In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (8 page)

1975

I
N 1923, WHEN HE
was twenty-nine years old, Jean Toomer published
Cane,
a book that sang naturally and effortlessly of the beauty, passion, and vulnerability of black, mostly Southern, life. In form it was unique: there were stories interspersed with poems, a novelette constructed like a play, and delicate line drawings that casually accented pages throughout. Some critics called the book a novel, some called it a prose poem, some did not know what to call it; but all agreed that
Cane
was original, and a welcome change from earlier fiction that took a didactic or hortatory position on black and interracial American life.

It was an immediate hit among those writers who would eventually make the Harlem Renaissance—including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston—who, apparently without knowing much about its author, accepted
Cane
as a work of genius and were influenced by it. Hughes was moved to explore the dramatic possibilities of interracial, intrafamilial relationships in the South in his plays and poems. Hurston was encouraged to portray the culture of rural black Southerners as generative, vibrant, and destined for a useful, if vastly changed, future in the modern world, though Toomer himself had considered
Cane
the “swan song” of that culture.

Not much was known about Toomer in black literary circles, because he never belonged to any; and shortly after
Cane
was published he no longer appeared even in white ones. By the time the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing, in the mid- and late 1920s, the book was out of print, largely forgotten, and its author an infrequently discussed mystery.

Toomer was still a mystery over forty years later, in 1969, when, at the height of the black studies movement,
Cane
was reissued and again captured the imagination of readers with its poetic complexity and sensitive treatment of black men and especially black women. By this time, the late Arna Bontemps, poet, novelist, and Curator of Special Collections at Fisk University, had access to Toomer's autobiographical writings: Toomer had died in 1967. Bontemps wrote sympathetically, albeit guardedly, of Toomer's long isolation in a Washington, D.C. brownstone, watching his grandparents decline, of the brief, three-month trip to Sparta, Georgia, that was the inspiration for
Cane,
and of the “crisis” about his racial identity. Some of the mystery surrounding Toomer's personality began to be dispelled.

This present collection of Toomer's writings,
The Wayward and the Seeking
(apparently there is much more), edited and shaped by Darwin T. Turner, also does much to clarify the Jean Toomer mystery. There is a large section of autobiographical fragments, three short stories, and many poems, including “The Blue Meridian,” Toomer's definitive statement of his vision of America. Also included are two interesting and often provocative plays that illustrate both Toomer's sensitivity to women and his ultimate condescension toward them, as well as a selection of maxims and aphorisms commenting on nature and humanity from Toomer's previously published booklet
Essentials.

Feminists will be intrigued by what Toomer writes about his mother and grandmother. His mother was an intelligent woman, utterly dominated by her father, whom she spent her whole, relatively short life trying to defy. She died when Toomer was fifteen, after the second of two mysterious at-home operations that, as described here, read like abortions. His grandmother was also dominated by her husband, until his health began to decline in old age. Then she, old and ill herself, blossomed magnificently from a sweet, silent shadow of her husband into a woman of high humor, memorable tales, satiric jibes at anything and everything. She is reported to have had “some dark blood.”

It will no doubt be hard, if not impossible, for lovers of
Cane
to read
The Wayward and the Seeking
(the title is from one of Toomer's poems) without feelings of disappointment and loss. Disappointment because the man who wrote so piercingly of “Negro” life in
Cane
chose to live his own life as a white man, while Hughes, Hurston, Du Bois, and other black writers were celebrating the blackness in themselves as well as in their work. Loss because it appears this choice undermined Toomer's moral judgment: there were things in American life and in his own that he simply refused to see.

Toomer's refusal to acknowledge the racism around him is especially lamentable. He lived in Washington with his grandparents for nearly the first twenty years of his life, and when he left to attend the University of Wisconsin, he decided he would say nothing of his racial identity unless asked. If asked, he would say, basically, that he was an American. The subject “never came up,” he writes, and within two weeks he was “taking this white world as a matter of course, forgetting that I had been in a colored group.” He does not find it odd that when his schoolmates mistake him for an Indian they brutalize him so severely on the football field that he is forced to call time out for good. “If others had race prejudice that was their affair,” he wrote, “as long as it did not manifest itself against me.” Given this deliberate blindness, it is no wonder that the fiction he wrote after
Cane
depicts primarily white people and never documents their racism in any way; it is as if Toomer believed an absence of black people assured the absence of racism itself.

To many who read this collection Toomer will appear to be, as he saw himself, a visionary in his assumption that he was “naturally and inevitably” an American—a “prototype” of the new race now evolving on the American continent, “neither white nor black.” They will note that it was not Toomer who ordained that a single drop of black blood makes one black. Toomer, looking more white than black, could as easily argue the opposite point: that several obvious drops of white blood make one white. They will think it heroic of Toomer to fling off racial labels and to insist on being simply “of the American race.” They will not be bothered by the thought that, during Toomer's lifetime, only white people were treated simply as Americans.

Other readers will no doubt consider Toomer a racial opportunist, like his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, who, according to Toomer, settled in New Orleans before the Civil War and commanded a regiment of federal troops during the war. After “the war ended and the black man [was] freed and enfranchised,” Pinch-back saw his “opportunity in the political arena. He claimed he had Negro blood, linked himself with the Negro cause, and rose to power.” Once having obtained power Pinchback did nothing of substance for the masses of black men who voted for him. He and his family lived richly among upper-class whites until his money began to dwindle from playing the horses too much. He then moved among “colored” people who were so nearly white that “they had never run up against the color line.” It was among these white and near-white neighbors that Toomer grew up.

