One Nation Under Gods: Interfaith Symbolism and the “American” Race in the Works of Jean Toomer

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ONE NATION UNDER GODS: INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM AND THE “AMERICAN” RACE IN THE WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER

Laura Gayle Fallon

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2009

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my thesis committee – Dr. Dagbovie, Dr.

Machado, and Dr. Berlatsky – for their wisdom and guidance throughout the development of this paper and many others. I would also like to express my gratitude to

Joshua E. Fallon for his unparalleled patience and encouragement in all of my academic endeavors.

iii

ABSTRACT

Author: Laura Gayle Fallon

Title: One Nation Under Gods: Interfaith Symbolism and the “American” Race in the Works of Jean Toomer

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Sika Dagbovie

Degree: Master of the Arts

Year: 2009

This study argues that the interfaith symbolism present in the works of American author Jean Toomer undermines dominant Christian justifications for racism in the

United States. It also discusses the ways in which Toomer’s interfaith symbolism promotes the establishment of a race Toomer called the “American” race, a group of interracial, interreligious people whom Toomer hoped would change the way race was viewed in the United States. The multireligious references in Toomer’s works challenge constricted definitions of both religion and race by highlighting interchangeable religious ideals from several world religions.

ONE NATION UNDER GODS: INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM AND THE

“AMERICAN” RACE IN THE WORKS OF JEAN TOOMER

Chapter I: An Introduction to Multireligious Symbolism in the Works of Jean Toomer

Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1

Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance……………………………………………..5

Toomer’s Spiritual Search………………………………………………………7

Responses to Toomer……………………………………………………………..9

Chapter II: Christ and Karma : Rejecting Reductive Labels through Interfaith

Symbolism in Cane

Cane as Rejection of Racial and Religious Simplicity…………………………15

“Becky”: Rebelling against Religious Norms……………………………………18

“Carma”: Complicating Racial Understanding through Religion………………21

“Bona and Paul” and “Kabnis”: Finding Peace through Interfaith

Reconciliation……………………………………………………………………25

Chapter III: Fostering Unity through Interfaith Symbolism: A Look at Toomer’s

Post-Gurdjieff Short Stories

Toomer and G.I. Gurdjieff……………………………………………………….33

“Winter on Earth” and the Gurdjieffian Utopia………………………………….39

“York Beach”: Americans Committing Economics……………………………..44

Chapter IV: Toomer’s Interfaith Symbolism in Poetry: Embracing Diversity by

Destablizing the White-Washed Deity

Toomer and Poetic Religious Reimaging………………………….…………….52

Criticizing the Christian Army………………………………………..………….58

The Poetry of Cane : A Portrait of Colonial Faith………….………….…………60

PostScript………………………………………………………………………..……….69

Notes…………………………………………………...…………………….………73

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...…78

I. AN INTRODUCTION TO MULTIRELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM IN THE WORKS OF

JEAN TOOMER

The American author Jean Toomer (1894-1967) struggled throughout his life to promote a more complicated understanding of race in America. Within his own works,

Toomer often associated this more complex perception of race with religious symbols, references, and ideas from several different spiritual traditions. The intense connection between racial understanding and multiple religions in Toomer’s writings not only highlights historical religious rationalizations of racial prejudice but also serves to challenge established organized religions in the United States by revealing similarities between faith practices which appear in other cultures and the dominant Christian tradition in North America. Toomer strives to simultaneously destabilize narrow views of race and religion in the hopes that toppling the definition of either abstract notion will lead to a nation which embraces both a global faith and an egalitarian treatment of all races. Due to Toomer’s own struggles with complicated personal racial and religious identification, the multireligious symbolism that appears in his works often references his own frustrations with a country in which he was reductively labeled as belonging to only one part of his mixed ethnic heritage or to only one religious tradition. These frustrations intensified after the publication and advertisement of his first major work, Cane , and continued to haunt him as he fought a life-long battle for the establishment of an America that would disregard racial and religious labels in favor of a cosmopolitan society.

When Boni and Liveright, Inc., first published Jean Toomer’s Cane in 1923, the publishing house advertised the book by printing portraits of a pensive Toomer in literary magazines and reviews. These photos of a languid author, half obscured by a dusky shadow, were accompanied by snippets which played up the supposedly exotic nature of

Cane . Book reviews discussed the “primitive blackness” of the work’s characters, ignoring everything but the “primitivist release” of Toomer’s prose poetry, insinuating to

Toomer’s readers that to read Cane was to immerse oneself in the “permanent surrender of the higher faculties,” to enjoy the arcane darkness of African jungles transplanted in the American South (Soto 173). The mysterious, dark photographs of Toomer were meant to accentuate the authenticity of Cane as an emotional account of the Negro experience in America. Though Toomer was phenotypically white, his publishing house capitalized upon on his public acknowledgement of the seven known races in his family lineage, intently focusing upon Toomer’s African American heritage in order to appeal to white readers who were fascinated by the emerging Harlem Renaissance movement. The endorsement of Toomer as a Negro writer was primarily based upon the pervasive

(though not uniformly mandated) one-drop rule adopted nationwide by white communities in an effort to keep whites and blacks legally segregated.

Despite the fact that Toomer claimed French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German,

Jewish, and Native American blood, he was consistently labeled as a black author. This oversimplified label frustrated Toomer’s attempts to publicize and celebrate racial mixedness in his work, and his rebellion against the label cost him some popularity among famous literary contemporaries. In a 1923 letter to Waldo Frank -- who, incidentally, would also insist upon oversimplifying Toomer’s racial background in his

2 own reviews of Toomer’s work -- Toomer vents about the narrow-mindedness of fellow writer Sherwood Anderson: “I dont [ sic ] think we will go very far. He limits me to Negro.

As an approach, as a constant element (part of a larger whole) of interest, Negro is good.

But to try to tie me to one of my parts is surely to loose [ sic ] me” (Letters 113). Toomer battled this racial limitation his entire life. Though at times proud of his black heritage,

Toomer felt his mission in America was to propagate an atmosphere inclusive of racial mixedness, an environment in which all races could intermarry and produce what he would later call the enlightened “American” race.

After Cane was published, Toomer dedicated much of his time and effort protesting against America’s tendency to reduce his complicated racial history, and he argued for national acknowledgement of a new racial label, called simply the “American” race (Weaks-Baxter 59). Toomer believed that a wide acceptance of this label would provide a much-needed space for all people who could not easily classify themselves as

“white” at the beginning of the 1900s. In the late 1920s, Toomer penned several short stories and essays that deal with this issue of cultural and racial mixedness. One of his unpublished essays, “The Americans,” explains that Toomer’s proposed race would emphasize the common humanity of man instead of cultural and racial differences in the

United States:

This new race is neither white nor black nor red nor brown.

These are the old terms for old races, and they must be discarded. This is a new

race; and though to some extent, to be sure, white and black and red and brown

strains have entered into its formation, we should not view it as part white, part

black, and so on…. Water, though composed of two parts of hydrogen and one

part of oxygen, is not hydrogen and oxygen; it is water . (qtd. in “Modernism and

Race 29)

The desire to bind races into a cohesive humanity is evident in Toomer’s work even before Cane was published in its entirety. Chunks of Cane were sent to diverse literary publications – Broom , The Crisis , Liberator , Modern Review , S4N , and others – in an effort to reach a diverse readership (Bontemps 186). The variety of publications which

Toomer courted is itself proof that Cane is, as Mark Whalan says, “a text structurally and thematically committed to hybridity” (Race, Manhood, and Modernism 209). Toomer mixed and matched and twisted the stories in Cane before settling upon the final form for the book, and some of the stories and poems were themselves pieces of other unpublished works which Toomer had previously authored. For example, the story “Karintha” was originally a poem recited to an urban, interracial New York audience in the play Natalie

Mann . Though “Karintha” has only Georgia as its immediate context, the story’s position within its original urban context indicates that the stories of Cane possess universal appeal. Critic Mark Whalan writes extensively about how the internal audiences of Cane link the protagonists of the book’s short stories to the tangible communities which Toomer was trying to influence. Whalan claims that the existence of absent or unspoken audiences in transplanted stories like “Karintha” “preclud[e] any isolationist reading or a reductively formalist approach that merely celebrates […] lyricism” (Race, Manhood, and Modernism 211). Instead, these different audiences necessitate “a consideration of [a story’s] cultural function within the New York avant- garde,” or with any other audience that may have been linked with a Toomer story in the past (Race, Manhood, and Modernism 211). The stories and poems of Cane therefore

4 represent a mixed world presented to a mixed audience – Cane and its internal audiences are mirrors for the cosmopolitan discussions which Toomer hoped to initiate in America.

Unfortunately, the way in which Toomer’s book was promoted by his publishers gathered a primarily white readership for his work.

Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance

The Roaring Twenties was host to an American and European fetishization of black heritage and “African” culture. Horace Liveright, who represented the second half of the publication company Boni and Liveright, was notorious for presenting edgy literature to the American public: “[Liveright’s] interest in nourishing the Harlem

Renaissance was consistent with his longstanding commitment to the American literary renaissance and its break from the genteel tradition” (Harlem Renaissance in Black and

White 371). To Liveright, Toomer’s Cane was an opportunity to cash in on this break from the American “genteel tradition,” whose proponents still adamantly demanded racial segregation. The evidence of interracial relationships symbolized by the mixed- race characters of Cane had the ability to ignite the ever-present American controversy surrounding forbidden interracial relations. Though Liveright desired to make money over the sensationalism produced by the publication of a book which featured interracial offspring, he was careful to bill Toomer strictly as a black man. 1 In response to this action, Toomer wrote a vehement letter to Liveright, insisting, “My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine” (Letters 171).

Because of this, Liveright accused Toomer of being secretly ashamed of his black heritage when Toomer continued to object to Liveright’s monoracial classification of him

5 as an author (Harlem Renaissance in Black and White 369). Toomer was hurt by this accusation, not only because Toomer readily claimed his black ancestry, but because

Liveright’s accusation revealed the publishing world’s reluctance to openly validate the talent of mixed-race individuals. To champion the talent of a black man or woman was to feed the American public’s desire for exoticism, but to recognize real interracial relationships was to invoke the public’s ire.

Even the prominent black critic Alain Locke had a tendency to dismiss the political implications of mixed-race relationships in Cane , though he valued the book as the product of a “folk spirit, reconstituted as conscious, modern art” and praised it highly in the popular anthology The New Negro (Scruggs and VanDemarr 220). Locke ignored the interracial themes prevalent in the book and focused instead on the book’s style and form. It was not until the 1950s that Locke would openly discuss “the dramatic inner paradoxes of mixed heritage, both biological and cultural,” which proves that even some of the most outspoken black literary critics were eager to avoid anything “impolitic” in the 1920s, and subsequently avoided the more controversial elements of Cane (qtd. in

Scruggs and VanDemarr 222). Like Locke, the influential W.E.B. Du Bois praised

Toomer’s work as well-written, but avoided tackling the larger political issues presented in Cane . In the literary journal Crisis , Du Bois says:

Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know

human beings; and from the background which he has seen slightly and heard of

all his life through the lips of others, he paints things that are true, not with Dutch

exactness, but rather with an impressionist’s sweep of color. (Soto 177)

This back-handed compliment hints that Cane is only an accurate representation of black and interracial life if it is viewed through an abstract lens. Du Bois’s evaluation emphasizes only Toomer’s personal perspective of black life in Georgia instead of analyzing Cane as a cry for social and political equality. Du Bois thus strips Toomer of any impartial authority on the subject of race: if read with Du Bois’s critique in mind,

Cane becomes an opinionated editorial based on personal experience -- not a creative look at the stark reality of racism.

Toomer’s Spiritual Search

Just as Toomer refused to be simplified racially, he also refused to subscribe solely to any particular or popular organized religion. Though he was an intensely spiritual man, Toomer rejected the traditional version of American Christianity which he was offered in his youth, saying this Christianity had been “instrumental in suppressing

African Americans” by abusing Scriptural references to biblical slavery, and by demanding imperial Roman subservience from American slaves (Weaks-Baxter 64).

Throughout his university life, Toomer experimented with existentialism and atheism, but after quitting school, he found that he still craved theology and religious philosophy. He voraciously devoured texts on “Buddhist philosophy, the Eastern teachings, occultism,

[and] theosophy” (Wayward 199). A close look at the Toomer canon will show that

Toomer was also familiar with Judaism, Sufism, and a number of other religious practices. He dabbled in various spiritual teachings until finally deciding to “[come] back to earth and literature,” implying that his spirituality had placed his head in the clouds for months before he resolved to continue his writing (Wayward 199). Nevertheless, this

7 esoteric foray into Eastern philosophy began to deeply influence his writing; his new life philosophies are peppered throughout Cane and almost all of his other works. When he later joined a spiritual group led by the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, Toomer evolved into an amateur theologian of sorts, an interfaith monk determined to link spirituality with “earth and literature.” Hence, Toomer’s works infuse spirituality into his race literature, and his penchant for the study of multiple religions results in texts rich in interfaith symbolism.

Because Toomer’s primary audience was a culturally Christian society, Toomer’s writings contain multireligious symbolism described in dominantly Christian terminology.

By subtly channeling non-Christian teachings through common Christian images and references, Toomer reconstructs traditional Christian ideas. For example, in Cane , a John the Baptist figure is simultaneously a Roman god, and the Christian God punishes a sinner via karmic ideology. This mixed symbolism subverts Christian rationalizations of racism by redefining and challenging America’s understanding of religion; if John the

Baptist can be recognized by readers as a biblical portrait, but can just as easily appear as a “pagan” deity, readers must question their own grasp of faith-based icons and references. Toomer illuminates the similarities among major world religions by layering the symbolism in his texts -- readers who would criticize another faith or race are forced to grapple with their own faith and racial identities as they are re-presented through the eyes of the Other. 2

When painted in such a way, Christian images, references, and classifications take on different shades of meaning: all of a sudden, the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and similarities overwhelm divisions. By destabilizing Christian symbolism, Toomer asks

America to reconsider not only their faith-based justifications of racism, but the very

8 concept of race itself. 3 Once a reader can draw parallels between the Other’s beliefs and his or her own, the Other is, in this context, a potential equal, and is more difficult to oppress. Though Toomer may at times be guilty of what critic Omolara Leslie mockingly calls “the shining faith that [foreigners] are all Americans under the skin,” his effort to make his readers see American Christian religion through the mind of non-

Christians does highlight similarities among all peoples that, by extension, emphasize similarities among races (qtd. in Achebe 75). The religious instability created by

Toomer’s multireligious symbolism therefore becomes a ground for critique and discussion: Christian justifications for racial oppression are dismissed, and Toomer dares his white readership to think of non-white Americans on egalitarian terms.

