Cane (16 page)

As we have seen, Toomer attended the all-black Henry Highland Garnet School (named in honor of the pioneering nineteenth-century black nationalist) for his elementary education, and then the famous Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, previously known as M Street High School, the District’s first public high school for African Americans, named after the famous black poet, from which he graduated in 1914. Dunbar High School was more like a black private school, an Exeter or Andover for African Americans, than a normal public school. Its teachers and students, incredibly, included several members of the Negro intellectual elite, the group that W. E. B. Du Bois would call “the talented tenth,” the “college-bred Negro.” Among its stellar alumni were the poet Sterling A. Brown, the feminist Nannie Helen Burroughs, the physician Charles R. Drew, and the lawyer and civil rights advocate Charles Hamilton Houston. (Both Brown and Houston would take advanced degrees from Harvard.) Dunbar High School’s distinguished faculty included many Ph.D.’s, such as the sociologist Kelly Miller and the Harvard-trained historian, Carter G. Woodson, along with the woman’s rights activist Mary Church Terrell, poet Angelina Weld Grimké (the niece of Reverend Francis J. Grimké, who had married Toomer’s parents), and Anna Julia Cooper, Toomer’s Latin teacher, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. Scholars who should have been professors in the Ivy League found their best job opportunities at this public high school.

Despite these extraordinarily well-trained teachers, however, Toomer’s education at school was apparently not nearly as fulfilling as those evenings spent with his beloved Uncle Bismarck, when he was the center of attention and Bismarck’s mesmerizing pedagogical methods opened his nephew’s mind to facts and mysteries at a pace that suited him best. Toomer found in Bismarck a badly needed father figure, of course; but he also had learning difficulties that even a school as sophisticated as Dunbar would have been ill-prepared to meet: “I had difficulty in learning to read. For some reason or other, try as hard as I would I couldn’t get on the inside of the thing: the letters and characters obstinately withheld their sense from me, and the lines of words behind which meaning lurked were like closed doors which stubbornly refused me entrance. I gazed with hopeless amazement at the older children, the teacher, the grownup members of my family who read so easily and seemed to think nothing of it.”
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Whether Toomer was dyslexic or merely a slow reader it is difficult to know, but in due course he overcame this frustration with deciphering the written word: “In time, however, reading had become just an ordinary thing which I was compelled to continue. I found but little to attract me in the various school readers. Some of the stories I liked, but they were not half as wonderful as those told me by Bismarck, and moreover, whatever pleasure or interest they may have had for me was spoiled when they were put through the mill of classroom recitations.”
⁴²

Toomer, like many people with learning disabilities embarrassed by their inability to learn at a pace with other students, created diversions in school: “I was the class-room cut up,” he recalls, “and the teacher’s problem.”
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Kerman and Eldridge speculate that Toomer’s disruptive classroom behavior may have had its roots in his resentment at being separated from his white friends on Bacon Street and the shock of attending a black school: “Surely resentment at being arbitrarily shut out of his group, as well as the inevitable lack of resources at a black school in Washington at the height of the Jim Crow era, would have affected what was offered to him and how Jean would accept it.”
⁴⁴
Though highly unlikely, as we shall see, these factors could possibly explain why the “little whippersnapper,” as his grandfather called him, was uncomfortable at the Garnet School, and necessarily at odds with its pedagogy: “I resented and resisted it. I had an almost constant feeling that I was being maltreated.”
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Nonetheless, as something of a self-consciously privileged child—a child with an almost mythic grandfather and an absent father whom he would seek to transform into a myth—living in a community in which light skin color could signify upper-class status, Toomer was able to use his class status to his advantage in the classroom: “At the same time, I had a lot of fun in school. Some of this fun was natural to the gay spirit of childhood. Some sprang from an instinctive resistance to authority…. I felt somewhat privileged and immune owing to grandfather’s position and influence…”
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Toomer’s matriculation at Garnet Elementary School and Dunbar High School afforded him the opportunity to acquire a very special education in what James Weldon Johnson, describing his years at Atlanta University (both the preparatory school and the university), termed the “arcana of race.”
⁴⁷
For Johnson, who would later correspond with Toomer regarding the possibility of the inclusion of some of his poems in a revised edition of his
The Book of American Negro Poetry
(1922, 1931), “the initiation into the arcana of race” meant “preparation to meet the tasks and exigencies of life as a Negro, a realization of the peculiar responsibilities due to my own racial group, and a comprehension of the application of American democracy to Negro citizens.”
⁴⁸
Toomer’s initiation into the arcana of race would mean something quite different altogether. As he claims in his autobiography, he “formed and formulated” his racial position in the summer of 1914 just before he left Washington to matriculate at the University of Wisconsin.
⁴⁹
He took this important step toward self-definition because he was keenly aware of his hybrid racial background, the racial ambiguity of his physical appearance, the questions and stares it elicited, the fact that he had lived in both the white and black worlds, and that he could, if he chose, continue to do so, or even choose one over the other.

