Jean Toomer\'s Cane and Racial

JEAN TOOMER'S CANE and RACIAL IDENTITY

Jean Toomer's Cane is actually an extension of author's self, character and beliefs that had been shaped by his rather affluent upbringing, the changing definition of race in 1920s and by inability to acquire one specific racial identity. Coming from a politically influential family with his grandfather the acting governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, Toomer had never experienced the negative impact of racial segregation and was given equal access to black and while social circles. This had resulted in weakening of a racial identity, as it was understood in those days. However he felt like he was being pulled between two worlds and thus turned to the ideals of Russian mystic Georges Gurdjieff who believed in expansion of self-expression for higher consciousness and awareness.

Toomer's ideology regarding race and racial identity were deeply influenced by his years at the college. In 1914, when he found himself embarking on a new episode in life as he was entering college, Toomer faced a serious dilemma. Which race did he actually belong to? How would people treat him if they knew he went to a Negro school? So in order to avoid being left out, Toomer decided to have no racial identity at all. He refused to classify himself as a white or black and this laid the foundation of his non-racial ideology that was later found in his book, Cane.

When Cane was published in 1923, critics and famous writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, William Stanley Braithwaite, immediately received it and Sherwood Anderson as part of new and emerging African-American Literature since it's author was a black man. Toomer was seen as solid new voice for African-Americans as Braithwaite claimed: "we come upon the very first artist of the race, who... can write about the Negro without the surrender or compromise of the artist's vision.... Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature." Similarly Anderson termed Toomer's work "the first Negro work I have seen that strikes me as being really Negro." Toomer appreciated such valuable observations but was still uncomfortable with the idea of being labeled a Negro writer. A man who had repudiated racial identity a long time back was not willing to let others put him in a certain categories of writers. He even denied James Weldon Johnson the permission to reprint some of his poems from Cane in the Book of American Negro Poetry saying: "My poems are not Negro poems, nor are they Anglo-Saxon or white or English poems. My prose likewise. They are, first, mine. and, second, in so far as general race or stock is concerned, they spring from the result of racial blending here in America, which has produced a new race or stock. We may call this stock the American stock or race."

Toomer's reluctance to accept himself as a Negro writer has nonetheless often been construed as his rejection of the black race and people have at worst considered him a traitor to his culture and heritage. However the charge appears absurd when one goes deeper into Cane and other writings to discover that Toomer was never rejecting black race, he was actually repudiating race in general. He wanted to transcend the boundaries of race to give man a more universal existence. Cane speaks heavily of black race and culture but with one important underlying motive i.e. To deconstruct race and racial identity as people generally saw it. Its ironic how the book delves into various aspects of black culture and how the author tries hard to divest himself from claims of being a Negro writer. In the book Cane which is actually a beautiful collection of poems, prose, vignettes and which focuses on various seemingly disparate themes and characters, the author doesn't reject race or black race specifically but tries to make the Negro population of Harlem generation to accept their existence in connection with the white race. In other words, the author believes that since black man is considered black in relation to his existence in a white world, it was important to be more tolerant of other races and in the process transcend racial boundaries altogether.

What gives Cane its inner tension is that these two objectives are not mutually exclusive for Toomer: he finds it necessary to assert the black self set: within a white world; racial "separateness" cannot contain the black or white truth. Toomer seeks to use the tension within race to find the truth that transcends races." (Kraft: O'Daniel edition: p.147)

Any sensitive reader of Cane would notice the numerous references made to culture and roots in this book but they are all in connection with 'another' world. The author talks in relative terms and his stories and characters are made to see their world and condition in connection with the other world that also exists around them. In fact Toomer's characters are urged to see their reality in relation to the larger reality. The minor world is embedded in the bigger one but both are equally important. It is when people do not encapsulate themselves in the minor world alone that they can transcend the conditions and circumstances that appear to restrict them.

