we 4 1995 ABSTRACT JEAN TOOMER: THE BURDEN 0F IMPOTENT PAIN By Chris Antonides To read a literary work solely on its own merits and in its (hunterms, without reference to an appropriate external context, can be misleading. But to read it in some apparently suitable context without careful consideration of its internal elements can be no less nfisleading. Since its publication in l923, Jean Toomer's ang_has generally been accepted as an exemplar of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, a school of black scholars and artists attempting to regenerate racial pride through art. Though this interpretation of 2332 had led to a certain agreement about the significance and mean- ing of the book, the book has generally been considered problematical. Yet, to date, no one has subjected the entire book to a close reading vfith respect to style, structure, and fiction. The present study aims to remedy that deficiency by subjecting it to a close reading placed in the context of Jean Toomer's biographical background and existing critical interpretations. Beginning with the structure of the book, this study attempts to trace the unity of the poetry of the first and second parts. StYlistically, metaphorically, and thematically. From this unity Chris Antonides emerges the persona of the poetry, a spokesman for Toomer himself. Using this persona as a source for the imagery, tone, and motifs de- veloped in the prose, the three parts of'ggg§_are subjected to systema- tic exegesis. In following this procedure, the study tries to be comprehensive, within reasonable limits, rather than selective. What emerges from the cumulative weight of the exegesis is tmat.§gg§_is far more congruent with Toomer's ambiguous attitudes to- ward race than has been formerly thought. Through an elaborate permu- tation and combination of significant imagery, tone, and motifs, Toomer's book does not simply affirm the theme of racial resurgence as posited in the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it celebrates the NEQFO'S past glories in a degenerating present, and affirms the absorp- tion of the black race by the white. The entire book, then, becomes an elegiac celebration of a race that, from Toomer's point of view, has all but vanished as an ethnic entity. JEAN TOOMER: THE BURDEN OF IMPOTENT PAIN By Chris Antonides A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1975 Q Copyright by CHRIS ANTONIDES 1975 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank all those who, through their many kind- nesses, helped bring this project to completion. My special appreciation goes to Professors Sam Baskett and Russell B. Nye, whose patient encouragement sustained me in my purpose, and to Professor Barry Gross, whose practical and sensitive direction transformed it into reality. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ...................... l II. THE USES OF POETRY ................... 23 III. THE NARRATIVES OF PART I ................ 78 IV. THE NARRATIVES OF PART II ............... l42 v. "KABNIS" ........................ 217 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................... 233 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Jean Toomer's gang, which sold fewer than five hundred copies in 1923 and 1927, no longer languishes in ill-deserved obscur- ity. A Steady trickle of articles, however, kept it alive as a minor masterpiece of black experience until the renewed interest in black culture, inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, created an atmosphere more receptive to the book's apparent stylistic anomalies. Of 158 reviews, articles, and dissertations,1 significantly more than half have appeared since 1967, ironically, the year in which nggfs reappearance coincided with Toomer's death. The reprinting of gagg_in a hardbound edition in 1967, followed by a paperback in 1969,2 was due largely to the efforts of staunch cham- pions: Arna Bontemps and George Gardiner, both associated with Fisk University which has done so much to further black learning in the United States, and Robert A. Bone, whose Negro Novel in America3 placed Cane in the forefront of novels about black experience. 1John M. Reilly, "Jean Toomer: An Annotated Checklist of Criticism," Resources for American Literary,5tudy, 4 (Spring 1974) 27-56. This checklist covers articles published through 1973. 2Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: University Place Press, 1967; rpt. Harper & Row, 1969). The paperback reprint replaces Waldo Frank's original introduction with a new one by Arna Bontemps. 3Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (Prince- ton: University of Princeton Press, 1965). l Yet despite this renewed interest in, and the considerable study devoted to, gang, the book remains in a different kind of ob- scurity. It has always been thought of as a puzzling book, difficult to classify, and hence to approach,4 with its three sections compris- ing sketches, poetry, short stories, and even a play-like novella. Bone's classification to the contrary, attempts to read the work as a unified novel usually founder.5 The tendency persists, however, .because the novel seems to be the most significant genre to transmit cultural myths, and the pre-eminence of the novel form, generally, bestows an aura of importance. However, positive evidence exists that neither the book's publisher, Horace B. Liveright, nor Toomer himself, had any illusions that Cag§_was a novel. After the book had been accepted by Boni and Liveright for publication in 1923, Liveright wrote to Toomer indicat- ing quite plainly that he would have preferred a novel, and expressed 4A good survey of the criticism through 1966 appears in Peter G. Kousaleos' "A Study of the Language, Structure, and Symbolism In Jean Toomer' s Cane and N. Scott Momaday' 5 House Made of Dawn" (Ohio University, 1973), unpubl. diss., pp. 30- 34. Almost any article pub- lished since 1966 refers to the "enigmatic" quality of the book. See, e.g., Mabel M. Dillard, "Jean Toomer: Herald of the Negro Renaissance" (Ohio University, 1967), p. 92; Todd Lieber, "Design and Movement in Cane," CLA Journal, 13 (September 1969) 35, Donald G. Ackley, "Theme and Vision in Jean Toomer' s Cane," Studies in Black Literature, 1 (Winter 1970) 45- 46, Rafael A. Cancel,_“Ma1e and Female Ihterrelation- ships in Toomer' s Cane," Negro American Literature 1Forum, 5 (Spring 1971), 25, Catherine L. Innes, TFThe Unity of Jean Toomer' s Cane," CLA Journal, 15 (March 1972) 306; Roberta Riley, "Search for Identity and Artistry," CLA Journal, 17 (June 1974) 480. 5See Bone, pp. 82-89. In a review of the Harper & Row re- print for the New York Times Book Review (January 19, 1969) 3, Bone refers to the book as a miscellany of stories, sketches, and poems. 3 hope that Toomer's second or third book would be one.6 Yet during those early months of 1923, before Toomer's enthusiasm for writing about Negroes had begun to wane, the author wrote back to Liveright stating that his second book would in some ways be like his first, composed of several pieces; these would be three in number, rather than the rough dozen narratives of Cage, and two would "approximate Kabnis in length and scope," while a third would be a long story he had in mind.7 Elsewhere, Toomer identifies these pieces as "Natalie Mann" and "Balo," both plays that he had tried unsuccessfully to interest contemporary theater troupes in, and "Withered Skin of 8 Berries," a story written during the same period. Whether these pieces were precisely what he had in mind in his letter to Liveright cannot be verified by anything more concrete at the time. That he felt himself unsure about writing a novel is revealed by his corres- pondence with Liveright: I am not quite ready for a novel, but one is forming. As I vaguely glimpse and feel it, it seems tremendous: this whole black and brown world heaving upward against, here and there mixing in with the white. The mixture, however, is insufficient to absorb the heaving, hence it accelerates and fires it. This upward heaving is to be symbolic of the proletariat or world up- heaval. And it is likewise to be aymbolic of the subconscious penetration of the conscious mind. 6Toomer Collection, Fisk University, March 12, 1923. 7Toomer Collection, Fisk University, March 9, 1923. 8Letter from Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, undated, Box 3, File 7, item #825. 9Toomer Collection, Fisk University, March 9, 1923. Not only does this passage reveal that Toomer felt that gagg_was not a novel, and that even after its completion he still felt unready to write one, but it also shows that his thinking had not progressed very far beyond QEQSf'if indeed at all. His thumbnail sketch of the novel-to-be comes almost entirely out of Lewis' vision in "Kabnis,"10 and that feeling of redundancy rather than development was later to assert itself in a sketch for his autobiography: "Cane" was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a forth [sic] book like "Cane," is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life. Apparently, the identification of the Negro with a black protagonist in his letter to Liveright had been carried as far as it could be to symbolize "the subconscious penetration of the conscious mind" which interested Toomer so much. Why, then, was ngg_not subtitled a collection of stories and poems, or a "vaudeville out of the South," as one of its contem- 12 porary advertisements put it? The possibility exists that no one involved in producing the book thought that it would prove so baffling, and Toomer's own admission that Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,_0hio 13 had been a revelation and an influence may have led Toomer to 10Toomer, Cane, p. 212. HToomer Collection. Fisk University. Box 14. File 1: p. 59- 12Toomer Collection, Fisk UniversitY. BOX 64. File 7- 13Toomer Collection, Fisk University. Box 1, File 1. item #43- suppose that his own book would be received in the same frame of reference. He had his famous predecessor's own assurances that he had managed to capture the essence of the Negro in a way that 14 And there were Anderson admired and himself had hoped to do. superficial resemblances between Anderson's loosely structured, episodic "novel" and Toomer's Cane, Both tried to visualize the essence of people in a given region through sketches of individuals and through them to get at some deeper insight into the human con- dition. Moreover, each centered around a shadowy narrator moving I among these individuals, observing and reporting what he saw. But the narrator of ngg_is far more shadowy than George Willard. The young man moving through Winesburg has both a name and an occupation, and however tenuous his relationship to the towns- people he writes about, their cumulative impact on him clearly forms the thematic progression of the book. The narrator of 9333, on the other hand, has neither name nor occupation, though he seems to be a wandering poet. Even so, he is never clearly in focus, fading and intensifying as a person almost inexplicably, a disconcerting factor in attempting to see in Cane a novel in spite of the author's own disclaimer. Lacking a more tangible central character, the book seems to be a series of disconnected fragments, idiosyncracies of Toomer, or stylistic experiments aimed at evoking the "soul" Of the southern Negro. 