Visions of Their America: Waldo Frank's Jewish Modernist Influence on Jean Toomer's "Fern".

Yellin, Michael Joseph

Jean Toomer's "Fern" (1921), which was included in his modernist masterpiece Cane, revolves around the comparison between the appearance of the title character, the daughter of an impoverished black sharecropper, and a Jewish cantor's mournful singing. This comparison belongs to the long tradition of identification between African Americans and Jews, which began with African American slaves reading themselves into the biblical narrative of Hebrew slaves escaping bondage in Egypt. Although Toomer's narrator alludes to slavery and the "common delta" of the Nile and the Mississippi, his version of this identification is significantly different from those that came before it because it references a religious figure from contemporary Jewish culture. Indeed, Toomer modernized the allusion by imagining similarities between an African American woman and Jewish man who could possibly have met (however unlikely) in 1920s America. More importantly, the question of each character's place in modernity is central to Toomer's representation of them.

Although the pathos that Toomer evokes through this comparison is readily accessible, critics have struggled to explicate the specificity of his allusion. Most have assumed that Toomer is alluding to biblical Hebrews. (1) William Boelhower is one critic who acknowledges that Toomer imagines a modern bond of suffering between African Americans and Jews: "Under slavery, African Americans were subjected to biopolitical conditions similar to those of the Jews in the concentration camps of the 1940s: becoming a people foreign to itself, without form, denied self- definition, and incapable of myth" (205). Boelhower goes on to explain that African Americans became % people with people" through a 'gift economy,' or an "inextricable network of obligations, redprocities, and acts of politeness" (206). Fern, he says, is a "conduit" over which the exchange of pain and suffering takes place (Boelhower 206). She sacrifices her body, "[e]mptying herself in a gesture of extreme and total abjection," in service to her people.

The anachronistic reference to the Holocaust aside, Boelhower correctly identifies the modern resonance of Toomer's comparison between African Americans and Jews. However, he does not account for Toomer's ambivalent identification with suffering. Moreover, he ignores a key element of Fern's identity: her facial hybridity. (2) At the conclusion of the text, Toomer reveals Fern's Jewish surname--Rosen- thereby declaring that this African American character is also Jewish. Toomer replaces the allegorical, trans-mythical identification between African Americans and Jewish Americans with a racial hybrid who embodies the regeneration of American culture. This movement from allegory toward facial fusion is connected to Toomer's misgivings about the political significance of suffering and spirituality, expressed in his 1920s notebook, and his ambivalent identification with Waldo Frank.

Waldo Frank was a Jewish intellectual who wrote Our America (1919), a seminal modernist jeremiad that criticizes America's slavish adherence to the pioneer pragmatism of its Puritan forefathers and announces the important role Jews will play in America's future. His portrait of Jewish avant-garde composer Leo Ornstein in this text influenced Toomer's representation of Fern. Frank declares that Ornstein's connection to Jewish history, particularly his embrace of Jews' history of suffering, provides him with enough potential spiritual energy to lead the regeneration of American culture. Playing with the notion that a history of suffering simmers with energy, Toomer implicitly invokes Frank's modernist conception of a usable past in "Fern." Moreover, by ascribing a distinctly modern sense of beauty and historical significance to a marginalized and impoverished figure, Toomer responds to Frank's call to challenge the "genteel tradition" of white Christian cultural hegemony.

As "Fern" develops, however, Toomer breaks away from Frank's ideas. Examining the structural and tropic similarities between Frank's portrait of Ornstein and Toomer's description of Fern's canefield breakdown shows that the latter is an implicit rebuttal to the former. Whereas Ornstein is a virile Jewish prophet who transmutes a history of suffering, Fern is a frigid martyr who collapses under the weight of such a history. Fern's body does not become a conduit for the release of revolutionary energy; rather, it becomes a site of trauma to which the hellhounds of a tragic history repressed deep within her psyche return. Ultimately it is not the spiritual power of Fern's suffering but rather her embodiment of a new race that makes her heroic. Put differently, Frank saw suffering as productive of a heroic Jewish race that would redeem Jews and America; Toomer viewed such suffering as unavoidable but regarded it as the price to be paid for creating a new, racially hybrid identity. Toomer simultaneously draws on Frank's mystical Judaism and distances himself from it.

