Roland J Pean

Lisa J Udel.

English 373 African American Literature

17 September 2023

Jean Toomer was a poet of the Harlem renaissance whose work Cane was a great critical

success centered on the Black Experience in both the North and South states. What I want to

focus in on a passage describing the children of Becky, a white woman who for having two

children with a black man was publicly scorned and made an outcast and examine how it ties

into Toomer’s own public life. The cabin she had been living in was taken away and whites

scorned her for sleeping with a black man or as they were called, negro, and the black

community scorned the man she had slept with due to the racial tensions. The reason I want to

focus on this is because of Jean Toomers own racial identity or rather that he refused to say if he

was White or Black and instead identified as an American which in conjunction with his life I

find rather interesting. Specifically that he was an extremely light skinned man who actively

rewrote his own history to the public of having a number of racial mixes in his blood to avoid

being known as a black man.

I found this passage in Becky describing the titular woman’s two mixed children, “White

or colored? No one knew, and least of all themselves. They drifted around from job to job. We,

who had cast out their mother because of them, could we take them in?...”(Gates and Smith

1146) He describes how the mixing of the races was on both sides of the divide greatly disliked

and that those born mixed race had a lot of difficulties in reconciling being born with both the

blood of the oppressed and the oppressor as well as the reaction of the community both white
and black. In fact Toomer in his work described the speculation of the black community as to the

father as a black man with no self respect due to sleeping with a white woman. Since the work of

the author can itself be a window into their mind I find the idle lines there to reflect on Toomers

own decision to obfuscate his black heritage and pass as white as of the recent speculation on his

racial identity. This struggle to understand and reconcile the bi racial identity with the racial

reality the unnamed brothers embodied to me is a window into why Jean Toomer preferred to so

utterly distance himself from his nonwhite heritage as a way to perhaps avoid coming to terms

with what that meant. Because of what conditions for Black Americans were in the 19th and 20th

centuries he preferred and did for a large time pass as a white man, “Prof. BYRD: Oh, the newly

unearthed facts are in census records. There's a draft registration and his marriage license. The

census records list Toomer as white. The draft registrations record Toomer as Negro. And then,

the marriage license lists both the bride and groom as white.” (Npr). It goes on to further state

that scholarly consensus is that he fully distanced himself from his African American Heritage. I

believe this was both to protect himself and his standing in a very hostile environment.

To me the tone of this feels resigned to the cruelties of the world, like the life, misfortune,

and death of ‘Becky’ are simply facts of life. However, given that this was a world under

segregation and Jim Crow that may very well have been the case to him, and thus tried

distancing himself from Cane and refusing to write a sequel. The reason I have such a small

section taking so much of my focus is because it is a genuinely tragic thing that someone was in

such a hostile world that they would disown their ancestors. Yet I also think of bell hooks, of

W.E.B Dubois, and Sojourner Truth who despite growing up and living through times of great

oppression produced and presented their art and social views even though they understood what

it would cost them. Their safety, their status, and are remembered as great or varying amounts of
complexity for W.E.B Dubois public strategy of ‘just go along with the state of things and they

will get better eventually’, which is simplifying a complex situation that’s still only recently

being reexamined and while I respect this one work and understand why one would feel tempted

as Toomer was but at the same time I feel less respect for someone whose situation was difficult

on a scale I cannot begin to imagine.

 Works Cited
Gates, Henry Louis, and Valerie Smith. The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature. Norton Anthology of African Am, 2014.
Npr. “A New Look at the Life of Jean Toomer.” NPR, 30 Dec.
2010, www.npr.org/2010/12/30/132488862/A-New-Look-At-The-Life-Of-Jean-Toomer.