Cane (19 page)

At the time of Toomer’s arrival in September 1921, the trustees of the institute had secured funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to erect a second building. By 1923 the institute was composed of two buildings perched on fifty-three acres with 210 students. A co-educational institution whose curriculum was a mix of industrial education and grade school instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, the institute prepared students for vocations in agriculture and industry. It served the African American community of Sparta, and the communities beyond it.
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Toomer lived, like the teachers, in a residence provided by the institute. “As the [acting] principal, [he] was required to visit homes, businesses, and churches.”
¹⁰⁶

Toomer was acting principal at the Institute from September to November 1921. This seminal, three-month sojourn in the South provided him with the materials, inspiration, and much of the setting for what became the first and third sections of
Cane.
Prior to his first visit to the South, Toomer’s writing lacked a specific sense of place that could serve as the setting and foundation for his art. The landscape of Sparta, Georgia, with its history of slavery and an ancestral past that connected Toomer to his father, was precisely what the emerging writer needed at this vital juncture in his apprenticeship. Under the spell of an alien and yet somehow familiar landscape, Toomer eagerly embraced this new body of impressions and sensations and thoughts, immersing himself in a set of experiences that he would interpret with impressive originality, without being nostalgic in any way. He saw it as a world in transition, and a world of transition for himself. In Sparta, as we have noted, he heard for the first time, he claimed, the traditional Negro “folk-songs and spirituals.” Because he was baptized as a Roman Catholic and reared in an upper-middle-class home in Washington, it is feasible that Toomer could have remained ignorant of the secular and sacred traditions in African American music whose origins were in slavery and that reached their maturity in the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow Deep South.

To be sure, these were not traditions often or openly embraced by the black men and women of Toomer’s class or color background, even at the two all-black schools he attended in Washington. As the eponymous hero of his first play,
Natalie Mann
, written in 1922 following his stay in Georgia, would assert in almost self-righteous fashion: “What has become of the almost obligatory heritage of folk-songs? Jazz on the one hand, and on the other, a respectability which is never so vigorous as when it denounces and rejects the true art of the race’s past. They are ashamed of the past made permanent by the spirituals.”
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Potentially, Toomer could have come to know the traditions emerging from the “race’s past” in the person of Old Willis, a former slave who “did odd jobs” for the Pinchback family.
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He writes that “I was very fond of [Old Willis].” But Toomer’s encounters with him apparently did not introduce him to the black cultural past that was now unfolding all around him in Sparta. Toomer discovered the slave and folk traditions of which Old Willis was doubtless a vessel as a young adult, precisely when he was struggling to find his voice as an artist, drawing upon these forms and traditions to illuminate his sense of his own identity and the historical experiences that had shaped that identity. As he went about his duties as acting principal in Sparta, he moved daily through a past that was also present, a past that helped him to understand the physical and cultural landscapes out of which he would shape the most original and seminal work of literature published in the entire Harlem Renaissance.

Like his contemporaries in the broad current of American modernism, Toomer was searching for—and ironically would discover in Sparta, Georgia, of all places—a “useable past,” to summon a phrase much in circulation at the time and attributed to the critic Van Wyck Brooks (a classmate of Alain Locke at Harvard), which would give shape and heft to his art, but also allow him further to define his racial identity. As he observed in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, whose novel
Winesburg, Ohio
left its imprint upon
Cane
: “My seed was planted in the cane—and cotton-fields, and in the souls of the black and white people in the small southern town. My seed was planted in
myself
down there.”
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The image of the “seed” that Toomer uses to dramatic effect in his letter to Anderson would function as one of the unifying, fecund conceits in his poem “Song of the Son,” in which he celebrates the ancestral past and cultural landscape of Sparta, the fictional community of Sempter in
Cane
.

In the same letter to Anderson, who asked Toomer’s permission to write the introduction to
Cane,
Toomer elaborated upon the deep impact that the land, people, and music of Sparta had upon his sensibility and identity: “Here were cabins. Here Negroes and their singing. I had never heard the spirituals and work songs. They were like a part of me. At times, I identified with my whole sense so intensely that I lost my own identity.”
^110.
Or, perhaps, we might say that here Toomer found his identity, if not his racial or cultural identity, then most certainly his identity as a creative writer, as the first American modernist writer to represent the complex culture of race in America in such a richly resonant and intricate manner. And because of this, Toomer’s book stands as one of the truly great works of American modernism.

Toomer arrived in the South during a period of profound transformation. He witnessed firsthand the ebb and flow of the Great Migration. Beginning in the 1890s and then picking up the pace in 1915, African Americans were leaving rural communities like Sparta for the urban centers of the South, first, and then the North, in search of expanding industrial economic opportunities, and a less repressive racial climate. As they left the southern agrarian way of life for modernity in the cities, some also sought to distance themselves from their slave past and its cultural traditions, which they regarded with a mixture of contempt, shame, and obsolescence. Regarding the “folk-songs and spirituals,” Toomer lamented, “I learned that the Negroes of the town [Sparta] objected to them. They called them ‘shouting.’ They had victrolas and player-pianos. So, I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death so tragic.”
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The poignancy of the passing of an era and the folk culture that defined it is a central theme of
Cane.
The speaker of “Song of the Son” exquisitely expresses this fateful sense of timing: “O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, / So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, / Now just before an epoch’s sun declines / Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee….”
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In a subsequent line, the speaker explains why he has returned to the land of his ancestors: “To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone….”
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This was Toomer’s own purpose, too, in writing
Cane,
to bear witness to the passing of an epoch: “And this was the feeling I put into
Cane. Cane
was a swan-song. It was a song of an end. And why no one has seen and felt that, why people have expected me to write a second and a third and a fourth book like
Cane,
is one of the queer misunderstandings of my life.”
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It is difficult to imagine that Toomer could be unaware that this urging that he write “a second and a third and a fourth book like
Cane
” stemmed both from that book’s majesty and power and from his repeated failure to create anything that remotely approached it in sophistication throughout the remainder of his life, as he fruitlessly sought to find a language to express what being “neither white nor black” actually meant, without the soul-base of region that the deep black South had provided him in
Cane.