The importance of the Toomer-Frank relationship should not be underestimated, for it reveals "Fern" to be an affirmative vision of a new race rising from the burning ashes of the old rather than a familiar modernist expression of impotence and desiccated sexuality. Placing Toomer's text in the context of Frank's Our America animates the concluding image of Fern sitting alone on her porch. Her hybridity is cast as an active, regenerative force. Indeed, this literary context shows that Toomer was not circumscribed by Alain Locke's definition of a "New Negro." He continually struggled against essentialist conceptions of race as well as the degradation of hybrid bodies (or more precisely, the degradation of his own body). While it would be reductive to draw conclusions about Toomer's literary work from the surface details of his biography, close textual analysis of "Fern" and Our America shows that Toomer reified his facial identity through the composition of his tide character.

The complexity of Toomer's perspective on race emerged from his concerns regarding his own identity. Toomer feared that white intellectuals might identify him simply as a primitive (and therefore vestigial) "Negro" who had no central role to play in defining America's future. In a 1922 letter to Frank, he carefully frames the complexity of his facial identity and challenges common presumptions about African Americans: My own life has been about equally divided between the two racial groups. My grandfather, owing to his emphasis upon a fraction of Negro blood in his veins, attained prominence in Reconstruction politics. And the family, for the most part, ever since, has lived between two worlds, now dipping into the Negro, now into the white. Some few are definitely white; others definitely colored. I alone have stood for a synthesis in the matters of the mind and the spirit analogous, perhaps, to the actual fact of at least six blood minglings. The history, traditions, and culture of rive of these are available in some approximation of the truth. Of the Negro, what facts are known have too often been perverted for the purposes of propaganda, one way or the other. It has been necessary, therefore, that I spend a disproportionate time in Negro study. Recently, facts and possibilities discovered have lead to an interest mainly artistic and interpretive. (Letter to Waldo Frank)

Here, as elsewhere, Toomer declares the hybridity of his facial background and claims his interest in "Negro study" has been motivated by the perversion of "Negro" identity in public discourse. By distinguishing himself from "Negroes," Toomer defends himself against Frank's possible assumptions. Moreover, he states that his exploration of "the facts and possibilities" of his racial identity has led him to view "Negroes" through an artistic and interpretive lens, which connotes both identification and simultaneous disidentification. He distances himself from a piece of his self-acknowledged identity by transforming it into art. These lines exemplify Toomer's presentation of his race to Frank throughout their friendship. He always maintained that he alone had the power to define the fact and meaning of the "synthesis ... of six blood minglings" in his body.

Interestingly, although Toomer claimed Jewish ancestry in a letter to the editors of The Liberator, he never mentioned such ancestry, nor did he ever refer to Jews or Jewish identity, in his correspondence with Frank (Jean Toomer Reader 15). (3) The conspicuous absence of such references, as well as Toomer's comments on African Americans in these letters, hint at deeper ambivalence regarding his racial identification. Furthermore, while he was attracted to Frank's audacious valorization of American Jews in Our America, he did not share Frank's faith in the value of suffering. To explicate this ambivalence more fully, it is necessary to juxtapose Toomer's correspondence and a roughly concurrent notebook from the 1920s. In the notebook, he links weakness with spiritual piety. He writes, Those who are weak, and suffer because of their weakness, resent it (provided they have strength enough for that) if you do not sympathise with them. That is, they resent your superiority. Sympathy makes equal[.] The weakest people whom I know are the most pious. Sincerely pious, not hypocritically so. It is a symptom of weakness when one must bring [God], equality, liberty, and justice to one's support. (Notebook, Jean Toomer Papers) (4)

Toomer offers the inverted image of the noble stoic as a pitiful victim whose only recourse is to lie prostrate before his superior. As he makes clear in the final line, "God equality, liberty and justice" are the doughty vestments worn by those who lack power. Toomer expresses a Nietzschean dismissal of the religious and democratic institutions that buttress the weak in their engagements with the strong.