14See the letter from Sherwood Anderson to Jean Toomer, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 1. Indeed, this consciousness-raising aspect of an§_seems to be very much at the center of what Toomer was trying to accomplish,15 and the feeling of dissatisfaction that goes along with such an attempt was probably expressed in the “unfinished" quality of the narrator. Primarily, the narrator emerges as a poet and mystic searching for his ethnic roots as a means of symbolically resurrect- ing what he perceives to be the dying black ethos. He is, in fact, a spokesman for Toomer himself. That is clearly revealed in the poetry which forms the interludes between the narratives of Parts I and II. The dominant, urbanizing influence of white society underlies the poetic fragments, and an important part of the persona's ethnic odyssey is his belief that he has found a means of celebrating and thus preserving in "art" what is quintessentially black. Symbolically, this art regenerates the race through a miraculous rebirth of culture, even as the race itself is consumed by the urbanizing influence of the white presence. Such a gloomy prognosis for the black race, however, gradually leads the narrator to postulate a larger destiny for bOth black and white races than that implied by racial identity: that the loss of the black identity, though painful and sad, is only a first step toward a universal human identity. Thus the narrator successively wishes to withdraw into a dreamy, nostalgic reverie of racial memory, to move toward some higher realization of human identity, and to 15Toomer, autobiographical sketches. See Darwin Turner's illuminating discussion of the various versions of Toomer's auto- biographies, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), p. 122, 13n. lament the passing of something beautiful and worth preserving even as his desire to preserve and communicate black experience fails to achieve its integrative and regenerative purpose. ‘6 which fires the But the portrayal of Negro "low life" poet-philosopher's imagination quite overwhelms the narrator. His abortive messianic attempts at salvaging what he sees as a doomed black ethos have been subordinated by Harlem Renaissance advocates 17 Never a to what seems to be a celebration of black "primitivism." really cohesive movement, the Harlem Renaissance nevertheless had eloquent spokesmen with well-defined objectives. Essentially, these were to promote black achievement in the arts by providing opportun- ities for publication and performance. And the subject matter of these artistic expressions was drawn from what seemed then to be uniquely black: not the middle-class or intellectual adaptations of white culture, but the "low life" of the uneducated black whose im- 18 perfect acculturation made him seem more African. Confronted with 16Nathan Huggins, The Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 180. Huggins says that Toomer's mixture of literary naturalism and mysticism approximates "not the 'scientific' reportage of Zola, Norris, Dreiser, but, rather, the portrayal of human continuity with organic nature as in Turgenev." See also a note signed by Gorham Munson, Toomer Collection, Box 41, File 26: "Kabnis is an American equivalent to a Russian drama by Maxime Gorky or Anton Tchekhov. It ramifies deeply into the soil and into life and it reaches up to a stunted broken intellectualism." 17Huggins emphasizes the "low life" and "primitivism" in asserting that the Harlem Renaissance had greater links with Africa than the South, PP. 84-136. See esp. pp. 102 ff. 18Ibid. the splendid sketches of Negro "primitives" in Cane, the Harlem pro- ponents eagerly claimed Toomer as their own, predicting greatness for him.19 Unfortunately, they did not reckon with the narrator's ambivalent attitudes toward his racial identity. This ambivalence, I”... P_’ in fact, reflected Toomer's own misgivings about his race. For a time, Toomer seemed to encourage the belief that he was Negro. This attitude coincided with the period during which he was publishing the individual sketches and poems later to be collected in Cane in various ”little" magazines. A striking instance is in his letter to John McClure in response to the editor's request for background information: Viewed from the world of race distinctions, I take the color of whatever group I at the time am sojourning in. As I become known, I shall doubtless be classed as a Negro. I shall neither fight nor resent it. There will be more truth than they know in what the say, for my writing takes much of its worth from that source.2 Aside from the opportunistic tone of this passage, Toomer clearly acknowledges his Negro ancestry. But he also sets the stage for his subsequent denial: 19Arna Bontemps, "The Negro Renaissance: Jean Toomer and the Harlem Writers of the 1920's," in Anger and Beyond, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 20-36. 20Cited by Darwin Turner, pp. 30-31. Turner also cites a pass- age in Toomer's Autobiography that clarifies the commercial value of the Negro associations, p. 61. As near as I can tell, there are seven race bloods within this body of mine. French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. . . . One half of my family is definitely white, the other, definitely colored.2 Given such a varied background, the classification of Toomer as a Negro does seem to be a matter of choice. What is important here is that he willingly takes on the label at a time when he wishes to make commer- cial use of it, an impression that is reinforced by his correspondence with Sherwood Anderson.22 In September of 1922, McClure had shown Anderson the manu- script for "Nora," later to be included in Qggg_under the title, "Calling Jesus." So impressed was Anderson, that he wrote to Toomer, congratulating him: I read your Nora in September Double Dealer and liked it more than I can say. It strikes a note I have long been wanting to hear come from one of your race.23 Anderson simply assumes that Toomer is a Negro, an impression probably 24 strengthened by John McClure. In his reply to Anderson, and in the 2'Ihid., p. 30. 22Toomer does not correct Anderson's assumption that he is a Negro. See letters of the years 1922-24, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 1, items #42-52. 23Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 1, #42. New York, 1922? No exact date. 24Anderson reveals McClure's correspondence discussing Toomer and his work, sent with a letter dated March 3, 1924, to Jean Toomer. Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 1, item #54. McClure has already indicated in a letter to Toomer that he believes the latter to be a Negro, June 30, 1922. And Toomer has warily confirmed the fact, see above, pp. 1-6/7, and 20n. 10 letters written to him during the next two years, Toomer never once Offers to correct this assumption.25 Indeed, he seems to sustain it as a means of maintaining the Older man's interest, discussing the matter of race quite freely. That would seem in keeping with his statement to McClure that he "would neither fight nor resent" the classification. Yet to Waldo Frank, who had befriended and encour- aged him, Toomer complained that Anderson was mistaken in limiting him to his Negro part.26 This criticism of mistaking the part (Negro) for the whole (complex human) appears in the penultimate poemof Cane, "Prayer." At about the same time, Toomer responded to an inquiry from Claude A. Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, affirming his classi- fication as Negro. This letter written in April 1923, several months before the publication of Cane, attributes his black ancestry to P.B.S. Pinchback, his maternal grandfather, and explicitly links his heritage with his literary output: The true and complete answer is one of some complexity, and for this reason perhaps it will not be seen and accepted until after I am dead. . . . The answer involves a realistic and accurate knowledge of racial mixture, of nationality as formed by the interaction of tradition, culture, and environment, of the artistic nature in its relation to the racial or social group, etc. All of which of course is too heavy and thick to 25See 22n above. 26Toomer Collection, FlSk UOTVGFSltY. BOX 3. F119 7: item #829 (?). 11 go into now. Let me state then, simply, that I am the grandson of P B S Pinchback. From this fact it is clear that your con- tention is sustained. I have I'peeped behind the veil." And my deepest impulse to literature (on the side of material) is the direct result of what I saw. In so far as the old folk-songs, syncopated rhythms, the rich sweet taste of dark skinned life, in so far as these are Negro, I am, body and soul, Negroid. My style, my esthetic, is nothing more nor less than my attempt to fashion my substance into works of art.27 This apparently frank avowal of racial heritage nevertheless contains the same avenue of potential denial as that in Toomer's letter to McClure the preceding summer. That is, in stressing the complexity of his origins and in withholding a part, Toomer makes his racial affiliation a matter of conscious choice. His identification as a Negro is almost an exercise in aesthetics: he has looked beneath the surface of Negro life and, to the extent that he had identified with ethnic aspects of that life, becomes a part of it. He nowhere de- clares that he is simply a Negro. And eventually, he will deny that his grandfather Pinchback is a Negro, eradicating the last connection with the race. But for the time, it suited Toomer to involve himself with his Negro identity. And there is no need to doubt the sincerity of that involvement. When Toomer closes his letter to Barnett with a direct reference to his need for money and the hope that the Associated Negro Press might be willing to pay for his material, he does no more than any serious writer: 27April 4, 1923, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 3, item #69. 