Responses to Toomer

It is, perhaps, Toomer’s penchant for redefining his own shifting racial and religious identities that has drawn so many literary critics and scholars to comment upon the biological markers within Toomer’s work. Consumed with the quest to find Truth within himself, Toomer sought answers to many of his spiritual questions by reflecting upon his own life. This reflection produced many autobiographical collections and leaked into Toomer’s fiction writing, as well, making critical comparisons of Toomer’s life experiences and his fictional texts almost mandatory for most critics writing about

Cane and other Toomer works. Some of these earlier comparisons, such as William J.

Geode’s “Jean Toomer’s Ralph Kabnis: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” published in 1969, offer interesting insights for the reader curious about Toomer’s life, but ignore anything deeper than a surface reading of text that can be readily identified as

9 autobiographical. Other early comparisons offer interesting close readings of Cane and a few short stories, but reduce the characters to simple stereotypes of “the primitive black, the black who had been semiurbanized, and the intellectual black” (Benson and Dillard

49). It is interesting to note that the distinct categorization of racial stereotypes is frustrated in most of Toomer’s pieces through his multireligious symbolism; yet, early critics of his work were determined to make sense of his text by labeling his black characters, anyway. Such simplifications are useful when viewing the way the literary community has responded to Toomer over time, but to present-day critics, using sources which continually refer to Toomer’s characters as “primitive” and as possessors of

“confused, i.e., ‘moony,’ racial [identities]” can be seen as an effort to actually reinscribe the racial stereotypes Toomer was trying to demolish (Krasny 42).

Thankfully, the 1990s witnessed a Toomer revival of sorts. Cane was finally appreciated as a canonical work of American literature, and writers like George

Hutchinson began to address issues in Cane which had previously been ignored. In “Jean

Toomer and American Racial Discourse,” Hutchinson tackles both the spiritual and the racial aspects of Cane by investigating the way Cane ’s characters often embody “the sacred aura of the taboo” (“Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse” 233).

Hutchinson argues that Toomer highlights “the terrible price to be paid for transgression of the racial divide” within American society, and thus condemns America’s rejection of the “natural laws” of interracial relationships (“Jean Toomer and American Racial

Discourse” 234). Likewise, in Ethnic Modernism , Werner Sollors maintains that in Cane ,

Toomer is “going on to create, searching for aesthetic wholeness and a new vision in a fragmented modern world” which struggles with both soul and skin (104). While these

10 critiques do not include comprehensive examinations of interfaith symbolism in Cane , they do offer a much-needed look at the status of race during the rise of Modernism in

America.

More recent criticism has been written about the spirituality in Toomer’s work, and how that spirituality reaffirms the way his text “[extends] the limits of literary form”

(Ford 2). The various literary forms employed by Toomer – sonnet, free verse, and short story – do add to the complexity of his collected canon, which echoes, in some ways, the religious and racial complexity mirrored in Toomer’s interfaith symbolism. Critic Janet

M. Whyde comes close to addressing Toomer’s spiritual references and their connection to race in the article “Mediating Forms: Narrating the Body in Jean Toomer’s Cane .”

Whyde argues that the image of the body, specifically the woman’s body, in Cane connects to “the quest for a unified self” that African Americans and mixed-race persons were seeking in the 1920s (43). Whyde offers a unique reading of the various bodies in

Toomer’s text and the way self-negation and self-discovery are linked in the work.

However, Whyde does not undertake the task of identifying the subversive nature of

Toomer’s spiritual references and their multireligious connotations, nor does she thoroughly discuss the references’ further implications for the establishment of an

“American” race. Also, Whyde’s analysis is like most literary critical analyses of

Toomer in that it is limited only to Cane : recent criticism of Toomer’s post-Cane texts are rather scarce.

Jon Woodson is one example of a critic who does include discussion of several

Toomer works, and he, like Whyde, tackles both the soul and body of Toomer’s pieces in

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance . Rare

11 investigations of Toomer’s spiritual search and its connection with his later texts are also beginning to appear in academia. Toomer critic and biographer Rudolph P. Byrd’s Jean

Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff offers one of the earliest and most extensive accounts of

Toomer’s involvement in the Gurdjieff Work in relation to his literature. Robert B. Jones continues this work brilliantly in Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A

Phenomenology of the Spirit . Though both men discuss Toomer’s thoughts on race and his spiritual quest, neither critic provides the reader with an extensive critique of

Toomer’s many-layered multireligious symbolism and how that symbolism challenges

American Christian race ideology: Byrd focuses upon Toomer’s development as a writer under the tutelage of Gurdjieff, and Jones is more concerned with the way Toomer “us[es] the language and symbology of Gurdjieff’s system” to “dramatiz[e] the idea that universal truth is ethical truth […] that the individual must be ‘awakened’ to universalist thinking” (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 65). In other words, Jones examines

Toomer’s Gurdjieffian symbolism, but does not discuss how that symbolism undermines

Christian rationalizations of racism and simultaneously promotes the idea of an

“American” race.

This thesis focuses on the ways in which Toomer’s interfaith symbolism support the idea of an “American” race and discourage monoracial (and monoreligious) thought in the United States will be the concern of the remainder of this essay. In Chapter Two,

“Christ and Karma : Rejecting Reductive Labels through Interfaith Symbolism in Cane ,” I argue that Toomer’s multireligious symbolism acts as a tool for establishing racial and religious identities as unstable, shifting signifiers. The instability of these signifiers calls into question the veracity of racism supported by religion by emphasizing the

12 interchangeable nature of common religious symbols. In Chapter Three, “Fostering

Unity through Interfaith Symbolism: A Look at Toomer’s Post-Gurdjieff Short Stories,” I evaluate literature written by Toomer after his first encounter with the Armenian mystic

G.I. Gurdjieff. In this chapter, I explore the changes wrought on Toomer’s multireligious symbolism and his “American” race ideas by his interaction with the Gurdjieff Work.

Toomer’s interfaith symbolism in these works still functions to destabilize religious racism, but it also advocates a uniquely Gurdjieffian worldview, which Toomer hoped would help instigate a movement for the official recognition of an “American” race.

Chapter Four, “Toomer’s Interfaith Symbolism in Poetry: Embracing Diversity by

Destabilizing the White-Washed Deity,” analyzes Toomer’s rejection of the “white” reimaging of God and Christ in American and European cultures. This rejection is especially apparent in his poetry, in which Toomer insists upon the recognition of a raceless, cultureless Deity created through an amalgamation of several similarities in different religious traditions.

The multiple layers of religious symbolism in Toomer’s writings mirror the dynamic complexities of those who refuse to submit themselves to simple racial labeling systems and reductive religious ideals that can be easily skewed and employed in oppressive racial classifications. Thus, a full understanding of the way in which these multiple symbolic layers function is vital to a complete analysis of Toomer’s texts.

Toomer’s later writings, such as “The Flavor of Man,” are proof of a spirit eager to witness “love of God, love of man, […] a sense of unity with all creation” in the people of his nation (Uncollected 407). According to Toomer, this unity could only be achieved if Americans gave up falsely-pious justifications for prejudice and joined together as

13 members of an “American” race. In his work, Toomer sets out to reconstruct race by reconceptualizing these justifications. By revealing similarities among religions and people groups worldwide, Toomer successfully identifies and challenges attitudes within the American Christian church which foster racism and division in the United States.

II. CHRIST AND KARMA : REJECTING REDUCTIVE LABELS THROUGH

INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM IN CANE

Cane as Rejection of Racial and Religious Simplicity

Many of Toomer’s underlying non-Christian multireligious references cannot be easily identified as belonging to one specific religion. His references are often a blend of several different religions, and at times they can point to basic concepts shared by two or more faith traditions. The juxtaposition of separate faith systems works to make

Toomer’s readers more aware of the similarities within major world religions, and

Toomer takes advantage of these similarities to point out the similarities among the people who practice opposing faith systems. This juxtaposition also adds more layers to the symbolism presented in Toomer’s works, and further discourages any attempt from the reader to categorize or label belief systems and those who practice them. Given

Toomer’s own conviction that people and faiths should not be reduced to simple labels, the discussions of multireligious interpretations in this chapter will not offer an exhaustive list of the various faith systems referenced in each interfaith image or idea.

Rather, this chapter focuses on how these interfaith references support the way in which

Cane promotes the rejection of simplistic racial labeling systems.

Toomer’s first major work, Cane , is the work in which it is simplest to identify

Toomer’s links between race and religion, and is a natural springboard for evaluating the chronological evolution of his interfaith allusions. In Cane , multireligious ideas are inseparable from the notion of race, as the various religions mentioned in each prose piece and poem reflect the characters’ multifaceted racial backgrounds. Critic William

Ramsey confirms that Toomer’s “narrative strategies undercut [binary thinking] by pulling readers in two directions simultaneously, toward the temporal and the eternal, thereby dislodging rigid cultural frames regarding race” (79). Together, these layered references work as a critique of the American tendency to not only simplify race but to advance the domination of non-white races via religious ideology. The willingness of the

American Church to participate in spiritual and racial domination repulsed Jean Toomer, as is evidenced by Toomer’s criticism of the Church’s tendency to overpower others:

Nothing could be more remote from or abhorrent to my nature than that I take part

in those perversions which are not ashamed to bear the names of religious

persecutions and religious wars. But I have hated and I do hate the vices and

vanities, the thirsts for power, the crafty acquisitiveness, that hide under religious

cloaks. I do hate the oily piety, the sweet sugar frosting, the hypocrisy, the

infidelity. (Wayward 65)

Toomer’s multireligious symbolism questions the motivation behind this “crafty acquisitiveness” by challenging the legitimacy of an overly-simplistic Christian view of race in Cane . Presenting a reader with multiple religious symbols which all approximate the same idea or image destabilizes the Church’s claim to a monopoly on religious truth by emphasizing religious similarities throughout the world. The interfaith symbolism in

Cane is linked directly with mixed-race characters throughout the book; thus, through interfaith references, Toomer illustrates the complexities of both religion and race, and in doing so, asks the reader to reject reductive, Church-promoted racism and to consider the benefits of establishing an “American” race which would make reductive labels unnecessary.

Toomer biographers Cynthia Kerman and Richard Eldridge document Toomer’s early desire to develop the “American” race by “expung[ing] society’s image of race as an important factor in classifying people” (340). Soon after the publication of Cane ,

Toomer began to heavily satirize human classification systems in his writing; for example, in “The Fable of the Creature” (1930), Toomer describes a group of people who feel it is of the utmost importance to establish the name of an insect:

Suddenly one of us declares authoritatively, “I have it! It is a cockroach!”

“So it is!” we all exclaim. “It is a cockroach!”

At last we understand.

We shake hands and look knowingly at the thing we understand.

The tiny moving creature goes about its business, being what it is. (qtd. in

Kerman and Eldridge 340)

Since the insect remains “what it is” despite human efforts to label it, the lowly insect rises above the human compulsion to understand via stereotype, to scientifically classify based only on outward appearance. Toomer writes that his desire to extinguish racial classification systems was felt from his “early years,” and that from his youth he had “felt and known [that he] was a member of the American people and of the American race, the new race that is gradually forming in this country”; however, in the same passage,

Toomer laments that, at the time of the publication of his own works, “[Americans] have labeled the bottle and forgotten its contents” (qtd. in Jean Toomer and the Prison-House

70). Though the blueprint for his proposed “American” race would not be formally published until after Cane appeared in bookstores, Toomer evinces the need for a racially-indifferent society throughout Cane ’s pages. By focusing on the interfaith religious aspects and connotations associated with his characters, Toomer dares his readers to label the “bottle[s]” of his portraitures before first examining the “contents” of their souls.

“Becky”: Rebelling against Religious Norms

The second story in Cane , “Becky,” utilizes primarily Christian symbolism.

However, it is in this story that a dominant religious norm, Protestant Christianity, is challenged through Catholic symbolism; thus, the story serves as a springboard for more complex religious symbolism in the rest of the book. The white protagonist of the story,

Becky, is surrounded by Christian symbolism, and the black people in the town call her a

“poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman” (Cane 5). Becky’s Catholicism seems to be a mark of tension in the mostly-Protestant town, and identifying her as a “poor Catholic” immediately marks Becky as a spiritual deviant. Becky refuses to conform to certain societal standards, and she emphasizes this refusal by inexplicably producing two mixed- race sons. Because of this, Becky is doubly ostracized: she does not practice Christianity in the same way as the community, and she has unmarried sexual relations with an unidentified black or mixed-race man. No one in the town knows who the father(s) might be. The absence of a physical male lover, when combined with Becky’s Catholic faith,

18 makes Becky a strange Madonna figure in the story, which, in turn, transforms her sons into twisted representations of Christ. Becky is not strong enough to rebel against the community completely, though – she allows herself to be cast out of the community, and instead of leaving town, she takes up residence “between the railroad and the road,” which makes her a stable, iconic figure in the midst of traveling people (Cane 5). Though she is shamed, this stationary, solitary position makes her a Madonna statue – like pilgrims seeking a Marian miracle, travelers throw “little crumpled slips of paper scribbled with prayers” as they pass her house (Cane 5). Her sons grow into restless, violent men, and when townspeople see them, they wonder, “White or colored? No one knew, and least of all themselves” (Cane 6). This racial ambiguity becomes a major theme in the rest of the book as Toomer’s multireligious references increase. In Cane , rebellion against the religious norm in America is always linked to rebellion against the reductive nature of American racism. By rebelling against the town’s definition of acceptable religion, Becky and her sons also rebel against carefully-established racial labels.

When Becky’s sons leave the town, they shout, “Godam the white folks; godam the niggers,” and they never return (Cane 6). By cursing at the townspeople in this way, the boys both profane the town’s religion and condemn the racism within it. People who are separated – divided into rudimentary categories of “white folks” and “niggers” – are doomed to be punished, to be damned to a life devoid of the benefits of interaction with one another. Becky dies when her house later collapses upon her, but she has provided the world with two mixed-race men who refuse to be defined and oppressed via racial labels. Though the boys are violent, their violence can be read as a reflection of godly

19 wrath, or a punishment upon those who do not embrace the boys’ philosophy of

“neither/norism,” a belief first coined by Roland Barthes that eschews polar ways of thinking (Harmon 92). Critic Charles Harmon explains that Cane is rife with this neither/norism: the boys in “Becky” deny “all available means of mediation between self and other because [they yearn] to find or create the mediating form that will perfectly match (and hence naturalize) the idiosyncrasies of [their] subjective experience” (92).