When Toomer attended the Garnet School, he was living in the home of his grandparents, which was located on Bacon Street in a neighborhood that at the time was composed of wealthy whites. During these years between 1894 and 1906, Toomer’s neighbors and playmates were white, but his classmates at Garnet School were all black. In 1906, Toomer’s mother, Nina Pinchback, remarried and moved to New York with her son and second husband, Archibald Combes, a traveling salesman for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. During this second and relatively brief marriage, Toomer lived and attended schools for three years in the white neighborhoods in Brooklyn and also in New Rochelle. After his mother’s tragic, apparently avoidable death by appendicitis in the summer of 1909, Toomer returned to Washington, D.C. Here, he lived with his Uncle Bismarck and his family on Florida Avenue in a black neighborhood. A year later in 1910 he enrolled at Dunbar High School. Now, for the second time in his life, Toomer found himself attending school in what he described as “the colored world.”
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But in fact, all of Toomer’s primary and secondary education, except for the three years in New York, took place in “the colored world,” under black teachers, surrounded by all-black classmates, in an all-black cultural environment. For Toomer, however, “the initiation into the arcana of race” did not mean preparation for “life as a Negro” and leadership among the race as it would be for Johnson and other members of Du Bois’s talented tenth. Rather, Toomer would have us believe that this initiation would be a means of acquiring an understanding of social relations and the operations of power as a member of what he termed “an aristocracy—such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America—midway between the white and Negro worlds.”
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But Toomer and his family did not live “midway” between these two worlds; rather, they lived, to a greater or lesser degree, as light-skinned black people who, for a time, managed to defy the color line and live in white residential neighborhoods. The Pinchbacks were undoubtedly aristocrats within the black world, but more likely were visitors or voyeurs or interlopers within the white world. The fact that Toomer attended the Garnet School even when his family lived in a white neighborhood underscores how rigid racial boundaries, in fact, were in Washington. By no stretch of the imagination, despite Toomer’s claims to the contrary, did this class of Negroes enjoy equal status with their white class peers, especially in racially stratified Washington, D.C., at the beginning of the twentieth century. Toomer, clearly, is asserting this claim—just as he had done about his grandfather passing as a Negro—to lay the autobiographical and sociological groundwork for his self-fashioning as a pioneering member of a new elite, an upper class of mixed-race individuals who would be points of mediation between white Americans and black Americans.

From 1909 to 1914, Toomer once again was a member of Washington’s fabled colored aristocracy, a world he would analyze and critique to great effect. Toomer is at pains to assure us that the transition into this world involved no hardship for him: “It was not difficult to do so. I accepted this as readily as I had accepted living in Brooklyn and New Rochelle.”
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Writing in an elegiac mode, Toomer reconstructs the character of the world he entered when he took up residence with his Uncle Bismarck after returning from New York, along the way arguing implausibly that this class of Negroes just “happened” arbitrarily to be defined as Negroes, as if the history of their families’ racial identification and the history of their participation in Negro culture had had no relevance on the shaping of their identities: “In the Washington of those days—and those days have gone now—there was a flowering of a natural but transient aristocracy, thrown up by the, for them, creative conditions of the post-war period. These people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, happened to find themselves in the colored group. They had a personal refinement, a certain inward culture and beauty, a warmth of feeling such as I have seldom encountered elsewhere and again…. All were comfortably fixed financially, and they had a social life that satisfied them…. The children of these families became my friends.”
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Because of the similarities in class, the transition from the white world into the colored world was, Toomer is arguing, a seamless one, in spite of the fact that, he would have us believe, he had effectively been “white” in New York and now was “black” in Washington. It is important to emphasize that Toomer is postulating an almost mythic class and racial formation, a “people, whose racial strains were mixed and for the most part unknown, and who happened to find themselves in the colored group,” who have, alas, disappeared (“those days are gone now”). He writes here of a racially and culturally distinct group
within
the “colored group,” “an aristocracy…midway between the white and Negro worlds,”
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which enjoyed considerable economic privilege, a class of which he and his family were always a part. Toomer’s depiction of this class-within-a-class, as it were, a point of mediation between black and white, is another component in his rhetorical strategy of declaring racial independence as a member of the vanguard of a raceless
tertium quid
.

In Washington, Toomer most certainly lived among the Negro elite, but it was disingenuous of him to suggest that its members were racially or culturally indeterminate; they were legally defined as Negroes, whether they liked it or not. And this would have been especially the case at the turn of the century following the
Plessy v. Ferguson
Supreme Court ruling of 1896, which declared “separate but equal” as the law of the land, the ruling itself a desperate attempt to police the boundaries that interracial sexual liaisons had hopelessly blurred. Toomer never tells us, if we but pause to think about it, why his family, living effortlessly as “white” in New York, found itself sending its child to an all-black school in Washington. Surely, no white family would have done that out of choice. But Toomer does this to establish the experiential justification for his subsequent decision to define himself as an “American.”

Toomer assures us that he identified implicitly with this new way of life, and certainly his earlier life on Bacon Street had prepared him for it: “They were my kind, as much as children of my early Washington years had been.”
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Toomer emphasizes their social, racial, and cultural uniqueness: “These youths had their round of activity, parties, interests—and were self-sufficient. In their world they were not called colored by each other. They seldom or never came in contact with members of the white group in any way that would make them racially self-conscious.”
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Occupying this liminal world of a mulatto elite, Toomer is arguing, it is not difficult to understand how he could define himself as “neither white nor black.”
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And yet it is also difficult to understand how Toomer could even suggest that within this period of American racial history that any white American at the time would label him as anything other than black. Anticipating the curiosity, confusion, and misunderstanding that his body, speech, and appearance would engender, and no doubt seeking to escape the boundaries imposed upon persons of African descent, Toomer tells us he formed his own “racial position” before leaving what he would have us believe was a “special” race world of Washington, D.C., to attend college in 1914. If so, he became one of the earliest proponents of the theory that “race” was socially constructed, even if his motives for doing so were quite mixed. Moreover, he would spend the rest of his life, following the publication of
Cane
, socially constructing his racial indeterminacy, and simultaneously deconstructing his Negro ancestry.