Quakerism. In his essay, “The Negro Emergent,” Toomer describes how African Americans were able to rise from those past identifications when they were portrayed only as slaves. He said they were working to find a voice for themselves.[25]

• Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University.[7]
• When Cane was reprinted in 1969, it was favorably reviewed as a "Black Classic", leading to a revival of interest in Toomer's work.[4]
• Since the late 20th century, collections of Toomer's poetry and essays have been published, and his Essentials was republished; he self-published it in 1931. It included "Gurdjieffian aphorisms".[16]
• In 2002, Toomer was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.[16]

• Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923) ISBN 0-87140-151-7
• Problems of Civilization, by Ellsworth Huntington, Whiting Williams, Jean Toomer and others, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1929)
• Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1931)
• An Interpretation of Friends Worship (Philadelphia: Committee on Religious Education of Friends General Conference, 1947)
• The Flavor of Man (Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1949)
• The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 0-8078-4209-5
• The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, University of Tennessee Press, 2006

• List of African American writers
• Literature of Georgia (U.S. state)

• Brother Mine: The Correspondence of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank, Edited by Kathleen Pfeiffer, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010
• Barbara Foley, "'In the Land of Cotton': Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer's Cane," African American Review 32 (summer 1998).
• Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Sparta," American Literature 67 (December 1995).
• Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, editors Michael Feith and Genevieve Fabre. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-8135-2846-1
• Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), online at Googlebooks.
• Nellie Y. McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
• Donald A. Petesch, A Spy in the Enemy's Country: The Emergence of Modern Black Literature (Google eBook), University of Iowa Press, 1989
• Turner, Darwin T. "Introduction," Cane by Jean Toomer (New York: Liveright, 1993). ix-xxv. ISBN 0-87140-151-7.
• Hans Ostrom, "Jean Toomer" (poem), in The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006, p. 17.) First published in Xavier Review 23, no. 2 (Fall 2003).