In our effort to map the genealogy of both academic and popular conceptions of race, Toomer’s conflicts also help us distinguish between what we might think of as one’s biological or genetic identity and one’s cultural or ethnic identity. Biological identity is registered in one’s genes and measured today through alleles and haplogroups, but cultural identity is, to a large degree, what scholars call socially constructed—arbitrary, fluid, contingent, and socially specific. Genetically, Jean Toomer was a light-complexioned Negro, descended from a long line of mulattoes. He was raised as a Negro American, in a family that identified as black. Like many African-Americans (one of us, for example, happens to be 50 percent European and 50 percent African, genetically), he had a significant amount of European ancestry. But not culturally. None of Toomer’s direct ancestors chose to live or self-identify as white.
That is a matter about which there is a tremendous amount of confusion. Does it mean much to discover, as a mature adult, that one is as white as she or he is black, genetically? That would be to presuppose that genetic ancestry, or biology, has some inherently determining characteristics of personality formation. It does not.
The fact that Toomer’s family tree consisted of a lot of light-skinned mulattoes who, for whatever reasons, married one another, is not exceptional. Many African-Americans’ family trees are shaded in the very same way. Toomer was very much like the novelist Charles W. Chesnutt or the civil-rights leader Walter White or the many people who most certainly had to self-identify to a census enumerator to set the social or cultural record straight. (How else would a hapless census taker even begin to comprehend the nuances of Negritude that have so markedly defined the complex “black” identity in the United States?)
Toomer was right to declare that he was of mixed ancestry, and that the opposition between “white” and “black” was too simplistic. But he was wrong to say that he had never lived as a Negro. He lived as a Negro while growing up. And then he decided to live as an ex-Negro almost as soon as the print was dry on Cane.
In part—to his credit—Toomer did so as a rebellion against a racist form of racial classification. But clearly Toomer the artist had other reasons in choosing to reinvent himself precisely when he published his first book: as a tactic to enable his upward social and artistic mobility. It was important to flee his cultural identity when he became a published writer, we believe, because of all of the circumscriptions placed upon Negroes and Negro writers in America in the early 1920s, when he began his career.
Like the protagonist in James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Toomer probably wanted to live as he pleased outside the strictures of segregation and Jim Crow laws; to be judged as a writer for his talents alone, on their terms; to be free to chase the dreams about which he fantasized; to love the women he loved, without concern about the law—to live freely. And who can blame him? The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah once wrote that “Race disables us.” The more that we, as scholars, understand the full weight of race’s burdens, the more understandable Toomer’s admittedly imaginative denials become. Still …
We hope that the documents that we share in our new edition will provoke discussion and debate among students and colleagues about those twin pillars of postmodern studies, the social construction of race and our society’s essentialization of race, born in the pseudoscience of the Enlightenment.
As to interpretations of Cane, the new contextual information takes nothing away from the splendid complexity of this marvelously compelling text, our most sublime rendering of the moment of transition of the first great migration, the migration of the ex-slave from the plantation to the city, from feudalism to modernity, from the South to the North, and of all that was lost and all that was gained in that marvelously complex process.
Toomer, more than any other New Negro writer (from whom he so desperately wished to stand apart), saw and felt that moment, and found lyrical registers of language to record it. Rather than confine his imagination to that of a “Negro writer,” he seized upon the critical success of Cane to attempt to escape the confines of race in America.
Jean Toomer—to draw upon a famous metaphor of W.E.B. Du Bois—did not want to ride in the Jim Crow car of American literary culture or of American social life. But Du Bois’s point in coining the metaphor was that the Negro should be allowed to ride in the proverbial “white” section of the American social train as a Negro, and not as a Negro in whiteface, or as a Negro who had left his sisters and brothers back in the smelly, cinder-covered Jim Crow car at the rear of the train.
Confronting the long history of speculation about Toomer’s race, we confronted again the role of race not just in the construction of identity, but also in the creation of a literary tradition. We felt that it was vital to add clarity to an often ambiguous, contradictory portrait of Toomer. In the process, we grew to appreciate more deeply the tragic pattern of ambivalence and denial that is part of his legacy as one of the most gifted imaginative artists of the 20th century.
Certainly, Toomer’s choices make it clear that we are long past the point of accepting uncritically what a writer says about himself or herself. We should subject all claims to the same critical analysis that we bring to the text itself. They, too, make clear the many issues about race to be confronted in our teaching.
So we come back to our carefully considered judgment, based upon an analysis of genealogical evidence previously overlooked, that Jean Toomer—for all of his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call multicultural or mixed-raced ancestry—was a Negro who decided to pass for white.
The poet Elizabeth Alexander’s “Toomer” evokes her subject’s shifting, complex, contradictory stance on race: “I made up a language in which to exist.” That line captures not only Toomer’s pioneering position on race as a social construction, but also his effort to liberate himself through language from his life-long ambivalence about his black ancestry.