At the same time, these lines not only deride spirituality but also lead, later in this notebook, to Toomer's self-indictment for his own weakness as a member of a disenfranchised race. After dismissing the value of piety, he laments the fact "that the working classes, particularly the dark skinned among the working classes, are still weak.... If the workers could bellow, 'We want power,' the walls of capitalism would collapse. They are yet too weak for that. They give out cat-meows for 'freedom.'" He then identifies with these politically impotent African Americans, declaring It is evidence of weakness that men like myself are not forced into the service of the governing class or exiled, or murdered. I should say, that it is evidence of a recognition of weakness. The master knows that little or nothing that I will ever say will have much effect w/ you the masses. They permit my existence because they, (the sharpest among them) are confident of my solitude. (Notebook)

Such identification is awash in self-loathing; Toomer abhors his own inconsequence and longs for recognition from the "governing class." These lines also show that he measures his significance in terms of an audience of the "masses" who will listen to what he has to say. More than anything, Toomer fears the "solitude" of insignificance.

Toomer further explicates his ambivalent identification with solitude, spiritual piety, and weakness in a metaphor that follows the above passages in his notebook. He writes: A moth, it is chaste. That it is delicate grey [sic ], that its fragile wings are covered with a fine powder, convey to one an impression of chastity. Likewise, to many men, a moth, fluttering around a candle, is symbolic of innocence that is virginal. But who wants to be a moth? Clearly those who have no other choice. Someone demurs? For proof ask any beautiful woman, eighteen to twenty-eight, to choose between a queenbee and a moth. (Notebook)

On one level, a moth signifies the musty virgin (the soon-to-be spinster) who lacks desire for physical pleasure as well as the capacity to engage the desire of men. Words like "chastity," "innocence," and "virginal" connote the purity associated with the pious ascetic. Toomer challenges the choice to live removed from material desires outright: "But who wants to be a moth?" He claims that no woman would choose moth-like asceticism over the wanton power of a "queenbee." Only those abject women who "[c]learly ... have no other choice" but to live as moths are protective and prideful of their innocence because they lack the will to buzz and soar like a queen bee. Spiritual piety and purity, he argues, serve as the consolations for a lack of agency.

On another level, the "delicate grey" color of the moth is a racial signifier: neither white nor black, it signifies racial hybridity and the archetype of the "tragic mulatto." The queen bee, which may also refer to the blues queens of the 1920s (e.g., Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, etc.), stands for a figure whose certainty of her racial identity affords her the capacity for sexual expression. (5) Facing alienation from blacks and whites, the mulatto moth experiences psychic stress that eliminates sexual desire and leads to tragic isolation. As a mixed-race person who agonized over his own sociopolitical impotence, solitude, and fragility, Toomer ruefully identified with the grayness of the moth. Yet, rather than slip into a funk over this self-identification, Toomer reclaimed his grayness, reinventing as a sign of metamorphosis. As he states in a passage that closely follows the moth metaphor in his notebook, "Nothing is. All life is becoming. Art is the highest expression, manifestation of this process. An artist creates; he grows. He is a stalk thrusting ever upward, and his works are the leaves and the branches which he puts out. There is no final flower" (Notebook). If life is "becoming" and not fixed, then a discrete race rooted in its own purity (protected over generations) is ultimately backward and vestigial compared to racial hybrids who carry the physical attributes of humanity's future. Toomer's art would become the means through which he would express this personal mythology, and racial hybridity as a sign of liberatory transformation would be its key feature.

In "Fern," Toomer transforms the "tragic mulatta" archetype into a triumphant (albeit fragile) figure whose hybridity embodies human evolution toward a new race. Toomer implicitly shows that the true value of the moth is not her soul or her faith in spirituality but rather her hybrid body He also shows in Cane that the sexual desire of queen bees--both black and white is naturally projected across racial divides, thus producing gray moths. As the old racial order consigns itself to the ashcan of history, an amalgamated race arises. Cane dramatizes this process and establishes a hierarchical relationship between primitive queen bees and more evolved moths.