Hence, the boys cannot connect with the town because the townspeople desire to define them mono-racially; the boys must leave town in order to find a more complex understanding of mixed-race identities.

While the spiritual symbolism in “Becky” is solely Christian, Toomer uses the

Catholic/Protestant strife within it as a bridge into more complicated, multireligious symbolism in later stories. Becky’s portrayal as a Madonna figure implies that the town’s rejection of Becky’s Catholic faith and mixed-race relations are symbolically a rejection of the Virgin Mary, “the star of redemption who intercedes with God for

[human] beings” in the Catholic faith (Eliade and Couliano 68). The fact that the townspeople outwardly reject Becky but still covertly pray to her by throwing written prayers at her house indicates that some people feel the need for a faith that disavows loyalty to racial labeling. For Toomer, this rebellious faith is the faith of the interracial

“American” race birthed through Becky’s mixed-race liaisons. It is the faith which

Toomer espoused when he disdained the American Church’s tendency to reinforce racial stereotypes. He writes in Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (1931) that “[t]he church fights the evil caused by a social scheme of which it is a main part,” or that the American

Church outwardly denies racial prejudices but secretly encourages them (Uncollected

238). In “Becky,” Toomer does not necessarily challenge the tenets of Christianity itself, but he does beg the reader to recognize the need for a rebellious, complicated faith that can truly conquer racism.

Becky herself, though, cannot ultimately escape the racial oppression around her, unlike several later protagonists in Cane whose descriptions are replete with multireligious references. Thus, “Becky” is the birth of an idea – the beginning of a complicated faith system – that is not yet complete. Other characters in Cane who are linked with more global interfaith symbolism are more apt to enforce the beneficial understanding of race that Toomer later advocates in his “American” race ideology.

“Carma”: Complicating Racial Understanding through Religion

The third story in Cane tells the short tale of Carma, a girl “strong as any man”

(Cane 10). Toomer gives Carma strength and agency throughout her story because she is the embodiment of the Hindu concept of karma , which is “roughly, the moral law of cause and effect” (Smith 64). According to theologian Huston Smith, this concept means

“we live in a world in which there is no chance or accident,” a world in which “every decision must have its determinate consequences” (65). Carma, therefore, facilitates punishment of her husband, who wishes to “curb her natural desires so that her actions might conform to the standards of civilized society” (Benson and Dillard 58). After her husband, the appropriately-named “Bane,” confronts her about her adulterous affairs,

Carma pretends to commit suicide in the cane field. When Bane discovers that she is alive, he is so angry that, in his frustration, he seriously wounds another townsman who

21 had helped Bane locate Carma in the cane. Bane is sent to spend time in “the gang” for his actions, and Carma is allowed to “take others” once he is gone (Cane 11).

If Carma really is karma , then she must “take others” – she must intimately involve herself in the lives of other people in the town by rewarding or punishing their actions. As the embodiment of cause and effect, Carma herself is neither moral nor immoral, and her promiscuity should not be viewed as a statement against forced female fidelity or the rigid ethical standards of her husband – instead, she is merely the consequences of action, and these consequences apply to everyone in the town equally. 4

Since Carma’s man-like strength is often noted throughout the short story, and since the

“others” she sleeps with are never mentioned with gendered pronouns or identified as male, it can be argued that Carma rewards and punishes, or “take[s],” both men and women alike. Many critics, like Janet Whyde, seem to take “Carma” as a gender commentary on the power of the female body; while it may be a gender commentary in some ways, the intense religious symbolism and repeated references point to something even deeper – karma has come to Bane’s town to literally eradicate the town’s “bane.”

The “bane” here is a lack of justice and intense oppression; Bane is the force opposing

Carma, trying to aggressively prevent her from “tak[ing] others,” or from letting karma influence the people in his town by facilitating the consequences of action. As indicated by his name and his aggressive behavior, Bane is presented as a violent oppressor, and the literal dismissal of Bane indicates Carma’s desire to erase the violent oppression of justice from Bane’s community.

Carma’s thirst for justice is evidenced by the way the narrator remarks that “God has left the Moses-people for the nigger” when he sees Carma on the road (Cane 10). By

22 invoking the Christian God and Moses, the narrator is highlighting the spiritual connection that black slaves felt with the Israelites, who were led out of Egyptian slavery by the Old Testament leader Moses (New International Version , Exodus 12-14). 5 In popular culture, Moses is usually associated with the famous list of Ten Commandments given to the Israelites once they were free. This association provides a connection between rules and the townspeople in Carma’s community: when the narrator asserts that

Carma is proof of God’s presence among the black people of his town, he is simultaneously referencing the “commandments” by which the townspeople ought to live.

Evidently some, like Bane, are violating these rules by oppressing others. The juxtaposition of Hindu and Christian concepts in this story work together with Carma’s direct association with black slavery to join race and religion in a complex, interwoven commentary on the way a more complicated understanding of religion can bring about greater racial acceptance. Though Carma is associated with the Christian God, when she passes the narrator on the road, the pine-needles are said to shine like “mazda” (Cane 10).

Mazda is a reference to Ahura Mazda, who is worshiped as “the Supreme Lord, [the] creator of all contrasts” in Zoroastrianism (Eliade and Couliano 248). Zoroastrianism is a religion which developed out of religious reforms in Iran approximately 3000 years ago, and Zarathushtra, the main instigator of this religious reform, sought to establish a religion that would serve as “a reaction against the orgiastic cult of male intiatory brotherhoods of warriors” which existed in Iran at the time (Eliade and Couliano 248).

These brotherhoods were notorious for their murderous violence; they were constantly warring over aristocratic titles, and practiced bloody ritualistic sacrifice. Thus, Carma’s connection to Ahura Mazda links her to efforts to bring peace to her town under the

23 blessing of the “creator of all contrasts” – an allusion to the various skin colors in her

Southern town (Eliade and Couliano 248). In order to help her restore equality, Toomer places Carma under Mazda’s benevolent presence while she fights against the violence of

Bane, who symbolizes the impetuous warrior mentality of a pre-Zoroastrian brotherhood. 6

Carma is also connected to the religions of West Africa and the Caribbean: she dances in the forest with “juju men, greegree, [and] witch-doctors” (Cane 10). In the early 1900s, white explorers and missionaries to Southern Nigeria documented the existence of “juju” men, or tribal priests who stored and consulted (sometimes human) sacrificial relics (Whitehouse 412-413). 7 Similarly, Greegree utilize amulets and charms in order to aid them in the practice of Caribbean voodoo. In some sects, these men are invested with the power to hold an “inquest as to the probable cause of [a person’s] death” (Shaw 865). Since juju men, greegree, and witch doctors are known and feared for their knowledge of death and their interaction with the spirit world, Carma’s association with these priests reveals a power within Carma that her other multireligious associations fail to elucidate. The presence of both juju men and greegree – African and

Caribbean priests – connotes Carma’s connection with the slaves which were taken from

West Africa and transported to the Caribbean as chattels. Voodoo, a mixture of African tribal traditions and Catholic mysticism, was, in many ways, a response to slavery in the

Caribbean and the American South. Slaves in these areas incorporated Christian elements into their religion, but never fully eschewed various African religious ideals.

Thus, in this text there is a link between blacks in Africa and those in the Western hemisphere, and Carma’s participation in their dancing hints that karma will somehow

24 honor this transatlantic connection by punishing those who separated slaves from their homelands.

Carma – and her consequences – are thus directly related to African and

Caribbean religious traditions and to Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, and

Zoroastrianism. All of these various belief systems converge within her in order to establish a complicated, harmonized religious system in her town. Consequently,

“Carma” is the first story in Cane which demonstrates complete agency on the part of a protagonist: she is powerful because she possesses the ability to integrate and embody religious beliefs which reflect the state of affairs in her town. Toomer’s message here is undeniably that Carma’s town will only find relief from Bane, or violent injustice, when it comes to terms with someone who possesses the ability to represent several religions and, by extension, the races which practice those faiths. Hence, Carma is also, in some ways, the abstract expression of Toomer’s dream for the religion of the “American” race, in which racial concepts would be “unlock[ed]” and “outgrow[n]” by “open[ing] the religions, the exclusive creeds” in favor of a “Root Religion […] whose force transforms” its practitioners until they realize that they are all one – that every person is an embodiment of all faiths (Uncollected 302-303).

“Bona and Paul” and “Kabnis”: Finding Peace through Interfaith Reconciliation

Intense multireligious symbolism appears again in the story “Bona and Paul,” which chronicles a man’s struggle with his own mixed-race identity. The protagonist,

Paul, attracts a beautiful white girl named Bona, who, while lusting after him during gym class thinks, “He is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf. He is a nigger. Bona! But dont

[sic ] all the dorm girls say so?” (Cane 70). These rumors about Paul lead the reader to believe that Paul’s ambiguous racial heritage is causing a scandal in his predominantly- white university; nevertheless, Bona finds herself helplessly attracted to his handsome face, and makes a pass at him during class. After this scene, Paul pictures himself and

Bona staring out of separate windows, which most likely signifies two different ways of seeing the world. Paul hears an undulating lullaby sung by a Negress in his head, and when he tries to imagine himself looking through Bona’s window, he is confronted with a mirror image of himself, and “with his own glow he looks through a dark pane” (Cane

71). Though this could be construed as a simple mirror image – a scene in which Paul is forced to view himself through Bona’s eyes – the reflection in the “dark pane” implies an intense racial contrast which hovers around both Paul and Bona. The language that

Toomer uses in one of his personal letters could also indicate that Paul’s self- confrontation with race is an encounter with Paul’s own spiritual life force.

In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer joyfully asserts, “Your Yea! to life is one of the clear fine tones in our medley of harsh discordant sounds. Life is measured by your own glowing” (qtd. in Kerman and Eldridge 93). After this statement, Toomer connects life to art, and says that art “has a sort of religious function. It is a religion, a spiritualization of the immediate” (qtd. in Kerman and Eldrige 93). When read in light of these statements, Paul’s “own glow” becomes Paul’s “Yea! to life,” in which he confronts the “dark pane” of his mixed-race ancestry and refuses to look away. For

Toomer, this “Yea! to life” is intimately connected to the spiritual quest to find peace and enlightenment within the self – a quest that Toomer sought to realize for most of his adult life. Though Paul’s moment of enlightenment is not couched in specific religious terms,

26 seeing the connections to religious awakening – be it salvation, Nirvana , moksha , or another religious experience – are essential to the reader’s understanding of the rest of

“Bona and Paul.” In another letter to Georgia O’Keefe, Toomer writes, “Most people cannot see [“Bona and Paul”] because of the inhibitory baggage they bring with them”

(Letters 191). This baggage is racial baggage, and Toomer believes it prevents his readers from grasping the spiritual elements and personal peace encapsulated in “Bona and Paul” when “Paul resolves these [racial] contrasts to a unity. […] Someday perhaps, with a greater purity and a more perfect art, I’ll do the thing” (Letters 191). This “thing” could easily refer to both Toomer’s writing and a personal sense of peace comparable to

Paul’s.

Paul’s revelation and sense of self continue to develop throughout the story, until, at a dance with Bona, Paul fully grasps the struggle of the people around him as they try to peg him as “Spaniard, an Indian, and Italian, a Mexican, a Hindu, or a Japanese” (Cane

74). He comes to peace – not with racism, but at least with the fact that others will always view him differently: “There was a fullness, and strength and peace about it all.

He saw himself, cloudy, but real” (Cane 75). This experience sounds similar to a Hindu moksha awakening, which is described as complete spiritual “‘liberation’ or ‘release,’ for it brings freedom from all conditioning and the limitations of time and space” (Easwaran

38). At the dance, Paul finally realizes himself as one free from the racial conditioning and physical obsessions of his peers, and he finally understands his enlightenment experience. His revelation is similar to a realization recorded in the Hindu Upanishads:

The Self is realized in a higher state

Of consciousness when you have broken through

The wrong identification that you are

The body, subject to birth and death. (Upanishads, Kena Upanishad, 2:4)

The confusion felt by the people desperately trying to label Paul as one particular race seems silly to Paul, since it is all evidence that his peers believe in the “wrong identification that you are the body” only, that the body does not possess a more important Self. The Christian allusion to the New Testament is provided during the dance scene to emphasize the ideological similarities between moksha and Christian revelation. These similarities work to complicate the American Christian idea that Paul must find peace through purely Christian means; the similarities also challenge the idea that revelation is unique to the Christian experience – the moksha experience in this passage is virtually identical to the state of peace sought by St. Paul, Paul’s namesake, in a passage in the New Testament. By having Paul see himself “cloudy, but real,” Toomer echoes a thought in one of St. Paul’s epistles: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I also am known”

(New International Version , 1 Cor. 13:12). This beautiful verse connects Paul’s moksha experience with Paul’s first confrontation in the “dark pane” of Bona’s racist worldview.

Critic Werner Sollors also comments on Toomer’s apparent fondness for this particular biblical allusion; he states that Toomer’s effort to make readers “yearn for a fresher and fuller look at the world […] is captured in [Cane ’s] repeated allusions to St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians” (Ethnic Modernism 104). The hope of being truly “known,” as

St. Paul feels he is known by God, is a hope Toomer repeats again and again in his works.

Bona eventually leaves Paul at the dance, but because Paul is now “known” to himself through his personal revelation, he reaffirms his mixed-race heritage by openly

28 shaking hands with the black door-man and assuring the door-man that “white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk” (Cane 78). Because of his mixed-race heritage, Paul says, “I am going out and gather [ sic ] petals” (Cane 78). 8 By not specifying which petals he will gather in the future, Paul is telling the door-man that he does not have to choose his color; he does not have to pass for black or white because he is both, and he is spiritually at peace with his “own glowing,” his own true self, however he may wish to define it.

Not all protagonists in the later stories of Cane find inner peace quite as easily as

Paul does, however. “Kabnis,” the piece which concludes Cane , centers around a self- destructive man who has all but given up on faith of any sort. This story is often viewed as the “climax of the volume” where “Toomer achieves the most concentrated and complex articulation of his theme” (“Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse” 231).