At the end of his appointment in Sparta, Toomer wrote that on “the train coming north I began to write the things that later appeared in that book [
Cane
].”
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As we have mentioned, he completed the first draft of “Kabnis,” the dramatic piece that composes the third section of
Cane,
in December 1921 in the last weeks of Pinchback’s life. Toomer then wrote “Fern,” which according to Kerman and Eldridge, would be published “almost without revision.”
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By April 1922 he had composed the parts of
Cane
in which Georgia is predominant. Having written so much, Toomer realized he had much more to write: “But I had not enough for a book. I had at most a hundred typed pages. These were about Georgia. It seemed that I had said all I had to say about it. So what, then? I’d fill out. The middle section of
Cane
was thus manufactured.”
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The middle section of
Cane
began with “Bona and Paul,” the story Toomer wrote in 1918 during his second stay in Chicago. He wrote many of the other stories and poems in this section throughout the summer of 1922. In July 1922, Toomer wrote to Waldo Frank and John McClure, editor of the New Orleans–based journal
Double Dealer
, to share with them his vision of the content and organization of
Cane.
Even at this early date, he imagined a book with a three-part structure. Toomer wrote that Part 1 would consist of all of the prose works in which Georgia is the setting; this first section he called “Cane Stalks and Choruses.” Part 2 would consist of his poems, and at the time was entitled “Leaves and Syrup Songs.” The third and final section would be prose works that now form the second section of
Cane,
and this section he entitled “Leaf Traceries in Washington.”
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Toomer was eager to assemble the various parts of his book into a unified whole for, as he declared to Frank and McClure, the “concentrated volume will do a good deal more than isolated pieces possibly could.”
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Toomer’s outline constituted a change of strategy. In the spring of 1922, he had sought help with publication of his work from two black writers: Alain Locke, professor of philosophy at Howard, and Claude McKay, the Jamaican immigrant poet who would be cast by Locke as a rising star, along with Toomer, among the younger generation of writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke had enormous influence within the black cultural world, and McKay was the associate editor of the white, socialist periodical, the
Liberator.
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Toomer wrote to them seeking their assistance in publishing the stories and poems that would eventually be published in
Cane.
As a result, Toomer’s first and second appearances in print were in a black publication; with Locke’s aid, “Song of the Son” was published in April 1922, in
Crisis
, the national monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, edited by Du Bois. This was followed by the publication of the poem “Banking Coal” in the June issue of
Crisis.

The outcome of Toomer’s efforts to promote his work with McKay yielded slightly more in the way of results. McKay accepted “Carma,” “Reapers,” and “Becky” and published these in the September and October issues of the
Liberator.
Toomer enjoyed similar good fortune with other magazines. By the end of 1922, his growing list of publications included “Storm Ending,” “Calling Jesus,” and “Harvest Song” in
Double Dealer
; “Face,” “Portrait in Georgia,” and “Conversion” in
Modern Review
; and “Seventh Street” in
Broom.
In addition to appealing to Locke for guidance in publishing his writings, Toomer also solicited his assistance in securing a patron to support him as he continued to write
Cane.
Although a patron never materialized, Locke, who functioned as the midwife to so many young black writers, did exert himself on Toomer’s behalf.
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As his poems and short stories began to appear, Toomer traveled with Frank back to the South, this time to Spartanburg, South Carolina. Toomer suggested the weeklong visit to Frank, in the fall of 1922, as a means of helping him to solidify his vision of the black world so central to
Holiday,
his novel-in-progress. Traveling as “blood brothers,” the trip strengthened the friendship between the two writers as well as their shared belief that out of the materials of the black folk experience they were creating a new art that would transform American literature.
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At a crucial point in their developing friendship, Toomer expressed just this view to Frank: “I cannot think of myself as being separated from you in the dual task of creating an American literature, and of developing a public, however large or small, capable of responding to our creations. Those who read and know me, should read and know you.”
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When Toomer returned from Spartanburg, he worked for two weeks as an assistant to the manager of Washington’s all-black Howard Theater. Out of this experience he wrote “Theater” and “Box Seat,”
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and these beautifully written but nevertheless searching critiques of black middle-class Washington would appear in the middle section of
Cane.
Toomer sent these stories to Frank for his comments. Encouraged by his response, he sent Frank the complete manuscript of
Cane
in December 1922. He enclosed the now famous, widely quoted letter that reveals the latent design and theme of
Cane
: “My brother! CANE is on its way to you! For two weeks I have worked steadily at it. The book is done. From three angles, CANE’s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again. Or, from the North down into the South, and then a return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha etc. swings upward into Theatre and Boxseat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song. Whew!”
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Elated and expectant that the book he had carried so long in his head would soon be in the world because of the support of his best friend, Toomer provided Frank with clues as to the structure of a work that would generate debates among scholars about its formal identity for decades: “You will understand the inscriptions, brother mine: the book to grandma; Kabnis, the spirit and the soil, to you…. Between each of the three sections, a curve. These, to vaguely indicate the design. I’m wide open to you for criticism and suggestion. Just these few lines now…. love Jean.”
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