Toomer's ruminations over his racial hybridity roughly coincide with his discovery of Frank's Our America. Indeed, each development fed the other and both ultimately led to the success of Toomer's literary work. In addition to being a modernist meditation on American history, Our America challenges the nation's white Christian hegemony. More specifically, Frank criticizes the "pioneer" mentality and materialism that had prevented America from realizing the liberatory possibilities of spirituality. Tracing America's cultural lineage back to the Puritans, Frank derides the descendants of Puritan pioneers for embracing pragmatism rather than spiritualism, and becoming "Reason's servant[s]" (Our America 28). To avoid the dead- end of pragmatism, Frank exhorts his reader to join a multicultural, spiritual vanguard that will regenerate America and lead it toward fulfilling its democratic promise.

Frank reserves a special place for Jews in this vanguard. Identifying his own people as the progenitors of a utopian future may be self-aggrandizing, but Frank was not alone in making such a claim. Frank's commentary on the political potential of Jews was informed by Randolph Bourne's "The Jew and Trans-National America" (1916), in which Bourne argued that Jews--specifically Zionists--are the ideal citizens of a transnational country because they are a self-consciously deracinated people who must balance their "political allegiance" to America and their "cultural allegiance" to Zionism. Frank concurs with Bourne that Jews are the ideal citizens to build a new America, but he replaces Bourne's claims of Jews' salutary political duality with a more vexing psychic ambivalence: an internal conflict between material desires and memories of deeply rooted mysticism sleeping within them. As the chapter "The Chosen People" unfolds, this notion of sleeping mysticism begins to signify the repression of religious memory. Frank contends that Jewish immigrants, upon finding material success, began searching for ways to excise the "religious memories" that "haunted" them. He also recasts the grandest achievements of secular Jews in the fields of science and psychology as tools for holding spiritual yearnings at bay (Our America 85; 84; 87).

Frank admits that other ethnic groups have also experienced this conflict between materialism and spiritualism, but he contends that the Jew did everything "a little more intensely, a little more like the fanatic, than his brothers. For not alone was his nature intrinsically pitched at a high key: he needed the added stress in order to combat the mystical yearnings which his reason covered" (Our America 88). The words "intensely," "fanatic," "stress," and "combat" connote the inward aggression that is the reverse face of the aggression directed toward Christians who have oppressed Jews. While conquering the new world, the Jew conquers himself. As a result, the American Jew is always teetering on the line between material success and nervous collapse. Such internal aggression produces potential energy that can be redirected for revolutionary purposes. Prophesizing the return of Jews' repressed ancient mysticism, he declares: Sons of an ancient Sacrifice these aggressive and worldly and compromising men who fill our markets and our professions. But let it not be overlooked: the Jew who dwindles himself down to these is sick and restless. The stifled Will is ready to burst forth. And in the most degraded families of Jews, you find them: solitary sons and daughters, stirring and rebellious--outposts-in whom that will has become once more incarnate. (Frank, Our America 92)

In confronting the degradation of American Jews, Frank represents them as abject-emasculated and unsexed by the material opportunities that putatively signify their agency. He also claims, however, that the restless spirit that resides within them cannot be repressed any longer and that the energy expended stifling their mysticism will "burst forth" in the incarnation of a new creative spirit.

In later chapters of Our America, Frank offers portraits of individual Jews who epitomize his conception of a Jewish vanguard. Frank's portrait of Leo Ornstein is especially important in its influence on Toomer's representation of Jews in "Fern." Ornstein was the son of a cantor and a high modernist composer known for deploying disturbingly dissonant sounds in his compositions. His early work was fraught with such passionate nihilism that even Ornstein felt compelled to step back into melody and more harmonious sounds. The work that is perhaps most relevant here is Poems of 1917 (1917), ten short piano pieces delving into the horrors of World War One. The original published manuscript of this music is prefaced by a poem written by Frank that refers to the agony and sorrow of the survivors of the war (Anderson). The music is fraught with fragile melodies shaken by rumbling chords and bass lines that come to dominate the performance in a muscular rush. Percussive crashes burst forth, harrying the melodies to premature conclusions and leaving the listener gasping for breath. In this piece of music, Ornstein captures the moment at which repressed demons of the unconscious upset the fragile balance of human psyches.

