Renown came to Jean Toomer with his 1923 book “Cane,” which mingled fiction, drama and poetry in a formally audacious effort to portray the complexity of black lives. But the racially mixed Toomer’s confounding efforts to defy being stuck in conventional racial categories and his disaffiliation with black culture made him perhaps the most enigmatic writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
The introduction to this new edition of “Cane” drops a bombshell.
Jean Toomer, author of “Cane,” in an undated photograph.
Now Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, and Rudolph P. Byrd, a professor at Emory University, say their research for a new edition of “Cane” documents that Toomer was “a Negro who decided to pass for white.”
They lob this intellectual grenade in their introduction to the book, which W. W. Norton & Company is to publish next month. Their judgment is based on “an analysis of archival evidence previously overlooked by other scholars,” Mr. Byrd and Mr. Gates write, including Toomer’s draft registrations and his and his family’s census records, which they consider alongside his writings and public statements.
Toomer’s racial complexity has long been intriguing to critics and scholars, but Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd’s assertion about his identity is certain to spark debate. Richard Eldridge, a Toomer biographer, said recently that he had not read the new edition — and will stand corrected if its case is persuasive — but that Toomer never “passed” in the classic sense of pretending to be white. Rather, he said, Toomer (whose appearance was racially indeterminate) sought to transcend standard definitions of race.
“I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” Mr. Eldridge and Cynthia Earl Kerman are the authors of “The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness” published in 1987 by Louisiana State University Press.
Toomer’s life — he was born in 1894 and died in 1967 — traversed many shifts in American racial politics, including times of soul-sapping racial oppression. And while he ended up writing other poetry, essays and drama, “Cane,” published in the Jim Crow era, was a sensation in its time and remains his contribution to the American literary canon.
The book includes sketches of city life, portraits of rural women and a loosely autobiographical section titled “Kabnis” about a conflicted, racially mixed man. Toomer’s experimental mesh of forms and lyrical language made black experiences “the metaphor for the human condition” and modernity itself, Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd write. In a recent interview Mr. Gates called “Cane” the most sophisticated and “blackest” book of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement it helped catalyze.
Yet this new edition of “Cane” documents that over the course of his life Toomer variously denied ever living as a black person; called himself racially mixed; and said he was a new kind of American, transcending old racial terms. Toomer did not want to be featured as a Negro in the marketing of “Cane” and later did not want his work included in black anthologies.
Archival research reveals a clearer picture, said Mr. Gates, the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard: “Everyone on his family tree was black and didn’t claim to be anything else. Only Jean tried to cross over.”
The 472-page Norton volume includes the first edition of “Cane,” Toomer’s letters, essays, his autobiographical writing and more than 20 interpretive essays about Toomer and the book. It is intended to follow up the first Norton critical edition, published in 1988, and to take Toomer scholarship into the 21st century.
The volume uses official documents collected by Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, a genealogist who helped untangle Michelle Obama’s ancestry and who has worked with Mr. Gates on his PBS television shows about family roots.
Toomer’s maternal grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback was the first black lieutenant governor of Louisiana (during Reconstruction) and was briefly the acting governor, in 1872 and 1873. Toomer, though, theorized that his grandfather (the son of a white father and a racially mixed mother) only claimed to have Negro blood to ally himself with newly enfranchised black men.
The book includes census data showing that Toomer’s parents and grandparents always identified as black or mulatto, and Mr. Gates said they identified that way culturally as well.
Toomer’s official record stands in marked, and sometimes confusing, contrast. Registering for the draft in 1917, he was identified as a Negro, as he was in a 1942 draft registration document. But 1920 and 1930 federal census reports identified him as white. In 1931, when he married a white woman, both bride and groom were identified as white on the marriage license.
Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd contend that because Toomer’s birth place was incorrect on the 1920 report, someone else might have responded on his behalf. But in 1930, they argue, it is likely that Toomer furnished the details himself. Tellingly, a 1934 article in a black newspaper quoted him as saying that he did not really know whether he had “colored blood.”
And while he was registered as a Negro for the draft in 1942, he had been living as a white man for years in Bucks County, Pa., with Marjorie Content, his second white wife, Mr. Gates said.
“He was running away from a cultural identity that he had inherited,” Mr. Gates said. And this came with consequences: “He never, ever wrote anything remotely approaching the originality and genius of ‘Cane,’ ” Mr. Gates said. “I believe it’s because he spent so much time running away from his identity.”
“I feel sorry for him,” he added.
In an interview Mr. Byrd, a professor of American studies at Emory, said the new research “resets the starting point for discussions about Toomer’s racial background, and its influence on his art.” (Mr. Byrd said that Toomer’s art and time were also consumed by his involvement as a teacher of the philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, the Russian psychologist and mystic.)
Thousands of African-Americans since slavery times grew weary of the struggle of being black in American and decided to pass, Mr. Gates said. But “it is difficult to think of someone who constructed such a complex artifice trying to justify that decision to others but also to himself,” he said of Toomer.
Mr. Gates and Mr. Byrd write that Toomer’s rejection of racial labels and racial essentialism may find an intrigued (and even receptive) audience among a new generation of readers in the age of Obama.
The new edition reintroduces Toomer and his role as one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black, an assumption on which the racial pecking order is founded, said William L. Andrews, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, a literature professor at Columbia University, said the census information would be useful in her teaching but didn’t alter her views of Toomer or “Cane.”
“The bottom line,” she said in an e-mail, “is that he wrote his most powerful, provocative and beautiful book during a period in which he was actively identifying himself as partially black and discovering and claiming to honor that part of his identity.”
“Unlike many others,” she added, “because of the way that he looked, he could choose to deny that identity later in life.”
Given Toomer’s views, Mr. Andrews said, he probably felt no need to inform people about “the African strain” in his heritage. “If people didn’t ask,” he said, “I expect he didn’t tell.”
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