According to George Hutchinson, this theme is a desire to “displace the dualistic racial consciousness of ‘white’ and ‘black’ Americans” (“Jean Toomer and American Racial

Discourse” 231). This dualistic consciousness is beautifully illuminated through spiritual symbolism when, in the middle of the night, a wretched Kabnis stumbles outside to curse

God. He weeps when he sees the beauty of the night – which here represents blackness – but pleads, “‘God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with this beauty.

Take it away. Give me an ugly world’” (Cane 83). This outburst fades into an unconvincing assertion that “‘God, He doesnt [ sic ] exist, but nevertheless He is ugly.

Hence, what comes from Him is ugly” (Cane 83). This statement aligns perfectly with a passage written by the Islamic Sufi dervish Jalaluddin Rumi:

If everything were as it seemed, the Prophet would not have cried out with such

illuminated and illuminating perspicacity, “Show me things as they are! You

make things appear beautiful when in reality they are ugly; You make things

appear ugly when in reality they are beautiful. Show us therefore each thing as it

is lest we fall into a snare and be ever errant.” (Rumi 69)

Kabnis’s cry mimics the cry of Rumi, and he morphs into the Prophet Mohammed, who requested that Allah show him the true nature of things in the world. Even though

Kabnis says that God does not exist, he nevertheless disproves his own disbelief by accusing God of creating an ugly world which is disguised with beautiful trappings. The nature of God – the Creator of beauty and ugliness – becomes a mirror of the dualism between black and white noted by Hutchinson. Kabnis knows that he cannot live with the perceived dualism of God, or with the reductive dualism of the polar racial consciousness of America.

The action in “Kabnis” comes to a head when Kabnis and some friends are having a raucous party in the basement of a workshop, which is inhabited by an old black man who is simultaneously described as a “Black Vulcan,” “John the Baptist of a new religion,” and the “Father of hell” (Cane 104). In every one of these terms, the old man is identified with fire: Vulcan is the Roman god of fire, John the Baptist taught that the

Messiah would baptize with fire, and the “Father of hell” is almost always associated with hellfire in Christian symbolism. As the embodiment of fire, the old man represents a purging, cleansing force for Kabnis and his friends. As Kabnis becomes drunk in the old man’s home and openly sleeps with prostitutes in between poker hands, the old man repeatedly utters the word “sin” as the night progresses, although the old man has lost

30 almost all sensory perception, and cannot really know what is happening during the party

(Cane 113). The man – the purging fire – “represents the aspects of Kabnis’s past that

[Kabnis] wants to deny. Consequently Kabnis can only project his own self-hatred onto the man” (Benson and Dillard 92). Thus, Kabnis inflicts upon the old man the same racial hatred that Kabnis hates in the “perceptual mechanisms” of others.

Kabnis does not see the man’s inner self – he cannot see beyond the man’s race.

Kabnis unleashes a violent torrent of verbal abuse on the old man, denouncing his simplistic Christian moralism and his willingness to live in a basement that resembles a black slave ship. After this outburst, the old man mutters that he has been criticizing, “Th sin whats fixed […] upon the white folks […] f tellin Jesus-lies” (Cane 115). Now, instead of viewing the old man as a complicit force within slavery and racism, Kabnis must reconsider the old man, and, in doing so, examine why he is so ashamed of his racial background – why he cannot reconcile the beauty of the night, or blackness, with a true understanding of the nature of black heritage.

Though Kabnis never verbally comes to terms with his mixed-race background, he is metaphorically purged of his self-hatred, as symbolized by the following sunrise scene. The sunrise, which seems rather distinct in a book filled with sunset imagery, is a

“gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town” (Cane 116). This fiery sunlight is an image of the old man himself, cleansing the town of prejudice, leading the town – and

Kabnis – into a future where race is not simply defined in dualisms, but in more complex terms. The old man thus creates spiritual space for Kabnis, a space where God does not approve of “th sin whats fixed” upon racism and where the beauty of blackness is not

31 tainted by any lurking “ugliness” or illusions. This space is a place where race can be as complicated as Kabnis himself, and if the sun continues to rise on Kabnis’s town, he will find peace with his heritage, just as Paul has. This inner peace is only obtainable for these characters through multireligious connections – Paul must have a moksha experience, and Kabnis must evidence his wrestling with Christ through the words of a

Sufi poet.

By combining different faiths in these ways, Paul and Kabnis gain insight into the

“central identity of the self which is the foundation of freedom, [in which] each individual is unique and yet identical with the all” (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House

71). This “central identity” which Toomer espoused as a vital part of the “transcendental vision of America” is the last step towards the complete evolution of an “American” race in Cane (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 71). Hence, several stories in Cane are representative of the gradual societal changes crucial to the development of a racially- indifferent nation. “Becky” is the beginning of religious rebellion which reveals the need for more a complicated understanding of race, “Carma” is the power effected through such a rebellion, and “Bona and Paul” and “Kabnis” are the effects of this rebellion on the individual. In the end, Cane becomes a fictional representation of the changes

Toomer hoped to instigate in America – changes which would help individuals “quiver into place” inside the unified “cosmos” of an identity unbounded by racial labels

(Uncollected 210).

III. FOSTERING UNITY THROUGH INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM: A LOOK AT

TOOMER’S POST-GURDJIEFF SHORT STORIES

Toomer and G.I. Gurdjieff

Shortly after the publication of Cane , Jean Toomer happened upon a pamphlet advertising a dance performance directed by the Greek-Armenian mystic Georgi

Ivanovich Gurdjieff. At the theater, Toomer was immediately smitten by the exotic performance; the Sufi dervish dances and Turkish flavor of the movements appealed deeply to Toomer’s interest in Eastern philosophy. Critic Nellie McKay cites the multireligious symbolism Toomer had studied before the creation of Cane , and confirms that his studies did “demonstrate an already-serious interest in Eastern thought and the occult” that continued after Cane was put to press (qtd. in Byrd 84). Toomer integrated this “Eastern thought” with his own Western ideas about a Christian God, and this same religious integration was demonstrated by G.I. Gurdjieff. Toomer later wrote that even

Gurdjieff’s deportment and body language during his performance “suggested co- ordination, integration, knitness, power” (qtd. in Moore 201). This control over self – the idea that man could become completely self-controlled – gripped Toomer so strongly that he sought to become a pupil of Gurdjieff’s Paris Institute. For a time, he “was so affected that he began to speak with a Russian accent” that imitated Gurdjieff’s strangely mixed

English pronunciations (Moore 201).

Though Toomer later dabbled in Quakerism and various interpretations of

Gurdjieff’s teachings, he consistently returned to Gurdjieff’s original spiritual ideals throughout his life, dedicating most of his voluminous writings to the propagation of what Gurdjieff students called simply the “Work.” Toomer’s later writings are passionate; yet, most of them lack the lyrical beauty and metaphorical power of Cane and his earlier poetry. Most Toomer scholars actually lament the author’s conversion to the

Work: critic Rudolph Byrd is, perhaps, being kind when he says that Toomer’s post-Cane canon “falls short of eloquence” (53). Prominent Toomer critic W. B. Martin goes so far as to say these later works “are, for the most part, nearly impossible even to follow, let alone interpret” (Martin viii). Indeed, it is a daunting task to match all of Toomer’s later works with direct Gurdjieffian references, and even when it is possible, understanding the mystic’s original teachings can be difficult, since most of Gurdjieff’s religious views seem to be an amalgamation of several religious teachings. Although Gurdjieff claimed to have discovered and taught the remnants of a pre-Christian religion in the Eastern religions he studied as a young man, Gurdjieff created his own religion around the tenets of several existing faiths. Thus, it is necessary for a Toomer scholar to study both

Gurdjieff’s system of thought and the several religions in which Gurdjieff participated to fully grasp Toomer’s spiritual influences. It is also necessary to recognize that even though “[t]here is a notable absence of African-American characters or themes” in

Toomer’s later works, this very absence “constitutes a metaphor for Toomer’s attempts to assimilate racial taxonomies and racial alienation into idealist philosophy” (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 65-66). While black characters no longer dominate his stories and poems in his later works, they are not forgotten. They are simply included in a more

34 global, cosmopolitan view of race. The ideal race in Toomer’s post-Gurdjieff works cannot be labeled as any particular ethnicity. Toomer still consistently uses a combination of Christian terminology and multireligious symbolism in order to challenge religious racism in America, and he continued to tirelessly advocate the institution of an

“American” race until his death in 1967.

Before delving directly into Toomer’s work in this chapter, it is necessary to briefly describe Gurdjieff’s basic teachings, as several of these ideas will be referenced as this chapter progresses. Within the Work, students are taught that humans suffer from an inability to unite their discordant selves. Each person is “formed of a multiplicity of small, ever-changing ‘I’s, each of whom has no relation to or contact with the others”

(Wellbeloved xxiv). These “I”s are in conflict with one another, preventing an individual from ever understanding Truth or the “Absolute,” which seems to be Gurdjieff’s interpretation of the Tao, or of the Greek idea of λόγος , which is used to describe Christ in the New Testament. 9 This Absolute “is the name given to the incomprehensible All or

One that comprises all worlds” (Wellbeloved 1). The Absolute consists of three main forces: a will, a full consciousness, and an understanding of the Absolute (Wellbeloved 1).

A Gurdjieffian pupil will strive to attain an understanding of the Absolute by uniting his or her “I”s, or by developing the three parts of man which correspond to the three parts of the Absolute – the intellectual, emotional, and instinctual beings which are individually comprised of hundreds of small “I”s. Once each of these beings are clearly defined within a person, these beings must be developed through self-discipline until they are all equally displayed and present within a person’s behavior. When all three beings function equally and simultaneously, then a human can unite with the Absolute and act as a

35 conduit through which the Absolute can influence the earth. Gurdjieff made it clear, though, that too many conduits will disrupt the energy balance between Earth and the rest of the Solar System (Speeth 20). Because of this, Gurdjieff’s students should not try to proselytize – they should only be concerned with developing themselves and other willing students.

There is also little need for proselytization outside of the Work because there is no punishment system set in place for people who refuse to participate in the Work.

Gurdjieff taught that few people accomplish unity within the Absolute, and that it is only those few who acquire, for lack of a better word, a soul. 10 Gurdjieff said that “[a] man is born without a soul, with only the possibility of acquiring one, and he has to earn it during his lifetime” (Thomas and Olga de Hartmann 183). Individuals without souls simply become part of the earth, and are reborn only inasmuch as their atoms are reused by the world for the creation of other matter.

Self-development, or the unification of “I”s, is accomplished through rigorous discipline of the intellectual, emotional, and instinctual beings. This discipline is slightly different for each student, but it normally begins with the breaking of small habits.

Gurdjieff would often make his students uncomfortable by asking them to accomplish tasks that their personalities found difficult. For example, a student with money and an aristocratic position in society would be sent to peddle wares in the marketplace, or a student who was overly timid would be instructed to yell insults at other students. The destruction of habit, of the mask of an ingrained personality, could be realized over a period of time, and the individual’s resulting control over his or her personality and body was thought to help stimulate the will power needed to unite discordant “I”s. Obviously,

36 this is the task of a lifetime. Gurdjieff told his students, “Take some small thing which you are not able to do, but which you wish to do. Make this your God. Let nothing interfere. Only strive to fulfill your wish” (Nott 66). The Sufi dervish Jalaluddin Rumi, whose poetry Gurdjieff studied, similarly writes, “If you have a hundred doubts of God, make them into ninety doubts. This is the way” (Rumi 95). In other words, the way to the Absolute is a painstaking process that must be achieved in small victories over the self. In order to speed up this process in his students, Gurdjieff taught them several physical movements and exercises. Gurdjieff based these exercises on dances he witnessed during his travels as a younger man in regions like “Turkestan, Tibet,

Afghanistan, Kafirstan, Chitral, Chian, Transcaspia and Turkey” (Speeth 88). Gurdjieff called the control gained by mastering these dance the ability to “remember oneself”

(Speeth 88). This remembering oneself is the starting point for many of Toomer’s later writings, and it lurks within almost all of his Gurdjieffian treatises. Toomer believed that self-control was vital to wiping out the racial prejudices in America. Toomer’s work became part of his Gurdjieffian Work as soon as he pledged to follow Gurdjieff’s assertion that in the Work “‘[t]here are neither English nor Russian, Jews nor Christians, but only those with a common aim – to be able to do’” (Nott 64). This sentiment echoes the famous verse in Galatians which states, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (New International Version ,

Gal. 3:28).

Such religious similarities gave Toomer an opportunity to promote Gurdjieff’s thoughts through Christian symbolism. For example, shortly after meeting Gurdjieff,

Toomer writes the following in his short story “Winter on Earth”:

Are men on land, in the air, under the sea, within the earth, on the sea, in deserts,

on mountains, at the poles, on ships, in churches, in prisons, in skyscrapers, in

huts, in houses, in dentist chairs, on operating tables, in rooms, in beds? Men are

in the Universe. (Uncollected 84)

Here, Toomer is undoubtedly appealing to his audience’s recollection of the verse in

Galatians by expanding the popular quote into an all-inclusive reference to the collective human race, a reference in which even the labels of race and religion are eclipsed by locations in the Universe. This is significant, because, while the New Testament and

Gurdjieff seem to be uniting their followers by emphasizing the equality of races, Toomer unites his readers by dismissing race completely. When read as a dismissal of race,

Toomer’s statement that “[m]en are in the Universe” can be interpreted as a rebellion against any religious interpretation of race whatsoever. Like most of Gurdjieff’s followers, Toomer did not actually evangelize the Work in his writings, but he did use what he had learned in the Work to encourage his readers to consider a spiritual life that would cultivate understanding and unity among Americans. For Toomer, this unity could only be established if others followed his own example of sloughing off racial labels.

Jean Toomer was overwhelmed by the racial delineations in America which encouraged his readers to think of Cane as nothing more than a study in what Lothrop

Stoddard terms “the lure of the ‘primitive’” (qtd. in Guterl 163). George Hutchinson notes that “[t]he problem [of labels] was so severe that for a period he stopped writing, convinced that the more he wrote, the more he reinforced the very ideology he was trying to escape” (“Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse” 230). After Cane , the urge to escape became a physical need. As soon as he became popular as one of the New Negro

38 writers of the Harlem Renaissance, he left to become one of Gurdjieff’s students in Paris.

When he returned, Toomer’s Christian symbolism was combined with Gurdjieffian terms and esoteric teachings that challenged the rationale of racist sentiment. The best examples of this coded symbolism are found in the two short stories “Winter on Earth” and “York Beach.”

“Winter on Earth” and the Gurdjieffian Utopia

One of the first short stories to be published after Toomer’s introduction to

Gurdjieff was “Winter on Earth,” which appeared in the Second American Caravan anthology in 1929. The story is a disconnected comparison of several different ways of life connected through snapshots and hurried descriptions of various surroundings that describe the quality of life in each place surveyed. The snapshots which convey the story are broken up into seven sections, which represent the Law of Seven taught by Gurdjieff.

Critic Michael Krasney asserts that the story is an entire “paradigm designed to render objectively the esoteric conception of the Law of Seven […]” (qtd. in Benson and Dillard

118-119). Using this law, Gurdjieff explained to his students that the universe can be described “in terms of vibrations that proceed through all existing kinds and densities of matter” (Wellbeloved 121). These vibrations correspond to the musical concept of the octave, which repeats itself after seven whole notes, and which Gurdjieff claimed was an expression of the Law of Seven in the universe. In Christian mythology, the number seven holds special significance because of its symbolic use in Scripture: in the Old

Testament, God creates the world in seven days, Noah takes seven of every clean animal on the Ark, and Joshua marches around Jericho seven times. The number seems to

39 represent perfection or wholeness, and in the New Testament, seven appears time and time again in Revelation as the number symbolizing the completion of God’s plans: the disciple John writes, “I saw in heaven another great and marvelous sign: seven angels with the seven last plagues – last, because with them God’s wrath is completed” (New

International Version , Revelation 15:1). The completion of God’s wrath results in the fall of evil and the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth. Toomer, aware of this symbolism, uses the seven sections of “Winter on Earth” as seven different portraits of life: the number seven implies that this is a complete catalogue of life as it is for different types of human beings. The seventh division, to someone familiar with biblical Scripture, would also be associated with the foundation of a new type of existence. This new type of existence, for Toomer, was available through the completion of Gurdjieff’s Law of

Seven.

The underlying message within Toomer’s seven divisions relates to Gurdjieff’s original message. There are eight lines in the seventh section, which, according to

Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven and his love of the octave, represent completeness of another sort. Gurdjieff believed that a person who had ascended to know the Absolute had symbolically passed through a full octave of vibrations; the eighth note on a scaled octave would represent the completion of seven previous notes. This eighth note, or step, symbolized complete unity with the Absolute. The seventh section of “Winter on Earth” appears to be a conversation between two invisible persons, possibly the narrator and the reader. The eighth line mandates that the reader should “step back and for years learn to be powerfully alone” (Uncollected 84). This is Toomer’s way of implying that the only way to complete the octave – the only way to unify one’s “I”s with the Absolute – is to

40 take responsibility for oneself and to develop oneself as an individual through rigorous discipline. To be “powerfully alone” is to find power in oneself to climb to a comprehension of Truth. The Christian and Gurdjieffian interfaith symbolism of the number seven in “Winter on Earth” thus reveals that, for Toomer, completion and perfection depend upon the individual’s ability to combine the Christian idea of holy perfection with the Gurdjieffian idea of an inner evolution of self.

The only characters in “Winter on Earth” who exhibit this combination of religious ideals are the inhabitants of the imaginary seafaring nation of White Island. The island’s name reminds the reader of the snow which is falling in other sections of the story. The snow tries to cover the imperfections of America, but there is “too much soot and dirt for pure white snow” (Uncollected 73). If snow is a symbol of the perfection of a nation, then an entirely “white” island is a land of perfect people, while America is rimmed with some sort of grime – something like a spiritual grime -- that cannot be removed or disguised. It is interesting to note that the people of White Island are travelers – Toomer writes that some of the islanders “had, in their day, touched almost every spot on the habitable globe. They had gone to the mainland and shipped as mates and captains. They returned invariably to White Island, having seen the main ports of

America, Europe, Africa and Asia” (Uncollected 77). Though the islanders are loyal to their land, they are curious and open to other races of people; indeed, they often marry those from other lands (Uncollected 77). However, after marriage, foreign spouses always insist upon living on White Island because “having once seen and lived on it even for a short while, one could not wish to permanently dwell elsewhere, so beautiful and

41 free and noble was it and its people” (Uncollected 77). Thus, it is safe to assume that the inhabitants of White Island are not of a single race.

Later in the story, the reader discovers that interracial marriage on White Island is not only a result of extensive global exposure. It is a tradition that stems from direct human contact with God’s angelic beings, who were the original inhabitants of the isle.

These angels had been “commissioned to teach and aid the men of Earth to improve their way of living,” and had one day found “a man-child brought in by the waves and deposited” upon the island’s shore (Uncollected 80). In order to help humans become more unified with one another, the angels demonstrate to the world a human’s ability to be happy when unified with others unlike himself: “[the man-child] and a young Angel

[are] joined in love; and thus [arises] the race of White Islanders who sometimes called themselves Children of the Sun” (Uncollected 80). Toomer’s Christian readers would have noticed this allusion to Judeo-Christian mythology concerning the population of the antediluvian earth. A particular verse in Genesis states that “the sons of God saw that the daughter of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose” (New

International Version , Gen. 6:2). For hundreds of years, theologians have debated over the meaning of the more literal Hebrew text of this verse. A recent publication of the

Hebrew Tanakh more accurately translates this verse as “the divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from among those that pleased them”

(JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh , Gen. 6:2). The phrase “divine beings” can be literally rendered “angels” in English, and many people have argued that this verse is ancient evidence of an angelic race intermarrying with a human one (New International Version ,

Gen. 6:2n). However, the more popular interpretation of this verse claims that “sons of

God” or “divine beings” is merely a reference to Jewish male descendents of Adam and

Eve who “intermingled themselves with the excommunicated race of Cain,” or who slept with women who presumably worshiped idols (Henry 17).

Because the resulting race of people are those who are expunged by God’s wrath in the Great Flood, some modern American churches who prefer the latter interpretation of this verse still use the verse as a tool to teach congregants about the marital incompatibility of two separate races of people. Although the “sons of God” in the Old

Testament are usually punished for abandoning their religion -- and not necessarily their race – the insular nature of the Jewish race has been cited for centuries among some white Anglo-American Christian congregations to illustrate the necessity of keeping a race “pure.” Over time, this teaching has seemed to lose much of its power in the

American Christian Church; however, a quick perusal of doctrinal texts published during

Toomer’s lifetime quickly reveals the pervasiveness of the Christian conviction that races should be distinct. For example, The Baptist March in History , published in 1958, is clearly written for a white readership who would not be offended by off-hand discussion of “the migrants, the Negroes, the summer mission program, [and] the specialized ministries of seven field workers” under the jurisdiction of the Baptist Home Board in the

1950s (Baker 80). Black Americans are constantly mentioned alongside foreigners and within records of foreign missions. Thus, the language used encourages the reader to think of black Americans as outsiders at best, and as African tribesmen, or “primitive” foreigners, at worst. In Toomer’s time, black Americans were expected to attend churches still listed as “colored” in church documents. Blacks were to worship the same

God as the whites, but as the white race was viewed as superior to others, the cultural

43 separation of worship sites based on alleged racial superiority made it difficult for interracial couples to be married in Christian churches (Baker 99). By creating a utopia in which such unions are blessed and even encouraged, Jean Toomer brilliantly turns traditional American Christian ideas of interracial marriage upside-down: in his world, this unity is necessary to foster the establishment of a new society which acknowledges

Gurdjieff’s Law of Seven by becoming complete through self-control. Only through interracial marriages can the angels of God truly carry out their commission to create a complete, self-controlled, interracial people.

In “Winter on Earth,” Toomer is blatantly rebelling against popular Christian sentiment by twisting a Judeo-Christian Scripture to suit his own means. His readers would have also noted that the allusion to the excommunicated race of Cain, or the

“daughters of men,” in “Winter on Earth” is a subtle nod towards Toomer’s most famous novel. Since Toomer often intentionally misspelled the name of his book as “Cain, ” it can be concluded that Toomer is connecting the man-child on White Island and his mixed-race descendants with the black and mixed-race characters in Cane (Letters 170n).

In view of this, in “Winter on Earth” Toomer is forming a link between “race of Cain” and all non-white Americans, and in Toomer’s version of the story, this race no longer drowns in the Deluge – instead, they become the salvation of the world. 11

“York Beach”: Americans Committing Economics

The prospect of a world-saving utopia, though always a subject approached with hope in his later non-fiction writings, is not presented as a viable possibility in most of

Toomer’s Gurdjieffian fiction works. Most of these fiction works center around one

44 main protagonist who is striving to enlighten himself, but who possesses one major flaw which prevents him from being completely awakened or enlightened in Gurdjieff’s Work.

For example, the protagonist in “York Beach,” Nathan, struggles with a calamitous lack of humility. Nathan’s friends, Alma and Bruce, possess the humility which Nathan needs to acquire. Critic Robert Jones thus argues that Nathan’s friends could represent alter egos of Nathan, and that Nathan’s main predicament is not his lack of humility but his inability to consolidate his many selves, or, in Gurdjieffian terms, his “I”s (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 78-79). In light of Jones’s argument, it is clear that Toomer is once again promoting unity over disharmony in both the individual and the community.

At the beginning of the story, Nathan claims that the “main ideas and attitudes of modern psychology [are] as ancient as the main ideas and attitudes of religion, both having existed and having been argued by opposing schools of men, to no result, before the Christian era” (Uncollected 86). If Toomer’s reader believes that Nathan will propose a Christian alternative to the battle between non-Christian psychology and religion, he or she is mistaken, because, by the end of the story, Nathan attributes the perpetuation of the argumentative spirit cited at the beginning of “York Beach” to the façade of morality in the American Christian Church itself: “We have more sex affairs than occur in all Europe, but are puritanical. We don’t give a damn what Christ said, but we have thousands of Christian institutions with their piety […] ‘If the South can stagger to the polls it will vote dry’” (Uncollected 147). Nathan takes issue not with Christianity itself, then, but with the way it is being practiced nationwide. This attitude is one which

Toomer shared with Gurdjieff. When two “rather sentimental” Englishwomen questioned Gurdjieff about his claims that Christ’s message had been distorted by the

Church, Gurdjieff flew into a fury and spat, “‘I hate your Jesus, [the] poor Jewish boy’ – the emphasis being on ‘your’” (Nott 41). Accordingly, as “York Beach” reveals

Nathan’s struggles with unity, it also reveals the idea that the Christian Church is actually distorting the very religion it seems to promote. Far from simply being a diatribe about the problems of the Church, Toomer skillfully structures “York Beach” around the concept of following Christian ideas which were founded “before the Christian era.”

This, also, is an idea from Gurdjieff, who taught that Christianity’s essence was in place long before Christ walked the earth. In Gurdjieff: Making a New World , scholar J.G.

Bennett writes an entire chapter tracing this claim that “there has been, since before the dawn of history, a group of wise men or ‘Masters’ who have watched over the destiny of mankind and have intervened from time to time to avert calamity […] by injecting new modes of thought corresponding to the needs of a changing age” (25). It is not clear whether Gurdjieff thought himself to be one of these Masters, but the lessons he learned from the Masters alive in the East in the late 1800s were passed on to his students. Some of these lessons undoubtedly dealt with the establishment of Christianity as a “Western” religion. Because Gurdjieff thought the evolution of Christianity was contaminated by the West, he told his Christian students, “Your aim is to be Christians in the real sense; but to be able to be a Christian you must be able to do . And at present you cannot. When you are able to do , you will be able to become Christians” (Nott 41). The do ing emphasized here is the unification of self, which Toomer presents in snippets through

Nathan’s conversations in “York Beach.” Once again, these lessons appear as multireligious symbolism disguised within Christian terminology.

When Nathan first arrives at York Beach for his summer vacation, he wishes for three things: to be a part of the social scene in York Beach, to improve himself, and to strike a balance of action between his first two wishes. The wish to improve himself is “a wish for comparative solitude, difficult experience, friction, and much work”

(Uncollected 88). This passage indicates Nathan’s willingness to “do” within the

Gurdjieff Work, and the narrator states that this wish arises “from the part of [Nathan] that [is] Ishmael” (Uncollected 88). The biblical story of Ishmael recounts Ishmael’s birth as evidence of Abraham’s lack of faith in God: although God had told Abraham that he would have a son by his elderly wife, Abraham fathers Ishmael by his wife’s young maidservant in the hopes that Ishmael might carry on Abraham’s family line. God blesses Ishmael, but an angel tells Ishmael’s mother that Ishmael will be “a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone […] and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers” (New International Version , Gen. 16:12). Abraham’s next son, Isaac, is borne by his wife, and Isaac becomes the father of Israel, while Ishmael receives little mention in the rest of the Scriptures. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul refers to the descendants of Ishmael as “slaves” due to his mother’s servant status, and tells Christians that, as the spiritual descendants of Isaac, they are “not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman” (New International Version , Gal. 4:31). Therefore, to the Christian reader who understands Ishmael to have been a violent man, Nathan’s juxtaposition of

Ishmael and “comparative solitude” seems strange, and appears to be Nathan’s wish to eradicate his own violent tendencies through self-reflection. This reading by itself can add emphasis to the theme of individual and communal unity Toomer strives to promote in “York Beach” by teaching the reader that self-control can only be accomplished

47 through the “difficult experience […] and much work” required to achieve Nathan’s first goal of becoming a social fixture. However, since Toomer is ultimately promoting the

Gurdjieffian System in “York Beach,” it is imperative that the reader go one step further and also read Nathan’s wishes as extensions of Gurdjieff’s teachings.

Because Gurdjieff was so heavily influenced by Islamic Sufism, it makes more sense to read Toomer’s mention of Ishmael from a Sufi standpoint. 12 Arabic tradition holds that most Arabic-speaking peoples of the world are descendents of Ishmael; thus, most Arabic Muslims view Ishmael as a patriarch figure (Monk et al. 44). Ishmael is honored beside Moses and Abraham in the Koran as “an Apostle, a Prophet” and one who “enjoined prayer and almsgiving on his people, and was well pleasing to his Lord”

(Rodwell Translation, Mary, 19.1). This picture of Ishmael is quite different from the biblical portrait of Abraham’s first son. Connecting Nathan with Ishmael in this sense – as one who seeks God or the Absolute, as one who seeks to help his community – makes much more sense. The work that Nathan feels compelled to do has little to do with the violence his Christian readers would associate with his mention of Ishmael. In fact,

Toomer undermines the prominent Christian belief that the descendants of Ishmael are prone to violence by implying that only work similar to Ishmael’s can balance out carnal

American desires, the season of “gaiety” and “elegance” of Nathan’s first wish which involves a “skin-game” business – middle-class tourism -- condemned at the end of

“York Beach” (Uncollected 88). Here, Toomer successfully critiques racism by anticipating his readership’s reaction to his mention of Ishmael, and by presenting

Ishmael in an entirely different way. By making Nathan part Ishmael, Toomer makes

Nathan a mixed-race character, at least in the metaphorical sense. Toomer’s main

48 readership would have been surprised at Ishmael’s connection with “comparative solitude” and “much work,” which means Toomer is forcing his readers to think of other races and religions in positive terms; he is denying them the opportunity to pigeonhole his characters (or himself) based on racial assumptions. By redefining the Apostle Paul’s mention of Ishamel’s slave status cited in the New Testament, Toomer also pushes his readers to redefine Christian associations with slavery: the Christian Church in America may view some humans as “slaves,” but that is not the only lens through which to understand non-Christian (or non-white) people groups. In other cultures and in the multireligious teachings of Gurdjieff, Ishamel is honored as the father of the entire

Islamic world -- slaves in other contexts can appear as heroic figures, and through his writing, Toomer encourages America to adopt that thinking.

Race is not an explicit concern in “York Beach.” However, some of Nathan’s comments can be read as subtle race commentary. At the end of the story, Nathan vehemently declares that America’s worst feature is its hypocrisy: “‘Everywhere, hypocrisy. From the bottom to the top, north and south, east and west, everywhere hypocrisy. Business everywhere is a skin-game’” (Uncollected 146). By labeling

America’s business a “skin-game,” Toomer forces the reader to associate the ideas of buying, selling, and trading with human flesh. This is a venomous remark concerning slavery and/or a denunciation of the way in which America is marketing and manipulating skin even in Toomer’s day, which is evidenced by the way Toomer’s publishers pushed to have Toomer advertized as a Negro writer in order to sell more copies of Cane . The “skin-game,” therefore, is what prevents America from unifying itself. Toomer is saying that America is divided, quite literally, by racial labels. This

49 interpretation of this passage is supported by Toomer’s essay “Race Problems in Modern

Society,” published the same year as “York Beach,” in which Toomer cries:

It is well known that whenever two or more races (or nationalities) meet

conditions that are mainly determined by acquisitive interests, race problems arise

as by problems of economic issues. The desire for land, the wish to exploit

natural resources, the wish for cheap labor – wherever these motives have

dominated a situation involving different races […] race problems also have

sprung up. (Uncollected 159)

The conceptual similarities of Nathan’s concern about the “skin-game” and Toomer’s denunciation of “acquisitive interests” – the bottom lines of American businesses – can only result in the reductive racial caste system more fully described in Cane . By the time

Toomer had written “York Beach,” he was most likely familiar with the Sufi poet Rumi, who was beloved by Gurdjieff. 13 In the poem “Proper Vocation,” Rumi calls God’s love a “wine” for believers, and, like Toomer, he scorns the meanness of a life focused upon business:

If [God] had wanted us to work, after all,

He would not have created this wine;

with a skin-full of this, Sir,

would you rush out to commit economics? (Rumi 30)

It is not certain which translation of Rumi Toomer may have read; yet, the similarities in this translation of Rumi’s passage and Toomer’s “skin-game” passage are striking.

Rumi’s “skin-full” of ascetic wine connotes both a wine skin and an entire human, or

“skin,” full of God’s love. Like Toomer, Rumi affirms that someone truly concerned

50 with Divinity will not “rush out to commit economics” – or will not focus on things so criminally trivial as money, since such a focus leads to personal downfall or even, as

Toomer emphasizes, the oppression of an entire group of people.

Just as he employs coded multireligious symbolism in Cane to challenge and destabilize America’s religious justifications for racism, Toomer continues to utilize such symbolism after he becomes a member of G. I. Gurdjieff’s Work. Because Gurdjieff’s

System hinges on the bases of several religious teachings, Toomer can easily conceal multireligious allusions within his Gurdjieffian references. As in Cane , these allusions, when combined with Christian terminology and race commentary, offer Toomer’s culturally-Christian readership an alternative to religious racism. If Christian terms and figures can be easily interchanged with non-Christian allusions – if Ishmael can simultaneously be a slave and a hero – then, according to Toomer, the singular perspective of Christian racism must be reexamined, and prejudiced Americans must find support for racism in something other than religion.

IV. TOOMER’S INTERFAITH SYMBOLISM IN POETRY: EMBRACING

DIVERSITY BY DESTABILIZING THE WHITE-WASHED DEITY

Toomer and Poetic Religious Reimaging

Even critics who provide commentary of Jean Toomer’s later, less popular works tend to focus solely on Toomer’s prose pieces. Toomer scholar Robert Jones, who provides readers with a refreshing exception to the canon of prose-centered Toomer criticism, realizes the danger in overlooking Toomer’s verse: “there has been no attempt to assemble a standard edition of Toomer’s poetical works […] Yet it is, perhaps, through the lens of his poetry that we are provided with the most revealing commentaries on

Toomer as artist and writer” (“Jean Toomer as Poet” 253). To ignore the import of

Toomer’s poetry is to ignore both Toomer himself and a form of literature which was viewed in the 1920s as a powerful medium for social change. In a 1923 letter to The

Poetry Society of South Carolina, Toomer insists that the poetry of the South is evolving into “[a] literature national in all else, and the best of it, universal” (Letters 132). Toomer viewed this flourishing universal literature as proof that his dream of an “American” race would soon be realized. This “American” race, an interracial people devoid of ethnic labels and racial castes, would join Toomer in stating “‘I am neither white nor black but simply an American”’ (Uncollected 214n). Toomer hoped that this indifference would eventually spread to international ports, erasing even the “American” label from

American citizens who would pledge, “I am of no particular race, I am of the human race,

52 a [human] at large in the human world, preparing a new race” (Uncollected 214). This new race would establish itself primarily through a restructuring of religious racism.

Though he was intensely involved in the Gurdjieff Work at the time it was written, the essay “A New Force for Cooperation” (1934) urges readers to consider adopting

Gurdjieffian philosophies, but pushes Toomer’s audience to ultimately embrace a “world- religion, complete enough to include all peoples, true enough to strike deep root-energies, sufficiently empowered to unify each individual in himself” (Uncollected 265). Gurdjieff himself did not promote his own religion with such universal modifiers, since Gurdjieff believed that an over-abundance of followers in the Work would disrupt the flow of energy in the world. 14 Thus, through “A New Force for Cooperation” (1934), Toomer was attempting to stage a religion even more inclusive than the faith system presented in the multireligious Gurdjieff Work. It is this new religion – practiced faithfully by the

“American” race – that Toomer promotes throughout his works, especially in his poetic writings. The narrator of the poem “Brown River, Smile” (1932), which later became the draft of Toomer’s epic poem “The Blue Meridian” (1936), begins his loving speech about the beauty of a multicultural nation by proclaiming “It is a new America,/ To be spiritualized by each new American,” in which all Americans find themselves “waiting for a new God” who will unite the nation through a collective race and religion

(Uncollected 255). Toomer undoubtedly saw elements of this “American” race ideal and the birth of “a new God” cited in the “universal” popular literature of his time and, like other African American poets, Toomer used his verse to challenge racial categories by promoting racial unity.

This unity is a theme throughout much Harlem Renaissance poetry, and is consistently present in the works of poets like James Weldon Johnson, who, like Walt

Whitman, admired “an approach to multiple American voices, languages, and modes of singing” (Sanders 103). During a trip to Soviet Central Asia, Langston Hughes penned the controversial poem “Goodbye Christ” (1932), in which the speaker claims that Jesus has been used as an advertisement for the support of racial oppression. As a result, the poet’s speaker declares that communism and egalitarianism will replace the prevalence of flawed American Christianity. Critics and readers alike labeled this poem “ultra-radical,” and, especially during the years of World War II, accused Hughes of spreading communist sentiment (Rampersad 65). Though the reaction to Hughes’s poem was predictable given the war-torn era in which it was published, it is interesting to note that other Harlem Renaissance poets received comparable criticism for simply suggesting that

American Christians rethink the relationship of race and religion. Countée Cullen’s poem “Heritage” (1925) features a black speaker who refashions a “white” image of

Christ into an African Christ with whom he feels communion. Cullen biographer

Lorenzo Thomas recounts the reaction of a bewildered and offended American readership:

That the poem’s proposed image of a Jesus who looked like a black man – and,

therefore, would truly understand what African Americans suffered – shocked

readers. The extent to which the image of a Black Jesus disturbed white America

became a measure of how thoroughly white supremacist ideas dominated our

culture. (78)

Though white Christians had already reconstructed the image of a Jewish Christ into an

Anglo-Saxon Savior in the Middle Ages, white Americans could not accept the similar

54 reimaging presented by Cullen, who wrenchingly prays, “Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,/

Daring even to give You/ Dark despairing features” (Cullen 107). 15 White Americans were permitted to translate and interpret Christian Scriptures to fit their own images, but only they were allowed to tamper with those images. By creating a white parallel in

Christ, the American Christian Church effectively structured a religion-based hierarchy in which whites could demand service from other races just because other races and/or their religions did not fit the image paradigm of Western Christianity. Critic Mark Whalan confirms that the “‘whitening’ of Jesus in Western representation was linked to an emergent discourse of racial difference and hierarchy, the result of which was the solidification of a politics of white supremacy” (“Jean Toomer, Technology, and Race”

469). In his novel Clotel , William Wells Brown also notes how the “whitening” of religious discourse engendered not only a sense of entitlement in the antebellum South, but also the idea that blacks were obliged to give service to whites because the whites had placed blacks in a position to serve the reimaged white God. In a sermon to slaves, a plantation pastor exhorts the slaves to be grateful for this position:

Your fathers were poor ignorant and barbarous creatures in Africa, and the whites

fitted out ships at great trouble and expense and brought you from that benighted

land to Christian America, where you can sit under your own vine and fig tree […]

Oh, my dear black brothers and sisters, you are indeed a fortunate and a blessed

people. (Brown 113)

This passage demonstrates that some white Americans found it possible to reimage not only religion but history: the language in the passage above morphs the slave trade of the

1700s into an evangelical mission trip, of sorts, in which whites “at great trouble and expense” snatch Africans in order to proselytize instead of to enslave.

Though the celebration of black culture and art was the main focus of the Harlem

Renaissance, the consequential restructuring of white religious images which accompanied the Renaissance’s celebration of black art and culture became destabilizing reminders for white Americans that, if Christ could be painted white, He could just as easily be painted any other color, and it was much harder to justify racism.16 In his book

American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon , religion professor

Stephen Prothero notes the prevalence of such religious reimaging in both black slave culture and the culture of the Harlem Renaissance:

[Black Christians] merge [the] New Testament Jesus with the Old Testament

Moses, creating one Black Moses who cares about this world as much as the next,

who delivers them from oppression as well as sin. Then, as if to ensure that this

Redeemer truly lives, they reincarnate him, again and again, in black women and

men as diverse as Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, and the Reverend Martin

Luther King, Jr. (227)

Hence, the reimaging of Christ within the black community was usually associated with historical figures who fought against racial abuse. This association created a powerful connotation between the reimaging of Christ and black freedom and equality; thus, when writers like Jean Toomer reconstruct the traditional image of a white Christ, the racial and the religious are seamlessly blended together. Because Toomer’s dream of an

“American” race is based upon a universal acceptance of all races via a universal religion,

Toomer’s reconstruction of “white” Christianity is not only a statement against American

Christian racism, but also a reference to his hopes for a unified, globalized humanity.

Critic Willliam Ramsey notes Toomer’s discontent with even black Christian theology in

America because of its failure to promote this globalized ideal:

Christianity, [Toomer] believed, was dead and calcified, a victim of modern

civilization’s dedication to mechanical assumptions and repression of vital forces.

In his opinion not even the South’s black church was free of this failure, for it had

borrowed from white theology and therefore conspired in chaining its people. (82)

Thus, Toomer’s reimaging of Christianity was not intended to simply revitalize and reclaim the Christian religion for black Americans, but to replace Christianity with symbols of a multicultural, racially-inclusive universal religion.

Jean Toomer destabilizes the “white God” image in several of his poems, repeatedly dropping multireligous symbolism. This symbolism functions as a tool to complicate white America’s interpretation of Christianity, and to encourage his readers to see racial and religious labels as mutable social steoreotypes. Critic Mary Zamberlin eloquently argues that Toomer’s works “signif[y] a deliberate interior ‘ spiritually integrated’ reception and distillation of variant particles in flux” (129). In other words, the fusion of symbols in Toomer’s writings crystallize the idea of a whole man by looking at him from a distance, by examining the “variant particles” of race and religion that allow a reader to see the unity in humankind. It was not enough for Toomer to simply replace the “white God” image with another racial image. Toomer’s poetry replaces the foundations of a white Christian religion with a “universal” Christ. Instead of racializing the image of God and establishing a “black” religion through black Christ

57 imagery, Toomer insists upon establishing an “American” religion that is as diverse as the heritages reflected in his proposed “American” race.

It is only in his verse that Toomer is willing to blatantly question the basic motivations of Christian evangelism, and to suggest a radical, more cosmopolitan view of faith than that presented by contemporary American thought. Christian imagery and terminology are still present in Toomer’s poetry, and the interfaith symbolism in

Toomer’s verse is not nearly as cryptic as it sometimes is in his prose.

Criticizing the Christian Army

One of Toomer’s earliest published poems, “Gum” (1923), stresses that the source of American hypocrisy stems from America’s obsession with economic gain. The poem does not employ multireligious symbolism, per se, but the themes in this poem appear repeatedly in poems laced with interfaith references; therefore, “Gum” serves as a foundation and reference point for the poems which will be discussed in this chapter.