Most importantly to Frank, Ornstein's music demonstrates the potential energy locked within American Jews' memory of their Hebrew past. He found in the modernist sound of Ornstein's piano a seminal nexus of painful history, virility, and empowerment. Describing in his Memoirs the first time he heard Ornstein play, Frank writes that at the end of the performance "Leo drooped over the keys, like a spent male after coitus, his head down as if he were praying" and that he, Frank, "shouldered through the throng" to throw his "arms about Leo Ornstein, loving him at once because [he] loved the music" (Memoirs 65). For Frank, this embrace signified his reconnection with his own Jewish past and his new role as a prophet.

In Our America, he sanctifies Ornstein as a prophet of the coming reign of mystical Judaism over regenerated American soil. He writes Ornstein's music is not Russian.... He calls it Hebrew. And he is right. It is the full-throated cry of the young Jew in a young world. Background of the Old--passion of pain and storm and deep repression. But upon it, breaks of tire, interstices of light, America's release. The weight of sorrow of the Jew like a loading atmosphere about him. And the Jew's intricate response: reasoning and wailing, the birth of faith, the tidal pour of energy in faith. New hope, new deed, new life. An answer to the lamentations of the Jewish rate in Ornstein's music: a sort of angry joy, lust of a new world's conquest. Hebrew the seed: American the fruit.... [W]hen all our people have at last come through suffering to longing, and thence to the release in life, they will find in them music. And it will be American. It will be near kin to the music of Leo Ornstein, with his burden of a stifled race and his clashing paeans of release. (187-88)

Frank figures Ornstein as a conduit through which "lamentations of the Jewish fate" flow into music. Summoning the demons Jews have repressed in the newly found flush of American financial success, Ornstein is able to come "through suffering to longing, and thence to the release in life." Frank implies that suffering Jews are so consumed with pain and tragedy that they lack desire: they are impotent and emasculated. By embracing and performing the agonizing pain of Jewish history held within personal memory, Ornstein regains his virility and experiences an orgasmic release that has the power to regenerate American soil laid to waste by industrialism.

Frank's description of Ornstein's performance figures the experience of tragedy as the seminal moment of empowerment and recasts the most degraded individuals as founding fathers of a new age--no small feat for a Jew working under the shadow of white Christian hegemony. It is easy to see why a young African American man like Toomer, desperate to prove his significance in a country that denied his manhood, would become so enamored of Frank's writing and his persona.

A letter written on August 4, 1922 to Mae Wright, Toomer's African American lover and another source of inspiration for Cane, reveals the extent to which Toomer had absorbed Our America. (6) Declaring his self-importance, Toomer decries the "Tyranny of the Anglo-Saxon Ideal" that dictates "white skin is the most beautiful and desirable in the world; the minds of the white race are superior to those of any other race; the souls of white folk are the chosen of God." He adds that while other peoples, including Jews (which he adds in pen in the margins), are open to the beauty and contributions from a spectrum of faces, "we of the darker skins cannot. Paradoxical as it may seem, we who have Negro blood in our veins, who are culturally and emotionally the most removed from the Puritan tradition, are its most tenacious supporters." He continues on to say that African Americans must feel (and glory in the feeling) the abundance and power of Negro-derived emotions. They must learn how not to squander them in sensual ways, but express them in a wonderfully rich and fertile art. To do these things is to come from under the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon ideal. To do these things is to create a living ideal of one's own. (Letter to Wright, 4 Aug. 1922)

Following Frank's example, Toomer declares that African Americans must tap the potential residing in the recesses of their historical identities, yet he fears that such potential could be squandered on worldly delights. Perhaps more importantly, Toomer, like Frank, asserts that embracing one's historical identity is a way to fight modern cultural hegemony.