12 Next week I start a short story and complete a criticism of a Study of Waldo Frank. But there is no reason in the world why I cant [sic] manage to get some stuff to you, if, somehow or other, big or little, you can pay me. You, together with most of the magazines I send ms to, are in a comparatively lean and .difficult field. I realize that, and hence dont [sic] expect much £50m you. But some small dribs must come in, else I close 5 op. Such a passage might reinforce Robert A. Bone's contention that Toomer stopped writing about Negroes because Cane was an economic failure.29 The reference to closing up shop may well indicate how much Toomer hoped that the book would save him from his financial difficulties. That his hopes may have been a bit unrealistic is suggested in a query 30 to Liveright about movie rights. That he planned to go on writing about Negroes, however, has already been shown in his letter to Liveright, in which he proposed a second, and even a third, book. Perhaps Toomer was given to short-lived enthusiasms. Cane was the product of a brief visit to Sparta, Georgia in the fall of 31 1921. The proposed second book was also drawn largely from that trip and the period immediately following Toomer's return to Washington, 32 D.C. When Waldo Frank suggested that he and Toomer visit the South, 281bid. 29Bone, p. 89. 30January 11, 1923, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 5, item #154. 31Autobiography, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 14, File 1, p. 58. 321bid., p. 59. 13 in the summer of 1922, Toomer agreed, confiding to Frank that the in- 33 Toomer spiration Of Sparta, Georgia had just about spent itself. needed fresh contact with his subject, for excepting brief visits, he did not consciously live as a black man despite his conscious association with blacks. His subsequent visits to black communities, however, failed to provide an impetus equal to the first, and by the middle of 1923, that was going stale. When, in August of that year, Horace Liveright wrote to Toomer suggesting that, for promotional purposes, he give greater emphasis to his "colored blood," Toomer sharply rebutted. In a rather offended tone, he replied that his racial composition and position in the world were realities which he alone might determine, that he would accept publicity created by Boni and Liveright regarding his Negro identity, but was not to be expected to feature this claim on his own behalf.34 Perhaps the sharpness of Toomer's rebuttal may seem to be an outright denial of his race, and therefore a sudden reversal of his earlier attitudes. Actually, such is not the case, for Toomer plainly says that Boni and Liveright can advertise him as a Negro if they wish. He merely demands that they respect his right of self- determination. That had been Toomer's position all along. But the tartness of his response does seem at odds with his previous equanimity. 33July 25, 1922, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 3, File 12. #794. ‘ 34September 5, 1923, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 5, item #176. 14 The suddenness of this apparent reversal may be due simply to the gaps between the letters. What Toomer thought and felt about racial matters from day to day has not been recorded. But his impatience with Anderson, and even with Waldo Frank's introduction to Cage, with their thinking him a Negro gives ample evidence that his rebuttal to Liveright was part of a progressive state of mind. Toomer's attitudes about race are inextricable from his attitudes about his larger human identity. From the time he composed Cag§_unti1 well after he renounced his black heritage, Toomer was obsessed with molding his own identity. He repeatedly attempted to shape the events of his life in autobiographies, leaving behind numerous fragments, outlines, drafts, at least three complete versions, and revisions.35 In them, he treated the details of his life as if they were the plastic materials of art, to be stretched and altered for aesthetic effect. With other sources to verify some of these de- tails, only inconsistencies among the various pieces themselves and his letters show that the artist's mind has transformed events. But out of this aesthetic tampering, a fascinating picture of self-determination emerges. Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. late in 1894; the accepted date is December 26, though there seems to 36 be some doubt about that. His mother, Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, had 35Turner, p. 122, 13n. 36The exact date of Toomer's birth is apparently unknown. In her biographical notes added to the chronology for the Toomer Collection, Mrs. Marjorie Content Toomer lists December 26, 1894. But another note indicates that he was born in October. 15 .married Nathan Toomer over the strenuous objections of her father, P.B.S. Pinchback, the retired Negro politician from Louisiana. Nathan Toomer had represented himself as a well-to-do plantation owner from Georgia, according to one account. Whether because his daughter's husband had misrepresented his wealth, was more than twice her age, or simply was a ne'er-dO-well, Nina Elizabeth was not happy in her marriage. In 1895, Toomer deserted his wife and infant son. Nathan Eugene Toomer-~"Jean" was one of his later trans- formations--remembers a bitter and lonely childhood.37 The reproaches of Grandfather Pinchback apparently hastened the daughter's departure from the Pinchback ménage. But the effect of those reproaches must have been gradual, for Mrs. Toomer did not leave immediately after her husband's desertion. She divorced him in 1899, but did not move to New York with her son until 1905. She remarried shortly after- wards; very little is known about the man, Coombs. The young Toomer, then called Eugene’Pinchback, perhaps in an effort by Pinchback to remove the association with his natural father, regarded his step- father with some hostility. He nurtured a romantic longing for the father he had never really known. Upon his mother's death of compli- cations following an appendectomy, in 1909, he returned to Washington to live with his grandparents. The return cannot have been a welcome one for Toomer: a deep sense of loss for father and mother, a step- father from whom he felt alienated, and a grandfather whom he resented 37Autobiography, Box 14, File 1. See also Turner, p. 12. 16 as having caused the rift in his family would have combined to create an identity crisis in anyone. In Toomer, they set in motion the motivation for his ultimate denial of race. During the period of Toomer's unhappy childhood, Pinchback's fortunes declined. When Toomer returned to Washington, he found him- self living on Florida Avenue, in an upper-class Negro neighborhood. There, Toomer got his first glimpse into "the sweet taste of dark skinned life": With this world--an aristocracy such as never existed before and perhaps will never exist again in America-~midway between the white and Negro worlds. For the first time I lived in a colored world.38 With autobiographical hindsight, he makes much of the initiation. But whatever he came to believe later, the environment cannot have given him a real sense of belonging. He saw himself as a "ruffian," troubled by the fear that excessive sexuality was weakening him, un- certain whether to identify with blacks or whites, and perhaps mor- bidly introspective.39 Had he had a stronger sense of attachment to his grand- father, the choice might not have been so difficult for him. P.B.S. Pinchback was known as a Negro. Though Toomer later maintained that his grandfather had claimed Negro ancestry merely as a political ex- 40 pedient during Reconstruction, the history of that supposed 7—7 381bid., p. 6. 39Autobiography, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 14, F1181, pp. 10-1]. 40Cited by Turner, p. 33. 17 fabrication is so elaborate as to challenge credibility. It requires us to believe that Pinchback had calculated this expedient long be- fore Reconstruction, at least from the time he raised a company of colored volunteers in 1862, a "Corps d'Afrique," as he called them, when he was twenty-five years old.41 His resigning his commission after difficulties over his race--commissioned officers were white-- does nothing to strengthen Toomer's assertion. And in 1863, Pinchback was allowed to raise a company of colored cavalry, a recognition of the man's determination and ability. These character traits are thoroughly manifested in Pinch- back's pursuit of political power. During Reconstruction, he proved as vigorous and able to organize an electorate as he had been to organize a militia. In 1868, he was elected to the Louisiana state Senate, and in December, 1871 was elected president pro tempore. When the incumbent lieutenant-governor died, Pinchback inherited that position. He served as acting governor from December 1872 to January 1873 during the impeachment proceedings against Henry Clay Warmoth. Though Pinchback was twice declared elected to seats in the national legislature, he was never seated because the elections were contested. When he retired to Washington, D.C., in 1890, he enjoyed a privileged status because of his attainments. It was only after the political temper had begun to shift, when Pinchback's friends and colleagues in 41QA§3 ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1934), p. 611. 18 the legislature were no longer present, that his circumstances became straitened. That he turned, in such circumstances, to Negroes is most significant. Labeled as a Negro and lacking influential allies, Pinchback perhaps no longer had a choice. An incident recounted by George H. Devol in his memoirs, Fortinears a Gambler on the Mississippi,42 provides colorful insight into Pinchback's childhood. He tells of a cabin boy named Pinch whom he had trained to play cards with Negro passengers on the steam- boats. After a particularly successful night, when Devol and his associates, including Pinch, had "cleaned out" the passengers, the gambling team took discrete leave of the boat in a heavy fog. The men and the boy were obliged to carry their valises of gambling equip- ment through the mud, sliding and falling as they went. Pinch was moved to declare that he would find a better way to exist, and vowed that he would get into the legislature some day. Devol makes clear that the Pinch of his story is the same Pinchback who was elected senator. Though Devol's anecdote may well be apocryphal, Pinchback was indeed a cabin boy on the Mississippi when he was eleven years old. If Devol may be believed, Pinchback was known as a Negro then. And in 1887, Pinchback was still prominent enough to have successfully rebutted the story. The story does not prove Pinchback's Negro identity, but adds another element to an extraordinary fabrication as promulgated by Toomer. 42Cited by Arna Bontemps, "The Negro Renaissance," pp. 33-34. 19 Such was the awesom figure Toomer went to live with in 1909, grew to resent, to defy, and, finally, to deny. Following the inner turmoil of his high school years, Toomer was unprepared for a career. He spent the period from 1914 to 1920 floundering from one abortive program to another: agriculture, medicine, socialism, physical education, commerce; Madison, Chicago, Boston, New York, Washington. Neither subject nor place could hold him. He would venture into some new enthusiasm only to return to his grandfather, whose patience had run out. When Toomer began to show interest in a writing career in late 1919 and early 1920, Pinchback encouraged him.43 This period was one of discovery for him. He immersed himself in Walt Whitman, discovered Goethe, Romain Rolland, and others, and, through the Rand School, began to move among the literary figures of New York. Striking up an acquaintance with Helena DeKay, following her lecture on Jean Christophe, Toomer went with her to a party attended by E. A. Robinson, Witter Bynner, and Scofield Thayer. Toomer apparently met Waldo Frank at this gathering, but he says that he formed no clear impression of the man at the time, and that it was only after a chance meeting with Frank in Central Park that their friendship developed. Significantly, Toomer calls his autobiographical description of the period from 1920 to 1923 "The Book of Death and Birth."44 It was the period during which he launched his most concentrated effort at a career. What died and what was born? His grandfather died in 43Autobiography, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 14, File 1, PP. 39-40. 44Ibid., pp. 49-64. 20 December of 1921. Though Toomer had read extensively and diversely from the time of his meeting with Frank in the spring of 1920, he had still not produced anything of literary significance. And though his interest in writing seemed more sustained than his previous interests, his pattern of running back to Washington whenever he had over-extended himself in running away did not change. When his grandfather became ill in the fall of 1921, Toomer was offered a temporary job as acting principal of an industrial and agricultural school for Negroes in Sparta, Georgia. Feeling enervated and trapped by his grandfather's iminent death, he welcomed the escape to Georgia. And it was there that Toomer formed the images that he would pour into Cage, He stayed three months, and when he returned to Washington in November, Pinch- back's death was a month away. While reminiscing on this important period in his life, Toomer says that he "realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then to- wards the city--and industry and commerce and machines. The folk—spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so 45 This feeling, associated as beautiful. Its death was so tragic." it is with his grandfather's death and a sense of guilt, was implanted in Cans, Toomer says, further, that Pinchback died the day after he had completed "Kabnis," which Toomer called “the long semi-dramatic closing-piece of 'Cane.'"46 451bid., pp. 58-59. 46Ibid., p. 59. 21 Nor was the death of Pinchback and its concomitant, the Negro, the only death of the period. During the feverish creation of Cage in 1922, Toomer exhausted not only himself but his faith in literature as a force which could provide men and women with "a con- "47 He saw the men and women of art structive whole way of living. and literature as "lopsided specialists of one kind or another; or, they were almost hopelessly entangled in emotional snarls and con- flicts." Probably, Toomer's meeting with Waldo Frank's wife, Margaret 48 But she can have been Naumburg, helped to crystallize this idea. influential only after the enormous impact of the South and Pinch- back's death on Toomer. The timing of Toomer's turning away from his Negro identity, the "swan-song" for the Negro which he expressed in gang, suggests that he was ready for some new experience. His affair with Margaret Naumburg must surely have been one of those "emotional ~snarls and conflicts" which advanced him further into philosophical "vision" as an escape. He was primed for Gurdjieffian mysticism,49 and, providentially, Gurdjieff appeared on the scene almost at the same time Qang_was published. And from then on, Toomer was finished as a literary artist. He continued to try his hand at literature of 47Ibid., p. 63. 48Earth-Being, one of Toomer's autobiographical pieces, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 19, File 4, p. 6. 49Autobiography, p. 64. 22 a more "universal" character, wrote numerous philosophical and social tracts, in addition to his autobiographies. But he never again wrote with the vividness and incisiveness of Cane, Thus Toomer became absorbed in a mystical birth and lost his way as a Negro. That his imaginative reconstructions of his life show him to be too absorbed in his own psyche to perceive that the racial question was far from resolved, and that there was still quite a lot left to be said, can only reinforce the regret already expressed by those who wish to enhance black accomplishment. Given the strong sense of identification between Toomer's search for his true nature and his literary efforts, we can expect to find his counterpart in Cage, A thorough explication of the book in the light of the details of his experience should show the importance of the book's elusive narrator in establishing the literary equivalent Of Toomer's renuncia- tion of racial identity. CHAPTER II THE USES OF POETRY The tendency of critics to read Qaflg_as a novel has led them either to neglect the poetry or to subordinate it to the prose.1 When critics do comment on a poem, it is usually to crystallize some meta- phoric or thematic element. For example, because "Song of the Son" seems to celebrate black identity, critics have singled it out for considerable attention.2 Centrally located in the first part of the book, this poem sharply focuses on the narrator's desire to locate his ethnic roots among the southern blacks. But the emphasis thus given to the theme of racial affirmation obscures both the structural func- tion of the poetry and the development of the narrator's consciousness embedded in it. ]As recently as June, 1974, Louise Blackwell tries to make a case for Cane as an experimental novel. See "Jean Toomer's Cane and Biblical Myth," CLA Journal, 17 (June 1974) 535-42. See also Darwin Turner's discussion on the futility of such an attempt, In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Iaentity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UniversTty Press, 1971), p. 124, 23h. 2Mabel M. Dillard, "Jean Toomer: Herald of the Negro Renais- sance" (Ohio University, 1967), unpubl. diss. Dillard was among the first to do so. See also Todd Lieber, "Design and Movement in Cane," CLA Journal, 13 (September 1969) 35-50, Donald G. Ackley, "Theme and Vision in Jean Toomer's Cane," Studies in Black Literature, 1 (Winter 1970) 45-65, and Roberta Riie ,_“Séarch for Identity and Artistry," CLA Journal, 17 (June 1974) 482. 23 24 Precisely because Cane is so infused with poetic elements of a personal, subjective nature, those parts of the book that are clearly set up as integral poems afford a point of departure for examining Toomer's method.3 After a short, epigraphic poem on the title page, Toomer uses five pairs of poems to separate each of the six prose pieces in Part I. He varies this pattern in Part II, be- ginning with a pair of very short sketches best described as prose- poems, and thereafter alternates the prose pieces with combinations of poems or prose-poems in pairs. He omits this structural device entirely from the third and last section of the book. In addition, Toomer uses very short, epigraphic poems and other lyric pieces scattered throughout the three sections of the book. As these con— tribute very little to the thematic and structural unity of the poetic intervals between the prose pieces, they will be discussed with the stories and sketches which incorporate them. The epigraphic poem on the title page is so miniscule that it often escapes notice: Oracular. Redolent of fermenting syrup, Purple of the dusk, Deep-rooted cane.4 3Bernard Bell, "A Key to the Poems in Cane." CLA Journal, 14 (March 1971) 251-58, attempts to show a religious unity among the poems. 4Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: University Place Press, 1967; rpt. Harper & Row, 1969), iii, title page. All further references to this work will appear in the text. 25 Yet its placement and deceptively simple content make it a crucial poem, establishing the central metaphor around which Toomer unifies the imagery of his book. He chooses cane, its faintly purple hue suggestive of dusk, to represent his vision of the black people. The fragrance of cane syrup and the sensuousness of the color purple easily suggest both "the sweet taste of dark skinned life" and the "aristocracy" Of the "colored world“ which Toomer first found in Washington, D.C.5 But cane clearly does not conjure up the Washing- ton milieu; the deep roots of the last line point to the soil of the Negro's ancestors in the South. And the first word, "oracular," hints that, as an emblem, cane is mysterious, puzzling, and prophetic, thus introducing an element of ambiguity into the image. This un- certainty juxtaposed with the image of dusk tends to reinforce that element, though the culmination in "deep-rooted cane" offsets it to some extent. The sense Of stability and affirmation of the rural ex- perience suggested by the deep roots, lends a certain weight to the image coming, as it does, at the end.6 Thematically, the poems of Part I elaborate on these ambigu- ous elements. The narrator seems to move among the groups and indi- viduals in rural Georgia, observing, becoming progressively involved with them, recording and reacting to their experiences. The first 5April 4, 1923, Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 1, File 3, item #69. 6Toomer commented on his having sent roots into southern soil on his visit to Georgia. See the letter to Sherwood Anderson, December 18, 1922, Box 1, File 1, item #43. 