Though race and other religions are not specifically mentioned in the poem, the last stanza ends with a disturbing picture directly related to Christian colonialism and oppression:

Upon a fountain in the square

Where sparrows get their water,

Upon the tambourines and drum

Of the Salvation Army jawing,

Hallelujah!

The crowd

jaws Jesus

jawing gum. (Uncollected 7)

The gum described in the last lines here is earlier mentioned as the second part of a dual advertising system erected in the city. The first advertisement declares Jesus to be “The

Light of the World” and the second, right under it, screams that “Wrigleys […] does you good” (Uncollected 7). The materialistic combination of salvation and unnecessary commercial gain are exemplified fully in the vision of Salvation Army members and their audience consuming a product made with an African colonial resource, gum arabic, while simultaneously praising God. Historian James Webb documents the abuse experienced by native Africans in Senegal when France enslaved local people to work on African gum plantations: “the weeks at the gum groves were often lean ones, and the slaves ate gum off the trees as they harvested” (154). Thus, the reference to gum in this poem is a reminder of international African slavery. This imagery presents the Salvation Army as a group of colonialist entrepreneurs, reminiscent of British and American Salvation Army brigades which were sent to European colonies overseas to evangelize. Associations inspired by the name “Salvation Army” immediately call to mind the militaristic dress of the organization’s members, a dress which “works well for The Salvation Army because it provides a common vernacular and an organizational ethos necessary to maintain a strong sense of unity in a religious organization that commonly crosses the boundaries of class, race, culture, and nation” (Hazzard 137). Overseas, this unified front became yet another Western military symbol – the clothing of the Salvation Army was redolent of the

European occupation already present in colonized areas, and equated Christianity and salvation with representations of war oppression. Because the Army in America stressed

59 free market capitalism and “individual effort to overcome the contingencies of life rather than [reform] of the social and economic systems,” the poor in the United States were pushed by the Army to embrace capitalism as an answer to poverty even though they had been abused by it (Hazzard 125). Little consideration was given to those who were already exploited by “white” economics.

Even though race and non-Christian religion are not expressly cited in “Gum,” the presence of colonial indicators which are synonymous with oppression and

Christianization suggest that the poem speaks to racial abuse which occurs via religious and economic justifications. Every person mentioned in this poem “jaws Jesus/ jawing gum,” or flippantly talks about religion while using the occasion to enjoy the gum, a frivolous result of exploitation. In the rest of Toomer’s poetry, the motif of exploitation becomes a constant reminder to society of the reason religious oppression should not be tolerated. Toomer’s interfaith symbolism in other poems creates alternatives for those who do not buy into the message of the Salvation Army by substituting universal faith values which do not endorse the justification of abuse. His poetry also serves as a warning to those who would continue to embrace religious ideas which are used to cultivate disharmony among races and deny the chance to found an “American” race.

The Poetry of Cane : A Portrait of Colonial Faith

In the poetry in Cane , Toomer continues his criticism of religious economists. As in “Gum,” the poetry within Cane offers succinct glimpses of this damage by exposing religious justifications for human abuse. However, the poetry in Cane begins to hint at solutions to resolving the issue of abuse by incorporating scattered interfaith images in

60 certain verses. These verses work in conjunction with the interfaith symbolism in Cane ’s short stories to create an overarching plea for an acknowledgement of common humanity which Toomer believed would facilitate the true birth of the “American” race.

Robert Jones convincingly claims that the book Cane contains five main story arcs and that these arcs, when ordered together in a circular design, are actually a literary illustration of the ancient mandalic traditions found in Hinduism and Buddhism. Each mandala is a stylized “circular design containing or contained by a figure of five points of emphasis, each representing the chief objects of psychic interest for the maker” (Jean

Toomer and the Prison-House 51). Accordingly, each person who creates a mandala will search for clues within its unique patterns which will help the maker find unity within the self. The mandala is thus an abstract map or chart of an individual’s spiritual progress towards enlightenment. The famous psychologist Carl Jung was known to be fond of mandala creation, and described the function of the mandala as a channel through which the inner self can be “brought back to an inner sacred domain, which is the source and goal of the soul and which contains the unity of life and consciousness” (qtd. in Jean

Toomer and the Prison-House 51). If Cane is truly a literary mandala image, then its contents chart the progress of the black American soul as it strives for full consciousness within the United States. Because of the mandala’s connections with inner unity, it is safe to conclude that Cane ’s mandalic structure indicates that, for Toomer, the inner unity of America as a nation is dependent upon a full and equal integration of all races in

America.

According to Jones, the poetry in Cane is an integral part of the book’s mandalic design, and the poems “Nullo,” “Conversion,” and “Portrait in Georgia” (1923) are

“celebrations of ancestral consciousness” within the mandalic cycle (“Jean Toomer as

Poet” 258). 17 Because these three poems form a chronological Imagist portrait of the changes wrought on the world through the introduction of Christianity, they can be analyzed as a trilogy of poems which form a vision of a point on Toomer’s literary mandala. 18 Since this point is related to “ancestral consciousness,” this point is connected to the primal or original “inner sacred domain” of which Jung speaks; therefore, this “ancestral consciousness” has been lost and is something to which the

American soul must be “brought back.” “Nullo,” “Conversion,” and “Portrait in Georgia” not only celebrate this consciousness as something to be desired, but also to document the corruption of this original, unified self.

“Nullo” describes a peaceful, beautiful world in which actions are not quite what they seem – cause and effect in this poem amount to nothing, or “Nullo.” The poem begins with “A spray of pine needles,/ Dipped in western horizon gold” (Cane 18).

These needles fall onto the path below them but, even though they appear to be aflame with “horizon gold,” “Rabbits [know] not of their falling,/ Nor [does] the forest catch aflame” (Cane 18). The Hindu concept of maya , which asserts that the world is really an illusion, is apparent in the false flame of the pine needles. Their presence in the forest, though seemingly destructive, is ultimately harmless because their power is not substantial.19 The forest’s refusal to react to the needles’ fall implies a serene space in which destructive action, or the appearance of destructive action, is of little consequence.

In this poem, Toomer paints a portrait of a placid world which is ideally understood by its inhabitants: the world is nothing about which to concern oneself – as long as the inhabitants allow nature to take its course, the world is as it should be. 20

Since “Nullo” is the first of the three poems in the trilogy related to ancestral consciousness, “Nullo” represents Toomer’s vision of the original state of the world, the state to which humans must return if they want to find peace. The second poem in the

Imagist trilogy, “Conversion,” introduces Christian symbolism which indicates a destruction of the peaceful, original state of humankind.

Like “Gum,” “Conversion” focuses upon the economic exploitation of a people.

Once again, the reader is presented with a group of proselytizing whites who are more concerned with economic gain than with religious discipleship. The poem’s opening line is an appeal to an unnamed African deity, the “African Guardian of Souls,” to whom the speaker, in halting, choked language, describes the state of an African tribe after a

Spanish invasion:

Drunk with rum,

Feasting on a strange cassava,

Yielding to new words and a weak palabra

Of a white-faced sardonic god –

Grins, cries

Amen,

Shouts hosanna. (Cane 26) 21

The tone of the poem connotes the bewilderment of the speaker – this “white-faced sardonic god” is supposedly a benevolent, loving diety, yet he is proclaimed by

Europeans who would ply Africans with alcohol as a bribe to encourage African natives to participate in the capture of fellow natives. The “white-faced sardonic god” is undoubtedly an image of a white Christ presented to Africans during African colonization.

In emphasizing the color of the “sardonic god” in this poem, Toomer calls into question the European tendency to “white-wash” religion, or to make biblical personas match white ideals by reimaging ethnically Jewish figures as Anglo-Saxon ones. It is significant that, though the Spaniards are comfortable white-washing an image of Christ, they do not present an image of a black Christ to colonized Africans. The Spaniards therefore squelch “a more spontaneous and free African spiritual impulse,” and the poem as a whole implies “the black church’s loss of earlier, vital spiritual roots” which would have helped preserve a black spirituality in America that was independent of “white” religious imaging (Ramsey 83). The white Spanish image of a “sardonic god” merely enforced the idea that white colonizers should be revered due to their theological (and racial) monopoly on Truth, and this idea followed African slaves into the New World.

Consequently, the white image of the “sardonic god” is a powerful symbol of the racial caste system Toomer wanted to replace with his egalitarian “American” race.

The line “[y]ielding to new words and a weak palabra,” which extends farther on the page than the other lines in “Conversion,” is the visual center of the poem for the reader. The word “palabra” dangles precipitously on the page, aberrant from the lines above and below it: its physical position makes it the most visually prominent word in the poem. 22 This is important, because palabra in Spanish literally translates to “word” in

English – Toomer uses this word to indicate to American Christian readers the dire result of economically-motivated evangelism. Almost all young Sunday School attendees learn the verse John 1:1 at an early age, since it best summarizes the Christian view of the deity of Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (New International Version , John 1:1). The “Word” in this verse is a poor

64 translation of the Greek term λόγος (“logos”), which is more accurately translated as “the

Divine Expression, ” or a communication of the word “Christ” which includes all meaning and thought behind the idea of the Supreme Deity ( λόγος , def. 3056). One of

Gurdjieff’s students, Beryl Pogson, taught a similar definition of λόγος in her American classes: “The Greek word logos means more than ‘word.’ It means the fullest expression of a creative idea in outer manifestation” (Pogson 18). Consequently, the term λόγος has more in common with the Taoist definition of the Tao: it is an expression which struggles to communicate the all-encompassing power and universal essence implied within the term. This is why Taoists assert that “The Tao that can be talked about is not the true

Tao” (Tao Te Ching, ch. 1). The Divinity which John is trying to describe in John 1:1 is something which he struggles to name – the nature of God cannot be encapsulated within a word, and to literally translate λόγος as “Word” in English divests the term of its force.

This is the same in Spanish: even with the advancement of Greek language studies in

Europe, the term λόγος is still translated as palabra or, in some versions of the Santa

Biblia, as verbo , which means “word” or “verb” (Reina-Valera , San Juan 1:1). In

“Conversion,” Toomer is referencing this terrible translation; the “weak palabra” is a

Christ not fully communicated, a Christ somehow marred or intentionally manipulated by cultural misinterpretation. When this manipulation is combined with the multireligious implications of “Nullo,” it is clear that “Conversion” represents the loss of theological understanding needed to prevent the racial abuse apparent in the poem. In the world of

“Nullo,” everything functions smoothly, but once humans begin to use the Divine

Essence for their own personal gain, the world begins to fall apart. The shout “hosanna”

65 is directed toward a redefined “white” image instead of a Divine Expression which would, presumably, maintain the idyll of “Nullo.”

The poem “Portrait in Georgia” completes the trilogy of Imagist poetry in Cane , and its physical placement in Cane – the poem stands directly opposite to “Conversion” -- illustrates the immediate consequence of allowing a Christian misinterpretation of Christ, or a “white-washing” of the Divine Image. 23 “Portrait in Georgia” is a masterful collection of alarming metaphors which succinctly describe the body of a woman in the

American South:

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. (Cane 27)

The burning lynch imagery in the poem is sickening. Every part of the body is described as an element of a lynching fire. Wolfgang Karrer argues that the “[b]reath – the last sweet scent of cane” towards the end of the piece is a subtle parallel to the demoralizing alcohol of the Spanish in “Conversion”: “[s]yrup, sweetness, and rum stand for the product of cane” and the “last sweet scent of cane” in “Portrait in Georgia” is a trace of alcohol – or evidence of white oppression and destruction – apparent on the unidentified woman’s breath (Karrer 137). This would mean that the woman’s life force, her very breath, is tainted with the scent of segregation and racial abuse.

It is significant that the race of the woman in this portrait is never made clear – her body is “white as […] ash,” but not specifically white or black. The ambiguity of race presented in the poem indicates Toomer’s belief that all races in the South are irreparably damaged by racist violence, and that all bodies, regardless of race, have the potential to be “white as the ash/ of black flesh after flame.” This new world – a world in which bodies contain “fagots” in their eyes – is indicative of the world changed by the white presentation of Christ in “Conversion.” In stark contrast to “Nullo,” the fire imagery in “Portrait in Georgia” is not part of the natural order of things. Instead, it is harmful enough to turn the beautiful assets of a woman, her hair, eyes, and lips, into instruments of pain. The interfaith symbolism of “Nullo” and “Conversion” is altogether lost in “Portrait in Georgia,” which may signify a world where violence supersedes any peaceful notions of non-violent religion.

Martha Nadell writes that this poem is Toomer’s own recognition that “his desire for an ahistorical, free sense of the individual has a powerful enemy: the historical and present violence of the South” (Nadell 152). The history of this enemy, white racism, is evident within the religious usurpation of Africans in “Conversion,” and its resulting influence on black culture has spawned not only an opposition to a universal religion, but,

Toomer believed, an opposition to an interracial “American” race. Thus, the poems

“Nullo,” “Conversion,” and “Portrait in Georgia” also document an abstract American resistance to the establishment of Toomer’s utopian dream. It is apparent from his later writings that Toomer believed this opposition could eventually be overcome, but in the era in which Toomer authored Cane , the “Portrait” of a woman in Georgia represented a portrait of racial affairs which prevented interracial or interreligious cohesion. 24 In

“Portrait in Georgia,” humankind is poised to self-destruct because it has divided itself into colors; to Toomer’s horror, it has reduced itself to nothing more than a symbol of violence, devoid of a universal faith that would persuade others to join Toomer’s

“American” race.

PostScript

“The Blue Meridian,” mentioned earlier in this paper, presents the most complete portrayal of Toomer’s dreams for a universal religion and race. Written throughout a span of several decades and published posthumously in the 1970s, the poem is often praised as one of Toomer’s finest works. The goal of the poem is to illustrate a future

America pregnant with an inclusive, religious acceptance of all humankind. The poem’s speaker declares the awakening of mankind, and extrapolates what it means to seek a

Divine Being in a fully spiritualized nation:

The old gods, led by an inverted Christ,

A shaved Moses, a blanched Lemur,

And a moulting Thunderbird,

Withdrew into the distance and died, […]

We are waiting for a new God,

For a revelation in our day,

For growth towards a faceless Deity. (Uncollected 288).