Toomer was so impressed with Our America that he wrote a response to Mary Austin's "New York: Dictator of American Criticism," a scathing review of the book that dismisses Frank as a Jew whose vision of America is clouded by "his profound complex of election"; she also declares that New York is "only a half-way house of immigration, a little less than a half-way house for European thinking" (Austin 129). Toomer's response appeared in the socialist New York Call in October 1920 (Scruggs and VanDemarr 3). (7) Comparing Austin s anti-Semitism to Jim Crow racism, Toomer contends that Austin's repudiation of Frank is analogous to a white southerner's stating, "No, th' nigger ain't un-American, so far as that goes; a good nigger's all right. An' he's damn useful pickin' cotton. But let him keep away from the polls. I ain't going to have no nigger legislating for me" (Scruggs and VanDemarr 230). Toomer argues that while both Jews and African Americans are provisionally accepted for their usefulness, both groups are disenfranchised from political power and thus prevented from shaping the destiny of their country. Aligning the power to interpret with the power to legislate, he implies that Austin's underlying fear is that New York Jewish intellectuals analyzing forms of American expression will threaten America's political order. Furthermore, this comparison highlights the way in which African Americans were forced into subaltern status similar to that of recent immigrants. Toomer declares that Jim Crow racism strips African Americans of their legal, political, and economic rights as Americans, thereby separating whites and blacks by a metaphorical gulf as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

Toomer's editorial also alludes, however, to a distinction between his views and Frank's. Whereas Frank focuses on the unique and discrete characteristics of the "chosen people," Toomer emphasizes a blending of faces. This is evinced in the following declaration offered in his response to Austin: It is a bitter dose for a certain class of Gentiles to think of the future American including Jewish blood; and it is equally galling for the Orthodox Jew to contemplate the fusion of the Hebrew and the Christian. It would occasion a rupture of friendship, if not a fight, to suggest to the average white man that the blood of his future grandchildren will commingle [with Negroes. In addition there is the] current nonsense among Negroes of the white race being degenerate. (Scruggs and VanDemarr 228)

Toomer neither blames one culture for the degeneration of American society nor links his hopes for the future to any one race. He imagines the creation of a new race. Moreover, he not only equates Orthodox Jews' resistance to assimilation (one wonders if he is referring to the mass of Russian Jews who were considered inassimilable) with white Christian nativism but also figures Jews racially as Hebrews to be fused with Christians. The importance of his refiguration of cultural assimilation as facial amalgamation cannot be overstated. On the surface, Toomer seems to reify facial distinctions between Jews and Gentiles; however, the reverse is true: Toomer represents facial distinctions as mutable and fluidity among races as natural.

In the same paragraph, he adds that the commingling of races, "frightful to the narrow and the prejudiced as are nature's elements to the uninformed, will come to pass. And there is tremendous good inherent in their certainty. In them rests the seed of the true American, the evolved spiritual pioneer of humanity" (Scruggs and VanDemarr 228). The reference to evolution is vital. In Jean Toomer, Artist, Nellie McKay notes that Toomer "immersed himself" in the writing of Herbert Spencer while living in Chicago between 1916 and 1917 (24). She also says that while working in the library of City College in New York, Toomer read George Bernard Shaw and was influenced by his notion (borrowed from Lamarck) that striving species could will evolution. Shaw's belief that the creative arts could spark such evolution also influenced his thinking (McKay 25). In response to Austin, Toomer frames segregation as the unnatural obstruction to the production of a new, more highly evolved race. Later in his correspondence with Frank, he resisted applying terms like "Jew" or "Jewish" to Frank or "Negro" to himself because they falsely represented eternalized and essentialized categories that were actually commingling and evolving into something superior. This idea marks a small but ultimately significant rift between Toomer and Frank.