What Toomer maintains in Cane is that a black man must know his earth-black roots, the land sense of life that is in the novel symbolically established in Georgia, but that no black man can ever forget that part of his blackness is in its contrast to the white world, the city sense of life symbolically expressed in the Washington and Chicago sections of the novel. Cane is the black people, the black life, and black oppression, the black condition that becomes cosmic in its attempts to reach out of the earth to the sun, to something more than itself. The symbol "cane" is a symbol of man's life movements. (Kraft: 148)

Divided into three sections, Cane is a story of five black women and one white woman in Part 1, which is set in Georgia. Part 2 is a collection of poems about black culture, heritage and land followed by series of relatively longer stories of life in black areas of Washington and Chicago. The last part, which is the most influential, is set again in Georgia, this time focusing on the lives of two young black men Kabnis and Lewis.

Lewis' character has an autobiographical touch as he is depicted as a man who rejects racial boundaries or limitation and struggles in search of more meaningless, less restrictive identity. The black-white polarity that actually signifies every kind of struggle between two opposing forces reaches its peak in this part as the author accentuates it with his two contrasting characters Kabnis and Lewis. Kabnis is the frightened, timid intellectual who is absolutely lost in his black world so much so that he is unable to see beyond it. Driven by senseless passions, he is accompanied by a black repressive force Tiresias who is engrossed in her pronouncements of sin and doom. Lewis on the other hand is a young man with an absolutely free mind and spirit. He doesn't subscribe to the black theories of racial identity and believes in omnipresent existence of opposing forces of white-black, slave-master, right-wrong etc.

Can't hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season's multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned. Split, shredded: easily burned. No use..." (p. 218)

If we notice carefully, we see that while the characters, geography and scenes are particularly black but in the last part, the dialogues are meant to accentuate just the opposite i.e. invisibility of color. In other words, Lewis' speech is devoid of 'color' and thus he offers unbiased views on every subject with no regard for race. His objective observations are not easy to digest for those who have been conditioned to accept racial identity as important part of personal identity. It is essentially an artist's views on race. As they say, an artist has no nationality or race, similarly in this novel, Lewis the artist can view the world as it exists without subscribing to conventional views of racial identity.

Black race is often mentioned in the book and as mentioned earlier, most characters are definitely black but the author is less concerned about 'color' as the source of racial identity and more interest in treating race as just another omnipresent reality. For example in his vignette 'Karintha', the protagonist is clearly presented as a black woman: "Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down."p.1 Similarly in Becky, race issue emerges again "Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell.... Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths" (8). But throughout the novel, it is factual treatment of race that dominates any emotional construction of race.

The central problem of identity in Cane is grounded in lack of acceptance of what has universally existed i.e. polarities. In the 1920s, writers like Toomer embraced a new kind of racial identity i.e. repudiation of race itself that emerged from accepting that world has always harbored differences and divergent viewpoints and thus different racial identities was also a norm and not something to be seen as a source of conflict.

Toomer sets the particular problem in the black world, but he sees it as the true artist does, whatever his race. The problem is the eternal one man must confront: the mind is the source of insight and of any art in life, but the mind also destroys the blood and passions that feed the life of the mind. Here is the black-white war that this novel moves toward, a war that is in the particulars of race if one chooses but is also beyond race as well, in the realm that Toomer was himself in. It is something of this special war, personal, racial, religious, national, that Toomer meant when he had Lewis say "Master; slave." This is our condition whether we put it that way, or say "Father-son": we are all masters to someone and all slaves to someone -- especially to ourselves; we are all fathers and all sons." (Kraft: 151)

Some considered the author a traitor but the truth remains that despite the attacks against him, Toomer was deeply attacked to his own culture and heritage. However he felt that we could use them as our strengths instead of our weakness. Toomer was not an aloof spectator as we see from various instances in the book where the author creates beautiful black characters and speaks of black culture with unfeigned fondness. In a letter to Claude McKay, Toomer explained: