by Jean Toomer
In 1918, Toomer returned to the Midwest, where he held a series of odd jobs, including becoming a car salesman at a Ford dealership in Chicago. During this second period in Chicago, he wrote “Bona and Paul,” his first short story, in which he explored questions of passing and mixed-race identity, a powerful work that would eventually find its way into the second section of Cane. In February 1918, Toomer accepted an appointment in Milwaukee as a substitute physical education director, and continued his readings in literature, especially the works of George Bernard Shaw.79
Returning briefly to Washington, D.C., Toomer set out again for New York where he worked as a clerk with the grocery firm Acker, Merrall, and Condit Company. While in New York, his reading expanded to include Ibsen, Santayana, and Goethe; he attended meetings of radicals and the literati at the Rand School, as well as lectures by Alfred Kreymborg, who, a decade later, would describe Toomer as “one of the finest artists among the dark race, if not the finest.”80 In the spring of 1919, he left Manhattan to vacation in the resort town of Ellenville, New York. Indigent though somewhat rested, he then returned to Washington in the fall, where he was confronted by the condemnations of his grandfather who was far from pleased with his grandson’s vagabond existence.
College photograph of Jean Toomer, bare-chested with arms folded, 1916. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.
Group portrait with Toomer at center ( four men in front blindfolded), from the Lunkentus Class of 1917 yearbook (American College of Physical Education). Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.
Unable to endure any longer the aging but vigorous Governor’s harangues on personal responsibility, in December 1919, his twenty-fifth birthday only days away, Toomer was on the road again. With only ten dollars to his name, he walked from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Winter had arrived, and as Toomer recalled, it was “cold as the mischief.”81 After an overnight stay in Baltimore, he then walked to Wilmington, Delaware, and from there hitchhiked to Rahway, New Jersey, where he worked for a time as a fitter in the New Jersey shipyards for $22 per week.82This practical experience with the working class disabused him of his romantic notions about socialism. Toomer’s destination was New York, and when he arrived there he once again took a job at Acker, Merrall and Condit. As he made his way from Washington to New York on Walt Whitman’s open road, as it were, Toomer was alone; his only company was the ambitious, yet unrealized desire to become a writer.
In 1920, Pinchback sold the Washington home that Nathan Toomer had purchased as a wedding present for Nina Pinchback. In spite of his disappointment with his grandson, Pinchback sent Toomer $600, the small profit derived from the sale of the rental property after the payment of the mortgage and taxes. With this windfall, Toomer decided to remain in New York to continue what turned out to be the beginning of his apprenticeship as a writer: “I decided that I was at one of the turning points of my life, and that I needed all my time, and that the money would be well spent. I quit Acker Merrall. I devoted myself to music and literature.”83And then, through yet another unexpected turn of events, he once again gained entrée into the rather closed world of New York’s literati. In August 1920 he was invited by Helena DeKay, whose lectures on Romain Rolland and Jean-Christophe he had attended at the Rand School, to a party hosted by Lola Ridge, editor of the new literary magazine Broom. “This was my first literary party,” according to Toomer.84 Actually, it would be more accurate for Toomer to claim that Ridge’s soirée was his first “literary party” in New York, for he had attended the literary salons hosted by the black poet Georgia Douglas Johnson in Washington, D.C., as early as 1919.85 Known among the cognoscenti of the nation’s capital as Saturday Nighters, these gatherings attracted such luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance as Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Sterling A. Brown, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Alain Locke.
Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth suggest that it was within the charmed circle of the Saturday Nighters that Toomer came to know Locke, with whom he had a cordial relationship in the years preceding the publication of Cane. In search of a community of writers in his native Washington he found, to a certain extent, such a community among those black writers and artists who attended the Saturday Nighters. According to Kerman and Eldridge, Toomer shared some of his early writing with Johnson.86 “Toomer was almost certainly the only writer in America,” as Harris and Molesworth assert, with the possible exception of the Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay, who flowed easily between Harlem and socialist literary circles downtown, “who visited literary groups as diverse as Johnson’s Saturday Nighters and the Seven Arts circle around Lewis Mumford, Sherwood Anderson, and Waldo Frank.” 87 They are also correct in asserting that Toomer never conceived of himself as a bridge between these two discrete literary communities, both of which were committed to the project of American modernism.88 Rather, he took what was useful from each in his efforts to create a work that expressed his own particular artistic and philosophical vision. Keenly aware of what he regarded as the differences and limitations of both artistic communities, Toomer, however, felt a much greater degree of affinity for those writers and artists whom he came to know through Ridge, chief among them Waldo Frank.
Toomer’s attendance at Johnson’s Saturday Nighters provided him with some preparation for the unmixable mix of banter, bravado, earnestness, narcissism, and posturing he would encounter at Ridge’s “literary party” in Greenwich Village. In the main, he was not impressed by his first encounter with the literati of the Lost Generation which, on this particular occasion, was represented by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Witter Bynner, and Scofield Thayer, among others. Hungry to learn about this new world, Toomer felt “that there was far too much buzz about publishers, magazines, reviews, personalities; not enough talk of life and experience.”89 However, one “man stood out…. He had a fine animated face and a pair of lively active eyes…. I didn’t know his name, but I marked him.”90 The man in question was none other than Waldo Frank, the celebrated author of Our America, a meditation on race, ethnicity, and spirituality in American culture. A few days after the party, Toomer encountered Frank while walking through Central Park. Both men stopped and introduced themselves, and thus began a friendship in letters that for Toomer would be instrumental in the publication of Cane. At this stage in his apprenticeship as a writer, Toomer had written the poem “The First Americans,” the forerunner of his epic, “The Blue Meridian,” and the short stories “Withered Skin of Berries” and “Bona and Paul.” He shared his work with Frank, and was heartened by the encouragement he received from the older, established writer.
Shortly after this propitious meeting with Frank, Toomer returned to Washington, having spent his inheritance of $600. This was the end of the summer of 1920. Needless to say, Pinchback raged against Toomer’s return. “Grandfather put up a fight but I beat him,” Toomer remembers rather defiantly.91 Possessing a sense of purpose and direction for the first time in five years, Toomer wrote, “I was wholly convinced that I had found my true direction in life, and no one was going to stop me. On the contrary, everyone, including grandfather, was going to help me…. I had matured considerably. And, I was filled with a purpose that was to keep me working for the next three years. But what terrible years they were!”92
And why would Toomer characterize the three years preceding the publication of Cane as “terrible”? The answer lies in part in the fact that during this period of his apprenticeship he lived in greatly reduced circumstances with his aging grandparents. “I was in the house with two old people whom,” as Toomer wrote in his autobiography, “despite the continual struggle with grandfather—he never gave up completely; he was a game fighting cock to the end—I loved. And they were dying. No, they weren’t dying. Grandfather gradually declined—a tragic sight—and, one day he broke…. I had to take over whatever of his affairs needed attention. And I ran th
e house, even cooking meals and sweeping and cleaning. In a way, it was a good thing for them that I had returned.”93 Of his grandmother, Nina Emily Hethorn Pinchback, Toomer remembered her as strong, vivid, and humorous even as she declined amid circumstances of near poverty: “Yet she bore up. Not a whimper from her. She was glad to have me there…She would say every now and again that she only lived for me. But this was the miracle—as her body failed her, her spirit began taking on a more and more vivid life. Her mind became sharper—and also her tongue. She showed a vein of humor and satire that was the delight and amazement of all who came in.” 94
This was not the first time in his life when Toomer had responsibility for the care of his grandmother. In 1909 when Pinchback held an appointment in New York at the Department of Internal Revenue, Toomer and his grandmother lived with his Uncle Walter and his family. Owing to Pinchback’s absence and the indifference of his uncle and wife, his grandmother, as he wrote, “becomes my responsibility. I look after her, and often, instead of going out at nights to play…I have to stay indoors and keep her company.”95 While he admired and loved his grandfather, Toomer also loved his grandmother. He understood her function and value in the household through its rise and decline: “She stood without flinching at Pinchback’s side all through his stormy and dangerous political career. She saw the rise of the family and, outliving her husband and all but one of her children, she endured its rather tragic fall.” Toomer also acknowledged the important fact of his grandmother’s support, when everyone else, in particular his grandfather, had dismissed him as a ne’er-do-well: “She was the one person in my home who sustained her faith in me after I turned black sheep, who supported me through thick and thin….”96 Nina Emily Hethorn Pinchback lived to see the publication of Cane, which bears the dedication: “To my grandmother…” She died five years later.
