HISTORY | LITERATURE

The Jim Crow Era and Black Identity in Jean Toomer’s ‘Cane’

What was Toomer’s vision of the African-American identity during the Jim Crow era?

“Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.” ― Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer’s novel, Cane (1923), has been hailed as a revolutionary work of modernist literature by many modernist critics, particularly in its contribution to the Harlem Renaissance.

Told through a series of creative vignettes — from poetry to prose to plays — Cane explores the lives and racial politics of various African-American characters during an era where Jim Crow laws ruled with an iron fist.

John Dittmer discusses the racial politics that overshadowed the Jim Crow era in his book, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era (1980), explaining how it was a period characterized by mass racial injustice; one where “white supremacy prevailed”.

Racial segregation existed in all aspects of daily life in Georgia, from work to education to politics. Dittmer exclaims that to be black in Georgia during the Jim Crow era was to “fall victim to white oppression, to live each day in the shadow of violence”.

‘Kabnis’ is a short play in Cane that tells the story of a black man — Ralph Kabnis — from the North who comes to South Georgia for work. It explores the complex ties that exist between the North and South of Georgia and the ways in which the two opposing racial communities clash and overlap. There is much symbolism at work within the play.

For one, the hearth and chimney in Ralph Kabnis’ cabin are described as “whitewashed […] black with sooty saw-teeth” (p. 95). Here, Toomer uses the metaphor to illustrate the racial conflict occurring between the North and the South in the coastal state of Georgia.

The Problem of the “Mixed-Race” Citizen

The play’s illustration of the clashes between the white and black communities touches on the topic of interracial relationships. Gino Pellegrini discusses Toomer’s fascination with “miscegenation” in Cane and the concept of the “mixed-blood” citizen.

Pellegrini explains how Toomer’s vision for Cane was to “voice and sketch out a mixed-race sensibility and community” that would be “grasped and appreciated” by the American public. However, the limitations of the fixed categories of black and white during the Jim Crow era did not allow for this to be the case.

As Pellegrini concludes:

“In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists.”

An example of where these “lost mixed-race protagonists” exist is in the opening piece to Cane, ‘Karintha’.

Karintha is described with skin “like dusk on the eastern horizon”, indicating her mixed-race heritage (p. 7). She is depicted as an exotic being, “carrying beauty, perfect as dusk”, and with men having “always wanted” her (p. 7). Karintha, however, does not have a voice in this narrative. Though we hear her story and learn about the type of woman she becomes, she never speaks directly.

Her story is obscured through the narrator, becoming the “muffled and ambivalent” voice Pellegrini describes. The solitary and fragmented images Toomer creates of Karintha throughout the piece set up the impression of a “misunderstood” protagonist who does not belong to either the black community or the white community. It is, in essence, a piece that is distinctly sensitive to the mixed-race sensibilities Toomer seeks to foster in his work.

These mixed-race sensibilities were reflected not only in the literary sphere but in the political sphere of America as well.

In his article, Daryl Harris discusses the ‘duality complex’ of the African-American identity. This duality complex was rooted in a struggle between an individual American identity and a more dual American identity — one that recognized the Africans as a significant and valid component of its national self.

Harris’s article examines the contradictory American values of “individualism” and “collective consciousness” in a political system that was rigidly opposed to national and cultural assimilation. Euro-American individualism, Harris argues, was “systemically actualized as White nationalism”, and subsequently “portrays Africans and non-Europeans as inferior Others”.

Ostracised as racial outcasts, then, Cane aims to address the issue of identity ambiguity that African Americans had to grapple with. Racial assimilation is thus demonstrated through the text’s form which, despite its separate and fragmentary elements, still maintains the semblance of a unified text.

Hence, Toomer’s vision of racial conciliation and a unified national identity, thus, come into play when considering Cane and its relation to the American political arena.

What was Toomer’s vision of the African-American identity during the Jim Crow era?

Struggling with the complexities of a dual national identity, Toomer aims to explore the social issues of hybrid racial identities in a society that actively renounced ethnic differences.

George Hutchinson’s work on American racial discourse looks at the biracial politics that dominated the period. Census forms during the 1920s instructed that those who deemed themselves “both black and white”, or “biracial”, must assign themselves as “black”.

This concept of racial ambiguity is explored in the vignette ‘Esther’. In the opening scene, it’s stated that “white and black men” hold “no interest” in Esther (p. 25). That is, she does not belong to either community. ‘Becky’ is yet another piece in Cane that explores the issues of racial ambiguity and the notion of becoming a racial outcast.

It illustrates the cultural prejudices and institutional racism that governed the daily lives of African Americans. As the “shameless white wench” with “two Negro sons”, Becky is shunned from both the black community and the white community, belonging to neither (p. 10).

The piece continues, describing the joint effort of the black and white communities to shun Becky: “When the first was born, the white folks said they’d have no more to do with her. And black folks, they too joined hands to cast her out” (p. 10).

Both pieces are reflective of the cultural practices of the period, where anti-miscegenation laws banned the inter-breeding of whites and blacks in the U.S. during the 1920s, thereby enforcing racial segregation.

Furthermore, Toomer’s poem, ‘Portrait in Georgia’, is a significant piece that explores racial ambiguity through the female form. The woman in the poem is described with hair “braided chestnut”, a physical feature common to women of African descent.

Her physical beauty gradually deteriorates throughout the poem, until her body becomes as “white as the ash of black flesh after flame” (p. 33). The poem challenges racial binaries and racial categorization through its portrayal of a racially ambiguous character.

Amanda Licato argues that the narratives in Cane ultimately “reveal its mixed-race or racially ambiguous characters to be misunderstood by the binary racial system of Jim Crow”. Here, the characters hold “marginal and isolating” positions that give them “no place to go.”

The racial representations thus demonstrated throughout Cane are deliberately ambiguous, so as to self-consciously engage in debates surrounding racial ambiguity.

Critics discussing Toomer’s literary works often express how they tie in with Toomer’s own struggle with racial identification.

Tru Leverette explains how Toomer “struggled with claiming an identity”, particularly one that “incorporated his full heritage and preserved his American-ness”. The many racial labels that existed at the time were not sufficient for Toomer and, as such, he sought to create a new identity.

That is a dual but unified American identity that could encompass the diverse variety of racial labels of the period. Onita Estes-Hicks adds how Toomer’s “complex racial background” left him “skeptical of racial labels”.

Toomer’s racial background retained his alertness to the complexities of identity and, so it can be argued that Cane serves the purpose of rejuvenating political debates on American nationalism that discounted the complexities and dualism of the American identity.

Works Cited

Dittmer, John, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920, (United States: University of Illinois Press, 1980).

Estes-Hicks, Onita, ‘Jean Toomer and the Politics and Poetics of National Identity’, Contributions in Black Studies 7, 3 (1985), 1–23.

Harris, Daryl B., ‘The Duality Complex: An Unresolved Paradox in African American Politics’, Journal of Black Studies 27, 6 (1997), 783–99.

Hutchinson, George, ‘Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35, 2 (1993), 226–50.

Leverette, Tru, ‘New Americans: Race, Mixture, and Nation in the Work of Jean Toomer and José Vasconcelos’, South Atlantic Review 73, 3 (2008), 61–85.

Licato, Amanda, ‘Reading and the Representation of Ambiguity in Jean Toomer’s Cane’, Berkeley Undergraduate Journal 24, 3 (2011), 799–92.

Pellegrini, Gino Michael, ‘Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities’, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 64, 4 (2008), 1–20.

Toomer, Jean, Cane, (United States: Library of America, 2019).