26 of the ten poetic interludes between the major prose pieces breaks with the free form of the epigraph. It is made up of eight lines set in iambic pentameter couplets. The speaker of the poem observes "black reapers“ as they sharpen their seythes preparatory to cutting their way through the fields. Their actions are deliberate, ordinary, and the rasping sibilants of the first four lines onomatopoetically' evoke the acts of sharpening and cutting in a matter-of—fact way: Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done, And start their silent swinging, one by one (6). The speaker is apparently observing at some distance: the reapers are not differentiated, their gestures are stylized, dominated by group movement. The effect is almost ritualistic. But the next four lines develop parallel ideas in a way that throws the entire poem into new perspective: Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade (6). The black figures in the first lines may seem to be simply Negroes working their way through the fields. But the parallel with the black horses, the indifference and relentlessness built into the entire image, creates grim associations. The black figures become faintly ambiguous, the shift from human effort to the harnessed effort of animals suggesting a first step in the development of 27 mechanization.7 The ruthlessness of the horse-drawn mower contrasts with the uneventful actions of the humans in the first part: the black figures there do not encounter a field animal with their scythes, but the parallel structure of the poem suggests that, if they had en- countered one, it would all be "as a thing that's done," unfeeling, inevitable. If Toomer intends to associate mechanical gestures with the encroachment of civilization, the bleeding rat becomes a metaphor perhaps of the natural black man. The Negro then becomes either the dumb instrument of his own undoing, or the victim of a blind force.8 But the neutrality of the speaker gives no clue, and Toomer's own statements about the encroachment of civilization on the rural way of life are only distantly hinted at.9 The speaker merely Observes the squealing, bleeding rat without emotion, without reaction. In "November Cotton Flower," which immediately follows “Reapers," the 7In his Autobiography, p. 59, Toomer expresses concern that "with the Negroes . . . the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city-~and industry and commerce and machines," Toomer Collection, Fisk University, Box 14, File 1. Michael Jay Krasny, "Jean Toomer and the Quest for Consciousness" (University of Wisconsin, 1972), unpubl. diss., sees this conflict between the country and the machine as central to the first part of Cane, p. 62. Lieber traces this conflict back to Toomer's association with Hart Crane, p. 36. Bell also hints at this idea in his analysis of "Beehive," p. 257. BBell, p. 253. He sees "Reaper" as a cyclical rhythm of Nature, an "emblematic representation of death as a timeless source of tension in life." William C. Fischer, "The Aggregate Man in Jean Toomer's Cane," Studies in the Novel, 3 (Summer 1971) 203, sees the fiat image as a prelude to the killing of Bob Stone in "Blood-Burning oon." 9Krasny, p. 62. 28 speaker preserves this psychological distance. The poem loosely follows the Italian sonnet form in that it consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter couplets grouped in the octet and sestet pattern. This grouping is achieved only by the meaning of the lines rather than the rhyme scheme, and the iambic rhythm is broken in lines 11 and 12, in which Toomer rhymes "saw" and "before": Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold, Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old, And cotton, scarce as any southern snow, Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow, Failed in its function as the autumn rake; Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take All water from the streams; dead birds were found In wells a hundred feet below the ground-- Such was the season when the flower bloomed. Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed Significance. Superstition saw Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year (7). The setting of this poem, like that Of "Reapers," in the fields amid the "natural" life of the rural primitive, creates a similar kind of circumstantial irony. Where the ironic contrast between humans and horses contributes to a relentless, unfeeling atmosphere, that in "Cotton Flower" reverses the startling effect of the bleeding rat with an equally startling effusion of mystical beauty. The octet pictures a bleak and dismal scene. Instead of the deceptively uneventful movements of the reapers, the landscape seems animated by a sinister nature. The boll weevil has come and gone, and, together with the approaching cold weather of the fall, has ravaged the cotton stalks. Their ancient appearance is intensi- fied in the metaphoric comparison with snow. Curiously, the vanishing 29 white cotton suggests the melting of snow in spring. But it is a strange, inverted spring. The "snow" leaves the earth parched and dry, instead of providing life-giving moisture. The earth sucks the streams dry and drains the wells. The image of birds lying dead a hundred feet below ground creates a portentous atmosphere. The in- congruous image of the "pinched and slow" branch which "Failed in its function as the autumn rake" mystifies. For the function of the rake is to catch at debris; perhaps here what Toomer means is that the plants may catch water and hold it in the soil. The whole of these eight lines presents at once a harsh winter and an anti-spring. Yet out of this false spring a flower blooms. The sestet carefully prepared a personification of the "cotton flower" as an allusion to Karintha, the half—wild creature of the sketch preceding this poem.10 Here are the "Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,/ Beauty so sudden for that time of year." But the significance here lies in the revelation to the speaker. The juxtaposition of this poem with the "Reapers" brings into relation the unfeeling har- vest and the sudden effusion of feeling. And this contrast strikingly recalls Toomer's autobiographical statement in "The Book of Death and 11 Birth," about the period in which these poems were written. He 10Lieber, p. 39, associates the cotton flower with Karintha, as does Bowie Duncan, "Jean Toomer's Cane: A Modern Black Oracle," CLA Journal, 15 (March 1972) 325. HAutobiography, pp. 58~59. 30 clearly associates the death of the "folk-spirit" of the Negro with the death of his grandfather. Significantly, he returned to Washing- ton from Georgia in November, the month of the startling cotton flower. This is not to say that Toomer consciously transformed the "November Cotton Flower" into a metaphor of his grandfather's death. Given Toomer's propensity for retrospection, he may well have associated the idea with the event at a later date. But the insight is a use- ful one in that it suggests a deeper meaning to the poem than the association with Karintha. Structurally, too, the placement of the poem suggests that Toomer is building a larger meaning. "November Cotton Flower" follows "Reapers," and that tends to loosen its tie with the preceding sketch and strengthen its link with its companion poem. Both poems share the element of startling revelation, and, though the speaker's parti- cipation in that revelation still seems vicarious, there is a deepen- ing Of feeling in the second poem. "Face" and "Cotton Song,“ which follow the narrative '2 "Face "Becky," show the further development of Toomer's design. goes beyond "November Cotton Flower" in delineating a black woman's features in terms of rural imagery. "Cotton Song" returns to the 12Krasny, p. 63, sees "Face" as a "starkly imagistic word painting Of a suffering woman . . . near death. But Bell, 254, sees "Face" and "Cotton Song" as extending the religious symbolism of "Becky," in which the first poem signifies the suffering and sacri- fice of Christ as embodied in Negro experience, and the second poem makes a complementary reference to the resurrection, a subtle analogue to the rolling away of the stone from the sepulcher. 31 work fields of "Reapers," but moderates the apparently unfeeling atmosphere by recreating a Negro work song. The speaker decreases the distance between himself and his subject, giving an aura of deepening involvement. Perhaps the most striking initial difference in "Face" is its break with the metrical regularities of the earlier poems: Hair-- silver gray, like streams of stars, Brows-- recurved canoes quivered by the ripples blown by pain, Her eyes-- mist of tears condensing on the flesh below And her channeled muscles are cluster grapes of sorrow purple in the evening sun nearly ripe for worms (14). This free and deceptively simple enumeration of an old woman's features gives each a metaphoric value, balancing the sublime against the earth- bound and the moribund. Until the last three lines, the images are unified by references to water, the substance lacking in "November Cotton Flower." "Streams of stars" seem to play on the word "streams" in such a way as to start the flow of images downward to the expected ground: the hair as topmost part of the woman's head also connotes the sky from which the water falls; then the inverted "canoes" afloat on a brow rippled by a wind of pain suggests an upside-down lake from which rise the mists of eyes; these, "condensing" on the cheeks below, ‘Flow into the "channels" worn into the woman's facial muscles. 32 But the downward flow is interrupted at the clieeks as the speaker unexpectedly compares them to bunches of grapes. As in the epigraph of the title-page, Toomer links the purple of a growing plant with evening. But instead of the deep roots of cane, he completes the downward movement with the imminent fall of "grapes . . . nearly ripe for worms." The interruption provides an ironic twist at a crucial moment, for if the purple of the grapes metaphorically be- comes the "purple of the dusk" of the epigraph, then "Face" creates another instance in which dusk signifies the black experience. The poem's earlier lines do not adequately prepare for the sudden appear- ance of the image, but its parallelism with the epigraph strongly suggests thematic significance. As its title immediately suggests, "Cotton Song" renders the common work experience of blacks, that of the backbreaking toil of the field hands accompanied by songs to ease monotony and fatigue, 13 The song also functions to relieve and to help coordinate movement. the pathetic atmosphere of "Face" with good-natured irony. Surpris- ingly, though the lines rime, they are metrically and rhythmically uneven: Come, brother, come. Lets lift it; Come now, hewit! roll away! Shackles fall upon the Judgment Day But lets not wait for it (15). This first of the five stanzas shows the irregularities of line and meter. By ignoring the conventional metrical foot, one can read most ‘_ '3Beii, 254. 33 of the lines in a chanting way with four stressed syllables on a line. But such a procedure results in unexpected shifts and, in the fourth line, a very unnatural reading of the words. The pattern is other- wise consistent and appropriate to a work song. The words fall into the uneven patterns of men straining at heavy work. The halting, straining rhythms of the first stanza, together with its urgency to act at once, to lift and heave, and not to wait "upon the Judgment Day," prepare for the easy, rolling sounds of the second: God's body's got a soul, Bodies like to roll the soul, Cant blame God if we dont roll, Come, brother, roll, roll! (15) The suggestion here that, once the straining has overcome the initial inertia of the burden, the momentum will carry the workers forward more easily, complements the meaning of the words. The hope of Judg- ment Day, when the shackles of a dreary life will fall away, is an inducement: bondage followed by freedom. The play of sound and meaning even becomes a kind of ironic jesting. The rolling "o's" have an onomatapoetic quality in "God's body's got a sou1,/Bodies like to roll the soul," producing that mixture of wry humor, pain, and music that are characteristic of work songs. The underlying serious spiritual element turns into the earthbound quality of play-in-work. Building on the playful satire of "Bodies like to roll the soul," the third stanza reveals more clearly what kind of bodies roll What kind of souls: 34 Cotton bales are the fleecy way Weary sinner's bare feet trod, Softly, softly to the throne of God, "We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day! (15) The play on bodies rolling the soul extends the actions of the first and second stanzas into a metaphoric connection with the cotton bales. Figuratively, the activity becomes the way the workers guide their souls to God. But the imagery of black bodies rolling fleecy, white souls marks an important reference to the white-inculcated religion. The allusion is without any bitterness, here, and foreshadows further development in "Georgia Dusk" and "Conversion." The image, perhaps symbol, of the white man's oppression of the black, cotton, is turned into a fleecy path for weary people. In a different context, the final line, "We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day," might well hint at a threat. But the fourth stanza makes clear that the black's deter- mination to act before Judgment Day refers to making cotton roll: Nassur; nassur, Hump. tho, eoho, roll away! We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!" (15) Whatever dreams of escape Judgment Day harbors remain dreams. The complete break with the preceding stanzas dramatizes that the rhythmic straining has reached its greatest pitch in the first two lines. The emphasis given to this stanza as a result makes it the climax of the song. This emphasis is made stronger in that the entire stanza is enclosed by the quotation marks introduced at the end of the third stanza. The fourth stanza thus becomes a kind of expansion of the 35 last line of the third stanza and lends great weight to the repeti- tion of that line. And the fifth stanza simply repeats the second stanza as a refrain-like close to the song. Thus "Face" and "Cotton Song" add implied dimensions to the narrator of gang, In the first poem, he goes quite far in re— sponding to the pathos of the old woman, almost as far as senti- mentality. In the second, he gets close enough to field workers to try to catch the inflections of the voices and movements. He ex- pands the imagery introduced at the beginning Of the book and reveals patterns of contrasts in his responses to the southern milieu. He has set the stage, so to speak, but up to this point, has not walked out onto it. Nor does this elusive speaker ever visibly walk out onto his landscape. But in the first of the two poems at the center of Part I, he refers directly to himself in the first person, and to his commitment to the black people and the soil from which they sprang. The implied conflict in the ambiguous portrayals of the earlier poems and in the fluctuating distance between the speaker and his subject is brought a little more clearly into focus in "Song of the Son." The poem's five stanzas, moving from invocation through affirmation, reveal strong misgivings about the future of the "soul" of the black race. The opening lines of the first stanza contain an invocation whose object is not clarified until the second stanza: Pour O pour that parting soul in song, 0 pour it in the sawdust glow of njght, Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night, And let the valley carry it along, And let the valley carry it along (21). 36 The "parting soul," like the presence invoked, is not immediately apparent. But its transitoriness is conveyed, and associated with the "sawdust glow" and "velvet pine-smoke" atmosphere of the night. This image strengthens the allusion to the epigraph on the title page, redoubling the links between darkness, sensuousness and the implied black people. Metaphorically, these sensory impressions become a kind of river of emotion pouring out of the atmosphere and flowing down the valley. When the speaker apostrophizes the soil directly, he identifies both the "parting of soul" and himself as deriving from it: 0 land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, Now just before an epoch's sun declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee, Thy son, I have in time returned to thee (21). Here is the speaker's homeland, raw and primitive. The sweet-gum tree and the abundant pine imply woodlands, the natural wealth of the land whose exploitation is hinted at in the I'sawdust glow." Through the implied process of trees reduced to heaps of sawdust, the image subtly links with the encroaching mechanization and commercialism which Toomer suggests in "Reapers." But if the glow and the smoke connote the emerging struggle between the simpler agrarian way of life--with its closeness to the soil hinted at in the poems leading up to this one--and the mechanized urban way, that conflict is submerged in the sensuous and elegiac elements which dominate the ambience of this poem. Reinforcing the departing way of life in the first stanza, the reference 37 to an imminent decline of an epoch strengthens the note of sadness. But the sadness is partly offset by the moment of realization, and the speaker declares himself a son of southern soil. The refrain, repeating the last line in each stanza, makes a particularly subtle close: by setting the phrase "in time" in apposition to "Thy son," the speaker plays upon meaning. He is a son of the southern soil at a crucial moment in black development, but, just as significantly, he is a son of an epoch in decline. Thus, the oracular image of dusk and redolence is transposed from fermenting cane syrup to smoldering sawdust. The theme of an epoch's decline hinted at in the sawdust glow, is picked up again in the next stanza: In time, for though the sun is setting on A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set; Though late, 0 soil, it is not too late yet To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone (21). The speaker voices his affirmation in a context of gathering dusk. The sun is in decline, and the metaphoric play on "song-lit race" clearly identifies the black people with dusk. The repetition of the phrase "in time" emphasizes the decisiveness of the moment for the speaker: he will capture the soul of his southern soil, and so per- petuate a beautiful thing about to die. This idea is introduced in the title of the poem in that the "Song of the Son" becomes the song derived from the soil, and the association of "song-lit" with sun invites a play on the words "sonP/"sun." The concentration of "song," "sun," "son," and dusk establish twilight as a crucial metaphor of black experience. 38 Intensifying and multiplying the images of dusk and purple begun in the "oracular" epigraph and threaded through the earlier poems, the fourth stanza adds: 0 Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums, Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air, Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes (21) Here, the color purple explicitly connotes the black race, especially those members from the past era of slavery. The purple cane, the purple "cluster grapes of sorrow," and now the "dark purple ripened plums," all delineated at dusk, are now fused into a metaphor of ex- ploitation. The Negro slaves and their remnants are ripe for pluck- ing, "Squeezed, and bursting in the pinewood air.“ There is also a submerged allusion to "Face," whose "cluster grapes of sorrow/ purple in the evening sun/ nearly ripe for worms" connote death. Again, the reference to "Passing" ties up the associations of "parting," "de- clines," and "Leaving" in the earlier stanzas, and stresses the elegiac tone of this poem. Finally, the fruit despoiled, the tree itself is now about to be "stripped bare," while in the background of the previous stanzas the scrap heaps of forest smolder. This stark image of exploitation foreshadows the tragic condition of the black race. Unlike the first three stanzas, the fourth stanza omits the repetition of the last line in order to prepare for its continuation into the fifth stanza: the line breaks off, "One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes," and leads without pause into the next stanza, 39 "An everlasting song)‘ The effect created contrasts with the reitera- tions of the first three stanzas: An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery (21). The seed, a commonplace of the theme of renewal, becomes the means of perpetuating the vanishing black race. But the renewal will not take place literally, Rather, the soul Of that race is to be preserved in song: the tree that grows from that seed will sing and celebrate what the Negro slaves were and what they are to the speaker. The reference to slavery identifies what the speaker considers most signi- ficant about the black race, the traditions of a bygone way of life. The entire weight of the song associations is thus invested in the "souls of slavery" caroled by that tree. A germ of folk art will perpetuate a vanishing race, an idea strongly emphasized by the re- petition of the second and fourth lines.14 14See Dillard, pp. 38-39; Krasny, p. 63. Lieber also makes this statement about "Song of the Son," pp. 37-38. Reilly, 314, sees redemption for the black poet in this poem; Ackley, 47-48, essentially agrees with Lieber; Sister Mary Kathryn Grant, "Images of Celebration in Cane," Negro American Literature Forum, 5 (Spring 1971) 32, sees the “Song of the Sonflfas a prevalent motif of celebration; Catherine L. Innes, "The Unity of Jean Toomer's Cane," CLA Journal, 15 (March 1972) 320, also agrees with Lieber, especially that the racial heri- tage is almost lost; and Charles W. Scruggs, "The Mark of Cain and the Redemption of Art: A Study in Theme and Structure of Jean Toomer's Cane," American Literature, 44 (May 1972) 285, sees the persona as the “366 of the fallen Adam, the one the 'Bible lied about,'" an allusion to "Kabnis." The idea, most strongly voiced by Lieber, that the poem is acceptance of lost heritage poured into art, runs through most of the commentaries. 