Along with accepting the multiplying responsibilities of caring for his aging grandparents, Toomer also became the caretaker of his beloved Uncle Bismarck: “Bismarck got very sick. I took over the running of his house also, and each day I went over and massaged him. He was over a month recovering. This took it out of me.” 97 Plainly, the responsibility of caring for aging relatives sapped Toomer’s energy and strength, yet it also, paradoxically, introduced a certain discipline and structure that advanced his goal of becoming a writer. “My days were divided between attention to the house and my grandparents,” as Toomer wrote of this period, “and my own work. At all possible times I was either writing or reading.”98
Toomer inevitably came face to face with his own limitations and deficiencies as a writer. There was the dream, and there was the reality. To realize the potentialities of the one clear affirmation of his life at this juncture, he had to confront and overcome the division between his own aspirations and his abilities: “But what difficulties I had! I had in me so much experience so twisted up that not a thing would come out until by sheer force I had dragged it forth. Only now and again did I experience spontaneous writing. Most of it was will and sweat. And nothing satisfied me…. I wrote and wrote and put each thing aside, regarding it as simply one of the exercises of my apprenticeship. Often I would be depressed and almost despaired over the written thing.” 99 These periods of despair were balanced by successes, few and far between though they were at the time. And these successes bolstered his confidence and renewed his faith in his capacity to become a writer: “But, on the other hand, I became more and more convinced that I had the real stuff in me. And slowly but surely I began getting the ‘feeling’ of my medium, a sense of form, of words, of sentences, rhythms, cadences, and rhythmic patterns. And then, after several years work, suddenly, it was as if a door opened and I knew without doubt that I was inside, I knew literature. And what was my joy! But many things happened before that time came!”100
Before he found his way “inside” literature, Toomer would have to endure another period when the accumulating responsibilities of being the sole caretaker of his aging grandparents would again drain him of his energy and focus. He had arrived at this state in the spring of 1922. “It was during this spring that I began feeling dangerously drained of energy,” Toomer wrote. “I had used so much in my own work. So much had been used on my grandparents and uncles. I seldom went out…. Sometimes for weeks my grandmother would be laid up in bed, and by now my grandfather was almost helpless. The apartment seemed to suck my very life.”101 As the summer approached, Toomer’s situation became even more desperate: “I felt I would die or murder someone if I stayed in that house another day.”102 Almost out of thin air, he managed to piece together enough funds for a week at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where he had often traveled to vacation. He made arrangements for the care of his grandparents during his absence. The time at Harpers Ferry was restorative, but all too short: “I returned with a small store of force which was soon spent…,” remembered Toomer. “The situation was slowly but steadily getting worse…. It was as if life were a huge snake that had coiled about me—and now it had me at almost my last breath.” 103
The much needed relief from this suffocating regimen would eventually come in the form of an invitation from Linton Stephens Ingraham, founder and principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute located in Sparta, Georgia. Ingraham was eager to hire an acting principal while he traveled to Boston to raise funds for his school. Toomer regarded this opportunity as a “God-send.” He accepted Ingraham’s offer to serve as acting principal. Toomer again made arrangements for the care of his grandparents, and prepared for his fateful trip by train to Georgia. Girding himself for what he would encounter on “the southern road,” as his contemporary, Sterling A. Brown, put it, Toomer recalled that “I had always wanted to see the heart of the South. Here was my chance.” 104 As acting principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute located in Hancock County, Georgia, Toomer provided continuity at an institution with an important history and mission. Ingraham was the institute’s founder and principal. He was born a slave in Hancock County, Georgia, on August 24, 1855, the property of Judge Linton Stephens. He was taught to read and write by Alexander Stephens, the brother of Judge Stephens, and then matriculated at Atlanta University. He established the institute on October 10, 1910, on three acres of land on his former master’s plantation. The institute was located one mile and a half west of Sparta, approximately eighty miles southwest of Atlanta, Georgia, in the county contiguous to Putnam County, Georgia, the birthplace of the writers Flannery O’Connor and Alice Walker.
At the time of Toomer’s arrival in September 1921, the trustees of the institute had secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to erect a second building. By 1923 the institute was composed of two buildings perched on fifty-three acres with 210 students. A co-educational institution whose curriculum was a mix of industrial education and grade school instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the institute prepared students for vocations in agriculture and industry. It served the African American community of Sparta, and the communities beyond it.105 Toomer lived, like the teachers, in a residence provided by the institute. “As the [acting] principal, [he] was required to visit homes, businesses, and churches.” 106
Toomer was acting principal at the Institute from September to November 1921. This seminal, three-month sojourn in the South provided him with the materials, inspiration, and much of the setting for what became the first and third sections of Cane. Prior to his first visit to the South, Toomer’s writing lacked a specific sense of place that could serve as the setting and foundation for his art. The landscape of Sparta, Georgia, with its history of slavery and an ancestral past that connected Toomer to his father, was precisely what the emerging writer needed at this vital juncture in his apprenticeship. Under the spell of an alien and yet somehow familiar landscape, Toomer eagerly embraced this new body of impressions and sensations and thoughts, immersing himself in a set of experiences that he would interpret with impressive originality, without being nostalgic in any way. He saw
it as a world in transition, and a world of transition for himself. In Sparta, as we have noted, he heard for the first time, he claimed, the traditional Negro “folk-songs and spirituals.” Because he was baptized as a Roman Catholic and reared in an upper-middle-class home in Washington, it is feasible that Toomer could have remained ignorant of the secular and sacred traditions in African American music whose origins were in slavery and that reached their maturity in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Deep South.
To be sure, these were not traditions often or openly embraced by the black men and women of Toomer’s class or color background, even at the two all-black schools he attended in Washington. As the eponymous hero of his first play, Natalie Mann, written in 1922 following his stay in Georgia, would assert in almost self-righteous fashion: “What has become of the almost obligatory heritage of folk-songs? Jazz on the one hand, and on the other, a respectability which is never so vigorous as when it denounces and rejects the true art of the race’s past. They are ashamed of the past made permanent by the spirituals.”107 Potentially, Toomer could have come to know the traditions emerging from the “race’s past” in the person of Old Willis, a former slave who “did odd jobs” for the Pinchback family.108 He writes that “I was very fond of [Old Willis].” But Toomer’s encounters with him apparently did not introduce him to the black cultural past that was now unfolding all around him in Sparta. Toomer discovered the slave and folk traditions of which Old Willis was doubtless a vessel as a young adult, precisely when he was struggling to find his voice as an artist, drawing upon these forms and traditions to illuminate his sense of his own identity and the historical experiences that had shaped that identity. As he went about his duties as acting principal in Sparta, he moved daily through a past that was also present, a past that helped him to understand the physical and cultural landscapes out of which he would shape the most original and seminal work of literature published in the entire Harlem Renaissance.