Like his grandfather, Toomer apparently used his “connection” to black people only once, when it was to his advantage to do so. When he was attempting to publish excerpts from
Cane,
he sent some stories to the
Liberator,
one of whose editors was black writer Claude McKay. He explained that though he was of French, Welsh, Negro, German, and Jewish and Indian ancestry, his “growing need for artistic expression” pulled him “deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as my powers of receptivity increased, I found myself loving it in a way that I could never love the other. It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me. A visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk-songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I had heard many false accents about, and of which till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to life and responded to them. Now I cannot conceive of myself as aloof and separated.”

Once
Cane
was published, however, Toomer told a different story. When his publisher asked him to “feature” himself as a Negro for
Cane's
publicity, Toomer replied that as he was not a Negro, he could not feature himself as one. He dropped out of literary circles, joined a Gurdjieffian commune intent on self-realization, met the well-connected white novelist Margery Latimer and married her. She died a year later in childbirth. His second wife, the affluent Marjorie Content Toomer, also white, settled down with him on a farm among the “tolerant Quakers” of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where, after seventy-three years of living as “an American,” Toomer died in a nursing home.

A few of us will realize that
Cane
was not only his finest work but that it is also in part based on the essence of stories told to Toomer by his grandmother, she of the “dark blood” to whom the book is dedicated, and that many of the women in
Cane
are modeled on the tragic indecisiveness and weakness of his mother's life.
Cane
was for Toomer a double “swan song.” He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the “Negro” he felt dying in himself.
Cane
then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go.

1980

A
NOTHER WRITER AND
I were discussing the difficulty of working immediately after the birth of our children. “I wrote nothing for a year,” I offered, “that didn't sound as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.” “And I,” she said, leaning forward, “was so stricken with melancholia whenever I tried to think of writing that I spent months in a stupor. Luckily,” she added, still frowning at this dismal memory, “I always had full-time help.” Having had a sitter only three afternoons a week, I thought she had a nerve comparing her hard time to mine.

What this woman and I needed to put our lives in perspective was a copy of Buchi Emecheta's book
Second Class Citizen.

It was the dedication page of this novel that made me read it, because it is exactly the kind of dedication I could not imagine making myself.

To my dear children,

Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice,

without whose sweet background noises

this book would not have been written.

What kind of woman would think the “background noises” of
five
children “sweet”? I thought the dedication might camouflage the author's unadmitted maternal guilt, but Emecheta is a writer and a mother, and it is because she is both that she writes at all.

Adah, the central character of
Second Class Citizen,
has no memory of her existence before the age of eight. She is not positive she was eight, because, “you see, she was a girl. A girl who had arrived when everyone was expecting and predicting a boy. So, since she was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family, to her tribe, nobody thought of recording her birth.” Adah's “tribe” are the Ibos of Nigeria, and among the Ibos a woman's only function is to work hard around the house and have countless children, preferably boys.

It is her brother, Boy, who is routinely sent to school, while Adah is left home to learn the duties of a wife. Bright and intensely interested in learning to read, Adah sneaks off to school: because her desire to be educated is as pathetic as it is obvious, she is allowed to stay. Her parents are reminded by her teachers that, since Adah will be educated above the other girls in her age group, her bride price will be higher. In short, they will be able to make money off her.

The years pass in dreams of going to England (which Adah thinks is a kind of heaven), in hard work at home, and in study, which Adah loves. When it is time to apply to the university, however, Adah—who is now orphaned—discovers that because she has no home she will not be allowed to take the necessary exams. Because women who live alone in Ibo society are considered prostitutes, and because she needs a home to continue her education, Adah marries Francis, a lazy and spoiled perennial student who considers her his property. (And in Ibo society, she is.) Eager for elevation among her clan (a woman who has many sons eventually reaches the rank of man), Adah has two children in rapid succession, impressing everyone with her ability to reproduce as well as hold down a high-salaried civil-service job at the American consulate. When she follows Francis to London she discovers such speedy reproduction is not admired there. With children in tow and a husband who has accommodated himself to being a second-class citizen, resigned to living in a hovel (almost no one, English or otherwise, will rent to “Africans with children”), Adah must adapt to a country that is overwhelmingly racist, and to people who seem incapable of decent behavior toward their former subjects.

Ignoring her husband's advice that she too is now a second-class citizen and must accept work in a factory with the other African wives, Adah applies for a better job, in a library. To her husband's discomfiture, she gets it, but must soon give it up because she is pregnant again.

The horrors of Adah's life are many: Francis is physically abusive out of frustration at not passing the exams he came to England to study for; Adah's countrymen and -women are rude and unhelpful because they consider Adah, with her first-class job, a show-off; Adah's pregnancies are hard, and her children often sick. But through it all she manages to view her situation from a cultural perspective that precludes self-pity. Early on, she makes a distinction between her husband and her children: “But even if she had nothing to thank Francis for, she could still thank him for giving her her own children, because she had never really had anything before.”