40 Perhaps the most prominent feature of Toomer's poetic style up to this point is its reliance on the poignantly ironic metaphor. The sharp reversals of "Reapers," "November Cotton Flower," and "Face," are especially noteworthy. The mixture of spirituality, pathos, and whimsy in "Cotton Song" effectively captures folk elements in a con— sciously artistic manner. But in "Song of the Son," as the narrator affirms his experience, the ambiance softens and the sensuousness deepens. The backbreaking toil of "Reapers" and "Cotton Song," and the prodigies of "Cotton Flower'I and "Face," are replaced with cele- bration.15 Toomer has also contrasted landscapes with individuals, arranging these in each of the preceding pairs of poems. The softer ambiance and the pairing of individual with landscape continues in the relationship between "Song of the Son" and "Georgia Dusk." The “sawdust glow" of the former poem blooms into a warm, glinting scene: The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue The setting sun, too indolent to hold A lengthened tournament for flashing gold, Passively darkens for night's barbecue (22). These opening lines sustain the mood of dusk as a developing metaphor for the black's heritage. The self-consciously "poetic" diction in ¥ 5George C. Matthews, "Toomer's Cage; The Artist and His ”Orlfi," CLA Journal, 17 (June 1974) 547, juxtaposes the "blood-hot eyes with—EhE—"TEEOts" of "Portrait in Georgia." Bell, 255, empha- 51295|the word "genius" in his interpretation, perhaps hinting at LEWTS Visions in "Kabnis." Grant, 33, merely comments about the poem S celebration. Fischer, 203, curiously, finds the tone of the poem sardonic. Innes, 309, sees racial fusion in the images, a most Important clue to understanding Cane. 41 such words as "disdain" and "indolence” reveal the presence of the speaker of "Song of the Son," but now withdrawn into the background once again. The educated usage in the context of the "tournament for flashing gold" contrasts with the Negro stereotype of indolence. The conflict between light and dark, with its heavily symbolic over; tones of race and exploitation, passively resolves in the dusk. The sky is personified as being more interested in feasting than in com- peting for possession Of the sun. The day connotes the period of oppressive labor established in "Reapers" and "Cotton Song," and here the dusk becomes the period of release. The speaker's tendency to withdraw, especially after his expressed kinship with the blacks in "Song of the Son,“ becomes an important thematic concern in the second stanza: A feast of moon and men and barking hounds, An orgy for some genius of the South With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth, Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds (22). In the preceding poem, the speaker rejoiced that he had arrived in his spiritual homeland in time to save the last remnant of the Old slave culture. But he is clearly not this "genius of the South/ With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth" who creates folk art from the raw materials of black experience. The speaker's role, then, becomes one of observing and recording. His vision of the "genius of the South" goes beyond the earlier associations of black sensuousness and the imagery of dusk, and assumes mythic qualities. The context makes him sound almost supernatural, a woodland spirit, a personifi- cation of brute passions and charmed breath. 42 But instead of the appearance of the hypothetical "genius," the two following stanzas shift the speaker's perspective to an object whose presence, till now, has only been hinted at in the "sawdust glow": The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop, And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill, Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill Their early promise of a bumper crop. Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low Where only chips and stumps are left to show The solid proof of former domicile (22). The sawmill becomes a tangible element of encroaching civilization. This pair of quatrains contrasts the influence of industry with that of the agrarian way of life in the opening pair. The silence which follqws the sawmill's shutting down fOr the day metaphorically re- leases the spell that bound the landscape to dormancy during the day. Now the "winter" of day is followed by the "spring" of dusk, and a mystical pollen fertilizes the ground ready to receive it. The whole is an allegory in miniature, preparing the celebration of night and freedom which are to come. But the image is not wholly free from the pollution of the industrial presence. The smoldering sawdust pile, first introduced in "Karintha" as an image of destruction, sends up low-hanging clouds of smoke to haunt the scene where the trees were reduced to fragments. The imagery recalls the "parting soul" of the 5011 carried along by the "velvet pine-smoke air," the "sawdust glow," and the ruthless stripping of the IflLmi tree in "Song of the Son." Since the poetic images progressively associate the rural countryside with the "soul," the identity, of what is black, the 43 fragmentation of those metaphors of black identity connote the frag- mentation of the identity. The haunted atmosphere in "Georgia Dusk" combines with the sensuousness of the scene to create a richly ironic celebration. This mingling of fragments of an old way of life with a new continues in the fifth stanza: Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp, Race memories of king and caravan, High-priests, an ostrich, and a ju-ju man, Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp (23). These men of African ancestry, already fragmented by their adaptation to a new land, still dimly recall their past. Their behavior affirms that past and celebrates it, even as the sawmill fragments it. The images of I'pomp" only hint at the past in a sketchy way, little flashes of the barbaric splendor captured impressionistically in the highly connotative words, "king and caravan,/ High-priests, an ostrich, and a ju-ju man." The tribal nature of these vestiges culminates in the last two stanzas: Their voices rise . . the pine’trees are guitars, Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . . Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane Is caroling a vesper to the stars . . (23) O singers, resinous and soft your songs Above the sacred whisper of the pines, Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines, Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs. Once again, the metaphors multiply the associations between black people and elements of the natural countryside. TO the accompaniment Of the guitar-like strumming of the falling pine needles, the chorus of black singers is identified with sounds of the canefield. The added 44 comparison of the falling needles to rain renews the associations of the scene with spring. And in the final stanza, the people's voices, permeated by the atmosphere of the resinous pines and the incense-like fragrance of the smoldering sawdust, rise up gently "Above the sacred whisper of the pines." The fragments of a dimly recalled, barbaric past combine with sensuous men in a sensuous landscape to produce a religious ecstasy. The ethereal voices give to the "cornfield con- cubines" an aura of innocence, hence the "virgin lips." And the "dreams of Christ" ironically refers to the influence of the white man's religion on people who might otherwise generate a "genius of the South/With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth." The folk song, working in these fragmented, transformed people, has be- come a carol. The resulting hybrid is full of sensuous beauty, and though the speaker has remained carefully in the background, his deep involvement with the people is evident in the rapturous language he employs. The shift away from the "genius of the South" at the begin- ning of "Georgia Dusk" to the "dreams of Christ" at its end dramatically highlights the speaker's quest for a spiritual leader of the black people. In "Song of the Son," the speaker evidently seeks and finds an identity in the soil of his ancestors. But the song he finds emanates from the soil; he does not sing it, though he invokes it. In "Georgia Dusk," he looks around, so to speak, for a minstrel who can capture the spirit of the land in individual song. But though the scene the speaker beholds is "A feast" worthy of such a being, he finds instead 45 a people collectively celebrating the spell of night. Their dreams are of Christ, and the messianic implication correlates the sense of struggle with the yearning for release which has been interwoven into the earlier poems. Thus, in these two poems, Toomer reaches the structural and thematic mid-point of Part 1.16 Each pair of poems leading up to and including this central pair regularly alternates a shorter followed by a longer poem, and each pair grows progressively longer: the first pair consists of eight and fourteen lines, respectively; the second, of thirteen and twenty lines; and the third, of twenty and twenty-eight lines. The effect is distinctly step-like, though by no means rigid. The impression of length, felt, yet partly concealed by the relationship of the poems to the stories and sketches, is paralleled by a corresponding intensification of the human fractions that add up to Toomer's projection of the black ethos and the speaker's search for it. The framing of the two "faces," with their plant- imagery in "Face" and "November Cotton Flower," by the field scenes in "Reapers" and "Cotton Song," restates the theme of the title page epigraph: black identity is rooted in the soil Of its slavery, and dusk is an important part of the metaphor. At the same time, images of fragmentation are introduced: the squealing, bleeding rat, the . 16Interpretations vary somewhat, but most critics agree that either "Song of the Son" or "Georgia Dusk" are central to the f'PSt Part of Cane. 46 unseasonable blooming of the cotton flower, the face "nearly ripe for worms," the shackles, the smoldering sawdust, the stripped plum tree, and, finally, the chips and stumps of trees. Yet all of these are infused with affirmation. The mingling of cultural elements repre- sented through these images inspires the speaker. Immediately following this structural and thematic climax, Toomer sharply compresses the remaining two pairs of poems of Part I. The pattern logically reverses the rising effect in the first two pairs, though "Nullo" and "Evening Song" repeat the short-long rela- tionship Of the pairings with seven and twelve lines, respectively. But "Conversion" and "Portrait in Georgia," which close the pairings Of Part 1, reverse the relationship with eight and five lines, re- spectively. The effect of these relationships creates a slight structural rise in "Evening Song'I followed by a falling away in the final two poems. This pattern is thematic as well. "Nullo"17 begins with a deeper penetration into the virgin forest. As with "Georgia Dusk," the poem begins at dusk: A spray of pine-needles, Dipped in western horizon gold, Fell onto a path. Dry moulds of cow-hoofs. In the forest. Rabbits knew not of their fallin , Nor did the forest catch aflame (34). But there is no focus on human activity. In fact, this poem is the only one in the first part of Cane that makes no direct reference to -__. 17A neglected poem. Bell, 256, comments on its "aura of wonder and mystery" in ordinary phenomena. Krasny relates it to Karintha's childbirth, p. 64. 47 human beings. The golden sun of "Georgia Dusk" still lingers on the horizon. Here, however, no feasting men nor baying hounds disturb the absolute silence of the forest. The "spray of pine-needles" re- m‘i nds us of the resiny "rain" accompanying the chorus in the sixth stanza of the preceding poem. The reference to the path is ambiguous, for the speaker does not clearly identify it as human or animal. The presence of the prints of cattle without attending human prints seems to establish the path as animal. And this impression is further heightened by the nature of the poem. The whole represents a nulli- ‘Fication of human presence. The soaring, imaginative responses to an Eivvesome environment conceived by the speaker and projected into the Ethos of the black people are here displaced by indifferent or unper- Ceptive rabbits. The rich, figuratively inflamed imagination of that " genius of the South/With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented breath" ought to have set the forest ablaze with its golden intensity O‘F "pine-needles,/Dipped in western horizon gold." But not so much as a glowing sawdust pile intrudes. The virgin forest, as the poem's title suggests, nullifies the speaker's imagination by rendering it i neffectual. The bonfires of "Georgia Dusk" become metaphors of the 8 un, the smoldering sawdust, and the speaker's imagination. "Nullo" ”apresents a tiny spark remaining after a huge bonfire: it can be Farmed back to a semblance of its Old life, but without new fuel, the ‘F‘lame will die. The urgent desire of the speaker to communicate his revela- tions about the black genius undergoes further metamorphoses. In " Evening Song," the "fires" are those of love: 48 Full moon rising on the waters of my heart, Lakes and moon and fires, Cloine tires, Holding her lips apart. Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon, Miracle made vesper-keeps, Cloine sleeps, And I'll be sleeping soon. Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the moon-waves start, Radiant, resplendently she gleams, Cloine dreams, Lips pressed against my heart (35). Plot.only love, but significantly spent love sets the imagery in this poem. The sun has set, replaced by the rising moon.18 And the sspeaker extends the metaphors of night and day, representing the (epoch of black culture, to the condition of his own heart. The dusk, representing heightened awareness of the speaker's ethnic identity, lias been superseded by the paler glow of the full moon. The moon, vvith its aura of omen, figuratively rises on the speaker's heart, and tflie heart, the seat of human passion, ambiguously mingles fire, water, éand moon. The sensuous and sensual elements in the poem show that tine speaker has not given up his ethnic commitment. And though the [Dassions are spent, the presence of "Lakes and moon and fires" connotes renewal. But what kind of renewal is implied in the rising of the Inoon? The moon can never match the blaze of sunset. If this image 18Krasny, p. 65, connects the sensuality of "Evening Song" 'to Karintha, Becky, Carma, and Fern. Bell, 256, also sees a cyclic Pattern in the waxing and waning of the moon. 49 represents renewal, its placement in the structural decline follow- ing the intense affirmation of "Song of the Son" and "Georgia Dusk" i~-and, indeed, the nullification of "Nullo"--marks a significant new direction in Part I. If the speaker's love metaphorically represents fris affirmation of racial identity, then Cloine represents the black anlture. She metaphorically sails out on the waters of the speaker's heart, drifting in sleep where the "Promises of slumber leaving sJiore to charm the moon" connote a serene mastery of the future. Even tflie form of the poem, returning to a more formal arrangement after tflie brief, uneven lines of "Nullo," suggests this mastery. The twelve l ines are arranged in three quatrains, rimed a223, These lines are Luneven metrically and rhythmically. But the third and fourth lines CJf’each quatrain are metrically constant, creating a special effect Ely drawing attention to them: "Cloine tires, . . . Cloine sleeps, - . . Cloine dreams. . . ." The downward trend of the physical, with i‘ts metaphoric connotations of withdrawal and repletion, is balanced Ely'the upward yearning of the imagination, the tighter rhythms Of the (Jne by the looser rhythms of the other. The sense of security, however, must be tempered by the ‘lnmges of moon and dream. Promises made by moonlight are often broken 11y daylight. The full moon, inconstancy, and impending danger are <3ften associated. The speaker connects the miraculous vespers of "Georgia Dusk" with Cloine. She becomes one of the "cornfield concu- t>ines" in the second quatrain: "Miracle made vesper-keeps." And in ‘the final quatrain, she is linked with the moon itself. She gleams, 50 "lladiant, resplendently,“ as she curls in "the sleepy waters where tune moon-waves start." Drowsing in the speaker's embrace, this personification of the epoch of the slavery past presses her lips aagainst his heart. "Evening Song" is thus a pale reflection of the fires of dusk, representing a slight rise in thematic development ‘Fofllowing the sense of vacuum in "Nullo." The arrival of night, the [Doet's drowsing imagination, and imminent sleep, clearly signal a 'thematic close. The poet who returns to his spiritual homeland, symbolically to plant a seed, performs an act of homage and love. lie metaphorically enters into the mystical experience at the end of "Georgia Dusk" and recreates in his heart the purity that has been lost by the incursions of civilization. With "Conversion" and "Portrait in Georgia," the speaker Tabandons the hope of renewal. At least, the imagery falls to its darkest and bleakest aspect, and brings the poetry of the first part ()f §a£g_to a close. "Conversion" immediately proclaims the falsifi- cation of the purer Negro strain in its commercialized counterpart:19 African Guardian of Souls, Drunk with rum, Feasting on a strange cassava, Yielding to new words and a weak palabra 19Bell, 256, astutely relates the poem to Barlo's sermon: it "heightens the meaning of the parable in Barlo's sermon by exposing the Christian deception of substituting a 'white-faced sardonic god' for the 'African Guardian of Souls.'" But Bell does not seem to think that the "African Guardian" has himself been "converted," thus deceived. Krasny, pp. 65-66, more clearly shows that whites alienate blacks from their essential spirits through Christianity. 51 Of a white-faced sardonic god-- Grins, cries Amen, Shouts hosanna (49). Tlie declamatory style helps to underscore the sententiousness of the iiigure portrayed in the poem. Here, the Negro folk-preacher, the ”lerican Guardian of Souls," undergoes a double "Conversion." lprarently weakened by drinking the white man's "spirits," and eat— iiig his debilitating food, this "guardian" yields to the false god. [\t first, this "white-faced sardonic god" seems to be a reference to 20 But such an izhe white man's God and to the white man's culture. “interpretation is inconsistent with the exalted dreams of Christ [Jreviously introduced in the poetry. Significantly, acts of feast- ‘ing and drinking do not elevate this man's spirit, though the {Dreacher's cries of "Amen" and "hosanna" show a debased echo of “the <:horus of the cane." There may also be a play on the "Oracular. . . . [)eep-rooted cane" in the mention of "strange cassava," for it is the rcoot of this latter plant that is eaten. The imagery and the language (If the poem thus show a shift in values. The "weak palabra/0f a vvhite-faced sardonic god" represents a shift in language and behavior SlIggestive of the moon: the spell cast by the moonlight and the $43nse of alienation from the true light of the sun are evoked. But as the weight of the poetry thus far suggests, the T“ierce and brilliant sunset characterizes the black experience. The . f. 20Neither Bell nor Krasny comment on the apparent contradic- ‘tion. Christianity may be deceptive, in the case of Barlo, but in “Georgia Dusk," the conversion is one of exaltation and beauty. 52 l ight of day is associated with oppressive toil in the fields or the encroachment of the white man's civilization. The rising of the moon ssuggests a respite from the implied rising of the sun. Yet in "Conversion," we see that the moon is linked with the folk-preacher vvho, in turn, becomes the white man's underling. Toomer's poem <:learly satirizes this "African Guardian of Souls," hinting at the tzitter denunciation of the preacher's influence on black people in "Kabnis." Thus the moon, master of illusion, ambiguously mingles hope aand decline under the spell of the white man's influence. The moon image persists through "Blood-Burning Moon," the sshort story which concludes Part I. But in "Portrait in Georgia," vvhich immediately follows "Conversion," the moon is present only as aan implied link with the night of a lynching. This, the briefest and sstarkest of the poems in Part I, reverts partly to the form of "Face": 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 (50). (Bone is the loftiness of the hair in the earlier poem, "silver gray,/ l ike streams of stars," replaced here by an image Of terror, "a 13lncher's rope." The coal-like eyes and "the last sweet scent of