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University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: the Tight Cocoon: Class University of Illinois Press Chapter Title: The Tight Cocoon: Class, Culture, and the New Negro Book Title: Jean Toomer Book Subtitle: Race, Repression, and Revolution Book Author(s): Barbara Foley Published by: University of Illinois Press. (2014) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt6wr6jc.7 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Jean Toomer This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:04:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter 2 The Tight Cocoon Class, Culture, and the New Negro Be still, be still, my precious child I must not give you birth! —Georgia Douglas Johnson, “Maternity” (1922) [W]ith the Negro’s emergence into self-knowledge is the discovery of the falsity of his former illusion that the white American is actually free. —Jean Toomer, “The Negro Emergent” (1925) It has often been argued that Jean Toomer found his Negro identity in Cane only to lose it soon thereafter. He was presumably dismayed by Horace Liveright’s decision to “feature Negro” in the publicity for Cane; distressed at Waldo Frank’s identifying Toomer as a Negro in his preface to Cane; and furious when Alain Locke included in The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) some of the sketches and poems from Cane without Toomer’s permission, thereby affirming Toomer’s public persona as a person of African descent at a time when Toomer was in rapid retreat from self-identification as a black man. Some commentators have viewed these reactions as links in a long chain of denials of African American ancestry that would eventually result in Toomer’s moving over the color line. Others have argued that, as a member of Washington’s “blue-veined” elite—and sufficiently light-skinned to have “passed” since his youth—he had never felt black in the first place; his post-Cane movement away from self-identification as a Negro was a return to a previous norm. Still others, viewing Toomer as a racial deconstructionist avant la lettre, have highlighted his increasing frustration with friends and colleagues, black and white alike, who were proving unable to comprehend his attempted formulation of an “American race” that would tran- scend inherited racial classifications altogether. Critics generally agree that the ossifying racial dualisms of the 1920s compounded Toomer’s dilemma: he was seeking to reformulate race and evade racial binarism precisely at a time when reinforcement of the color line was becoming a national obsession. Whether adjudged tragic, opportunistic, or heroic, however, Toomer has been routinely This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:04:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 52 Part I viewed as a reluctant recruit to the New Negro cultural movement of which he has been viewed, in paradoxical retrospect, as the first significant participant.1 I argue here that Toomer’s racial self-identification during the Cane period was not nearly as problematic as has often been proposed. It is clear that, even before he entered into the period of intense activity that produced Cane, he had been attracted to the project of positing a composite “American race” that would supply an identity beyond dualism and biological essentialism. His life in Washington and various northern cities had also sheltered him from the grittier aspects of Af- rican American life. When he traveled into the Deep South in 1921 and discovered an unexpected sense of kinship with its dark-skinned peasantry, however, he was by no means wholly unprepared for the experience. Not only had his exposure to the Socialist analysis of racism furnished him with a theoretical framework within which to situate his perceptions of Georgia’s peasantry. In addition, as a youth he had lived in a Negro neighborhood and attended all-black schools; as an adult, he had experienced interchanges with members of Washington’s Negro intelligentsia who not only shared his interest in the sociology of race but also had ties with the left. It was primarily in correspondence with white writers and editors that Toomer stressed his chameleonlike ability to move between and among racial groups. But when he lived among African Americans—of whatever hue—Toomer did not equivocate about his membership in the group. During the Cane years, Toomer was a New Negro, albeit one striving to define that identity on his own terms.2 As with Toomer’s connection with American socialism, it is important to read forward through Toomer’s life and writing if we wish to ascertain with some accuracy his relationship to the New Negro Movement. Too often critics have imposed on the Toomer who wrote Cane the Toomer they discerned in later years—whether race traitor, proto-deconstructionist, or mystic seeking psychic wholeness. I situate Toomer’s ideas about race and racial identity in the matrix of the postwar debate over the New Negro. As has been widely acknowledged, the New Negro, originally identified as a Marxist militant, gradually devolved into the culture-making hero of the New Negro Renaissance celebrated in Alain Locke’s 1925 anthology; the term New Negro was a highly protean ideologeme, signaling contradictory and conflicting paradigms and programs for addressing the realities of American racism. While he is generally viewed as engaged with the less political features of the movement that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, I propose that Toomer to no small degree linked his self- identification as a Negro—a New Negro—to his hopes for revolutionary social transformation. That this self-identification persisted for some time after the publication of Cane indicates the intensity with which those hopes had been held. His eventual relinquishment of this self-identification testifies not so much to the appeal of whiteness as to the intractability of American racism and the arrested dialectic of the class struggle.3 This content downloaded from 76.77.171.221 on Mon, 27 Mar 2017 16:04:51 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Chapter 2. The ightT Cocoon 53 “The matter of race and the race problem in America”: The “Mixed-Blood” Discussion Group The full extent of Toomer’s interactions with the New Negroes of Washington during the Cane period remains underappreciated largely because Toomer him- self downplayed the importance of these ties, both at the time and in retrospect. Writing to Claude McKay from Washington in the summer of 1922, Toomer noted the “complacency” and—in a telling phrase—the “tragic consequences of spiritual abortion” of his circle of acquaintance. In letters to his mostly New York–based white male modernist friends, Toomer continually stressed the limitations of his environment. Toomer’s autobiographical writings either minimize his Washington connections or to efface them entirely. The 1931 text, dubbing 1920–22 the “ter- rible years,” gives the distinct impression that Toomer went through his period of writerly apprenticeship in near-complete intellectual isolation. Implying that he dwelled among philistines, Toomer wrote that his preoccupation with writing led “[p]eople around [to] wonde[r] what I was doing. They said things. Once or twice I let fly. I got the reputation of being a very queer fellow.” Although “[o]ne or two other people of my own age came in to see me,” Toomer’s only sustained contact was, he maintains, with his old friend Henry Kennedy (“Ken”), who “alone was with me. Two or three people of my own age came in to see me. I met a sculptress, and she did a bust of me.” Toomer details his research and reading—into Buddhism and other “occult” philosophies; modern literature; “the matter of race and the race problem in America”—but invites his reader to conclude that these were all solitary undertakings. For all intents and purposes, the 1931 autobiography portrays Cane as the outcome of white literary influences.4 The evidence revealing Toomer’s quite substantial connections with a network of Washington, DC–based African Americans in the early 1920s offers quite a different portrait of the artist as a young man. In a January 1921 letter to Alain Locke, Toomer describes a discussion group that he has recently launched: “I have managed to hold two meetings of a group (Mary Burrill, Georgia John- son, Miss Scott [of Howard], Mary Craft, E. C. Williams, Henry Kennedy, and myself) whose central purpose is an historical study of slavery and the Negro, emphasizing the great economic and cultural forces which have largely deter- mined them. The aim is twofold, first, to arrive at a sound and just criticism of the actual place and condition of the mixed-blood group in this country, and, second, to formulate an ideal that will be both workable and inclusive.” Noting that the group would be “cemented” by “a knowledge [and] certain fundamental facts we have in common,” Toomer proclaims his leadership role (“I tried my best to throw a little fire in their hearts”) and lists the current readings: T. R. R. Cobb’s 1858 An Historical Sketch of Slavery; a book by “Wells” (most likely H.
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