For Toomer, the “old gods” must be forgotten – Christ has been “inverted” by white

Christians, or reimaged into a shadow of the λόγος ; Moses has been “shaved,” which was considered a great shame and a symbol of impotence in ancient Israel. The “Lemur” refers to a malevolent spirit of the dead found in ancient Roman houses – to be a

“blanched Lemur” is to be a powerless spirit, a faded ghost, and the “moulting

Thunderbird” is the death of Native American traditions after the introduction of the new

“American” race. To seek God in Toomer’s idealized nation, one must shed narrow views of religion in order to fully embrace the “faceless Deity” that the nation itself will become. Because this Deity is “faceless,” the new God cannot fall prey to reimaging, and every human race in America will be able to worship without having to wrestle with questions of racial identity.

While the hope for an unprejudiced nation is commendable, it is easy to see why some of Toomer’s biographers and literary critics have felt the need to gently remind their readers of the naïveté involved in the proposal of such a utopia. Toomer’s proposal to replace religion with a universal longing for a “faceless Deity” is rife with potential problems: though Toomer tweaked Gurdjieff’s ideas and even merged them with Quaker theology at points in his life, Toomer was always trying to substitute one religious system with another. The “faceless Deity” which Toomer pursued was still connected with organized, established religions which, despite the occasional, nebulous convergence of religions, included exclusive religious claims. To further complicate matters, Robert B.

Jones notes that Toomer’s “transcendental metaphysics” still “[invite] the intolerable imperfections of the existing world as a precondition for continuing to maintain intact the world of perfection in the intellect or spirit” (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 134).

The perfected Self which Toomer sought to realize could only survive alongside imperfect Selves, which would completely prevent the possibility of a universal utopia based on individual perfection. Consequently, any religious or philosophic proposal for global unity “which begins with the individual ego as its defining principle is doomed to

70 fail” (Jean Toomer and the Prison-House 135). Perhaps it was an inner acknowledgement of this conundrum that prompted a dream in which Toomer says he argues with Gurdjieff: “‘I [felt] a burst of angry power and [tried] to get G. into a position so that I [could] give him a decisive sock on the jaw’” (qtd. in Kerman and Eldridge 308).

From his recording of this dream and of other mental arguments staged with and against the great Armenian mystic, it is clear that Toomer wrestled with some of the impossible implications of a religion which, though inclusive of several faiths, still excluded those not involved in the Gurdjieff Work.

The issue of exclusivity also appears within Toomer’s racial discourse. The erasure of racial labels is often just as dangerous as racial stereotyping, and “a discourse that allows no room for a ‘biracial’ text (except by defining it as ‘black’) is part of the same discoursive system that denies the identity of the person who defines himself or herself as both black and white” (“Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse” 228).

In other words, a suppression of racial identity can still insinuate that racial identity, particularly blackness, is something shameful, something to be dismissed. A rejection of race is still a form of racial performativity, a performativity which results in a communal urge to appear raceless, or at least mixed-race. Lewis Gordon cites specific instances of this urge in modern culture, and wisely proclaims that “the look of mixed race […] is not to be taken for being mixed in the sense of parentage or heredity, but in the sense of playing mixture – literally, wearing it” (60). Of course, the act of performing race also brings up questions of “authenticity,” and whether one’s race (or apparent racelessness) can be counted as a “True” identity. Toomer’s own struggle with such questions is apparent in his life-long quest to both obliterate racial contexts and simultaneously cling

71 to a specific “American” race, a race which, even if it could become a universal ethnicity, could never conceivably unite its people simply through the virtue of racial mixedness.

Despite the dubious feasibility of his goals, Toomer doggedly remained faithful to what he viewed as the fight for global perfection. The glaring problems with both proposed racelessness and an all-inclusive religion prevented Toomer from formulating any real steps for implementing his dreams. However, Toomer’s idealism, though seemingly naïve and thoroughly impractical, is incontrovertibly refreshing. One cannot help but echo Toomer’s penultimate cry at the end of the “Blue Meridian,” a mandate which calls for a divine new conscience in America which cannot be muddled by justifications for racism. The verse ends in a resounding, confident shout: “The Big

Light,/ Let the Big Light in!” (Uncollected 313).

NOTES

1Although Liveright was famous for supporting and publishing black authors during the Harlem Renaissance, he was also famous for publishing scandalous material simply for its public shock value. In person, Liveright could be condescending toward the black authors he agreed to publish, as is evidenced by a letter addressed to Countée Cullen, in which Liveright told the poet, “‘Your gift is certainly so much above the average of our minor poets that I want to encourage you all I can’” (qtd. in Harlem Renaissance in Black and White 370). Liveright’s patronizing attitude towards one of the greatest poets of the Harlem Renaissance leads me to believe that Liveright saw in black authorship publicity for his publishing company, and not necessarily a chance to promote racial equality.

2America’s burgeoning awareness of the world in the early 1900s could have influenced Toomer’s decision to use interfaith symbolism as a reading incentive for an audience hungry for information about “mysterious” foreign lands and beliefs. The advent of a relatively affordable motor car and the construction of huge luxury ships like the Titanic encouraged travel and curiosity about non-Western ideas. For example, the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt sparked a flurry of demands for texts about ancient cults and Egyptian travel tips. This global fever found its way into the Harlem Renaissance; even famous black artists like Aaron Douglas began to “[embrace] elements of African culture through the use of Egyptian art in [their] work” (Kirschke 263). However, it should be noted that within the Harlem Renaissance, the revival of interest in Africa was more closely associated with an interest in Africa as a motherland, not as a purely exotic foreign continent.

3In this way, Toomer continues the work of earlier African American authors who challenged faith-based justifications for racism. While nineteenth-century writers may not have used interfaith symbolism in their critique of the American Christian church, they did point out the inconsistencies apparent in the racial abuse supported by a church body that purportedly practiced Christ’s admonitions that Christians must love and serve others. The novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), written by the escaped slave William Wells Brown, documents several scenes in which plantation owners exhort their slaves to tolerate abuse based on biblical teachings. The Christian abolitionist Frances E. W. Harper also reveals the disparity between religious racism and Christian doctrine in Iola Leroy (1892), and former slave Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), mentions the frequency of the sexual exploitation of slaves by white Christians who would consider the rape of a white person to be grounds for punitive action.

4Most critics read the physical descriptions of the characters of Carma and Bane as proof the characters’ literal humanity. For example, critic Rafael Cancel summarizes “Carma” as the tale of a woman whose “quarrel and [feigning] to shoot herself in the forest is a smart strategy on [Carma’s] part to get rid of her husband” (27). Literal readings such as this lead critics to evaluate both Carma’s and Bane’s actions as statements to be analyzed through the lens of morality. (Scruggs and VanDemarr write that Carma is “a femme fatale, a bad woman, a hot-blooded ‘mulatta’” (146).) However, if Carma is the embodiment of the concept of karma , her actions cannot be viewed as moral or immoral – she is anthropomorphic, a symbol of cause and effect in her town. Because of this, I do not read “Carma” as a power struggle between sexes, or as a commentary on morality or sexual freedom.

5For an in-depth look at the Moses theme and other biblical references appropriated into black culture during American slavery, see James M. Shopshire’s essay “The Bible as Informant and Reflector in Social-Structural Relationships of African Americans,” published in the anthology African Americans and the Bible .

6 It is significant that the small fragment of modern Zoroastrians who live in Iran and primarily worship Ahura Mazda are “poor and oppressed” people (Eliade and Couliano 254). The god Ahura Mazda is, to these Zoroastrians, a god of order over the poverty and oppression which they experience.

7Though the particular source I reference here – an article from a 1905 publication of the Journal of the Royal African Society – is rather archaic, this older source more accurately portrays the popular barbarian connotations associated with a juju priest during Toomer’s lifetime. For a more modern discussion of the origin and history of juju/greegree practices among the Yoruba people of West Africa, please see Diana Mafe’s excellent article “From Ògún to Othello: (Re)Acquainting Yoruba Myth and Shakespeare’s Moor” (2004). It should be noted that the terms “juju” and “greegree” are sometimes interchangeable, and that juju (or fetish) practices still survive around the world, most notably in Western Africa and in Caribbean and American Voodoo.

8Some critics, like Monica Michlin, argue that Paul is primarily a story about passing, and that Paul’s yearning to embrace his mixed-race heritage is a “desire to pull a blanket of weak, wishful thinking over [a] moment of truth” which “[reflects] Toomer’s own contradictions and denials” (Michlin 99). The interfaith enlightenment in “Bona and Paul” is, however, presented to the reader as a positive experience which profoundly changes the way Paul sees his place in the world. Paul rises above the racial stereotyping of his peers at the dance – he does not ignore race or pretend that his own race is inconsequential, nor does he continue to pass after his enlightenment. He simply realizes that he, as a human being, is more than the sum of his physical parts.

9This idea is discussed in detail in Ch. IV.

10 Instead of using the word “soul” to explain this principle in his native tongue, Gurdjieff would refer to a developed human being as a being who possessed a “something.” It is this “something” that allows a human to gain immortality in the Work.

11Wendy Naava Smolash notes the significance of Cain symbolism in North America, chronicling the prevalence of the idea that the mark given to Cain in the Bible was dark skin: “As punishment for Abel’s murder, God [marked] the skin of Cain’s forehead, a mark that protects Cain from harm even as it exiles him” (Smolash 747). Smolash goes on to explain how this mark somehow evolved into a mark which covered the entire body, and how black slaves in North America were often associated with this mark in order to excuse a prejudiced racialization of black bodies from a religious standpoint.

12From a traditional African American standpoint, the story of Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, is an assurance of God’s protection over slaves instead of an account of Abraham’s disobedience to God and Ishmael’s subsequent violence: “Hagar the slave woman and her son become representative of African American slave women and their descendants, and the divine promises to and rescue of Hagar become symbols of God’s concern for the survival of African American women and their children” (“Hagar” 88). Though this viewpoint differs significantly from the Koranic version of Ishmael’s story, it also paints Ishmael in a more sympathetic light than the Old Testament version of his tale. In “York Beach,” Nathan’s association with Ishmael thus further confirms the racial underpinnings of this story, and it begs the reader to view Ishmael (and his “race,” whether that race is viewed as Arabic or African) as a symbol of common humanity instead of a symbol of slavery.

13 Several Gurdjieff biographers, such as J.G. Bennett, have recorded Gurdjieff’s love and respect for the Sufi dervish Rumi. Given Toomer’s penchant for reading Eastern philosophy and his affinity for Gurdjieff’s Rumi-influenced teachings, it is not a stretch to assume that Toomer was quite familiar with Rumi’s mystic poetry. More information concerning Sufi influences on G.I. Gurdjieff can be found in the book The Teachers of Gurdjieff by Rafael Lefort.

14Previously discussed in Ch. III.

15Harlem Renaissance poets who wrote of a black Christ were building upon a historical tradition of reimaging white Christianity through black literature. These poets challenged Christian rationalization of slavery and racism by using parts of the Christian narrative, especially the story of Moses leading the Israelite slaves to freedom, as parallels for the black American experience and proof that God’s love extends to all races and social castes. See, for example, Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa” (1768), in which Wheatley states, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/ May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train” (Wheatley 13). See also Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “An Ante- Bellum Sermon” (1895), in which a preacher insists that Moses will return to set black slaves at liberty (Dunbar 13-15). The prominent black feminist and abolitionist Frances E.W. Harper even warns white slaveholders that “The sharp sickles of God's retribution/

Will gather your harvest of crime” in her poem “An Appeal to My Country Women,” published in 1853 (Harper 74).

16For more examples of black Christ imagery and black Christian reimaging in black poetry, see Keith Gilyard’s excellent essay “The Bible and African American Poetry” in the anthology African Americans and the Bible (2000).

17It should be noted that “Portrait in Georgia” and “Conversion” were originally part of a larger poem named “Georgia Portraits” (1923), which was published in the journal The Modern Review . The original inclusion of both poems in a larger work confirms the intended connection between the poems.

18The poem “Face” in Cane was also originally a part of “Georgia Portraits.” Some critics like Karen Ford argue that “Face” should also be included in the collected analysis of “Nullo,” “Conversion,” and “Portrait in Georgia” (Ford 50). However, I believe the poem’s violent body imagery is identical, in many ways, to the violent body imagery of “Portrait in Georgia,” and that to include “Face” in this discussion would seem redundant. Even Ford admits that “Face” and “Portrait in Georgia” “[operate in] exactly the same way” by “suggesting that [commodification] of human qualities is an inhumane practice that leads inevitably to death” (52). Because of these intense similarities, I have chosen to omit the poem “Face” in this instance.

19 The Hindu concept of maya is actually more complicated than this explanation reveals. However, for the purposes of this paper, it is easiest to describe maya as illusion. For a more thorough and academic discussion of maya , please see Donald Braue’s book Maya in Radhakrishnan’s Thought: Six Meanings Other Than “Illusion” , which explains the concept of maya as it was understood by the prolific Indian philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.

20 Though there is no textual evidence that Toomer may have read the Tao Te Ching, the Taoist principle of wu wei may be included in this poem. Wu wei is “the supreme action, the precious suppleness, simplicity, and freedom that flows from us, or rather through us, when our private egos and conscious efforts yield to a power not their own” (Smith 208). The idea of wu wei is the ability to let the Tao, or the indescribable essence of the universe, flow through one into the world. In this state, human action, much like the action of the pine needles, is eclipsed by a desire to be united with the Tao. The peaceful inaction of the forest in “Nullo” shows an ability to let things be as they are: the pine needles, though seemingly dangerous, are allowed to fall without notice.

21The Spanish word “palabra” leads me to believe that Toomer’s poem is a reference to the Spanish invasion of an unidentified African city or region. The introduction of “a strange cassava,” a plant native to Latin and South American regions which were once part of the Spanish empire, also supports this view.

22William Ramsey translates the word “palabra” simply as “talk” (Ramsey 83). Likewise, Karen Ford reduces the word “palabra” to “palaver” in her analysis of this poem (Ford 76

54). Nevertheless, because of the more literal translation of “palabra” in English as “word,” I believe “palabra” is referring to something more complex than “talk” or “palaver.” The “weak palabra” is literally a “weak word ,” and the popular association with Christ as λόγος , or the “Word” in the New Testament fits perfectly with the introduction of a “white-faced sardonic god” in Africa.

23Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr confirm that the violence implied in “Portrait in Georgia” is “[t]he result of the slave’s [ sic ] conversion to the gods of Western civilization” (155).

24See specifically Toomer’s essays “Race Problems in Modern Society” (1929) and “Living is Developing” (1936) in The Uncollected Works of American Author Jean Toomer: 1894-1967 .

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