There were other differences as well. Toomer initially identified with Frank's spirituality and his descriptions of degradation redeemed by a faith in Hebraic messianic prophecies because they infused "moths" with a sense of meaning denied them in a world dominated by queen bees. However, he could not fully share Frank's faith in the power of spiritual piety. Toomer and Frank bonded as marginalized figures who grasped at a teleology that assuaged self-doubt, but Toomer's ambivalence ultimately led to their estrangement. (8)

The strongest expression of Toomer's ambivalence does not appear in his correspondence with Frank, but rather does in a second letter to Mae Wright written on August 21, 1922. This letter reveals Toomer's doubts regarding the spiritual power of ancient Hebrews. Referring to the Old Testament, Toomer writes, "They feared everything they could not readily understand. They feared the thunder, the lightning, all the large natural forces. They feared their dead ancestors. They feared God. (Witness the amount of fear in evidence in such a comparatively recent and sublime document as the Old Testament.)" Whereas Frank glorifies the strength of ancient Hebrews--the potential energy that Ornstein unleashes in his music--in Our America, Toomer clearly associates the people of the Old Testament with quavering supplication. (9) Toomer's comments to Mae Wright elucidate the key components of his ambivalence toward Frank's doctrine of Jewish spirituality: deep respect for its celebration of the sublime matched with concern over its preoccupation with suffering and subordination.

To progress beyond this disempowering fear, one must, according to Toomer's letter, "replace fear with love," as "Christ and Buddah [sic]" have taught. Toomer draws on Christian rhetoric to emphasize this progression: The religion of Christ is a difficult religion. It is easy to fear; so hard to love.... [M]ost of us lack the strength and courage to sincerely express it. It is such a powerful thing, that the weaker sides of our natures shrink from its expression. And most of us, strange as it may seem, are ruled by what is weakest in us. Rare is the man who has the courage to be a Christian. (Letter to Wright, 21 Aug. 1922)

Toomer appears to offer here an implicit critique of Frank's Jewish spiritualism. More importantly, his vision of a triumphant love informs much of Cane. In particular, he glorifies the triumph of cross-racial love over racial fear and hatred; such love, he declares, releases the seeds of a New America.

In sum, Toomer's correspondence with Frank (and with Wright) contains his praise for as well as resistance to Frank's Jewish teleology. Toomer was attempting to extract the burgeoning spirit of Frank's writing from the celebration of suffering in which it was embedded. The motivation for this ambivalent engagement with Frank's ideas was his encroaching insecurity about his racial identity and marginalized social status. Put another way, Toomer admired and identified with Frank's temerity to reject the Anglo Saxon ideal, but he always needed to assert that such identification was partial and temporary--as was his devotion to "Negro study." The fullest expression of this ambivalent engagement can be found in "Fern."

"Fern is one of the most enigmatic and haunting stories in Cane. The story opens with the narrator's lyrical portrait of the enthralling title character and follows his engagement with this character through three sections and a final coda. Before unpacking the meaning of this opening portrait, however, we need to understand the role Fern plays in the Jim Crow South where "the soft listless cadence" of folksongs hangs in the air (Cane 17). Exploring the dynamics of sexual desire in the South, Toomer fashions the title character as a tragic figure whose "strange eyes" seek "nothing--that is, nothing that [is] obvious and tangible and that one [can] see, and they g[i]ve the impression that nothing [is] to be denied." The narrator adds, "When a woman seeks, you will have observed, her eyes deny. Fern's eyes denied nothing that you could give her; there was no reason why they should withhold." Men who gaze into her eyes imagine that she is "easy." However, this vision of free love is mere illusion. The narrator states that "When she was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it. And then, once done, they felt bound to her (quite unlike their hit and run with other girls), felt as though it would take them a lifetime to fulfill an obligation which they could find no name for." Men who believe they can fill the cavernous absence of her eyes with their sexual desire leave her, baffled and ashamed, yet vowing to themselves that some day they would do some fine thing for her: send her candy every week and not let her know whom it came from, watch out for her wedding-day and give her a magnificent something with no name on it, buy her a house and deed it to her, rescue her from some unworthy fellow who had tricked her into marrying him. (14)

But just as the rural landscape of the South is imbued with a sense of an immutable tragedy that cannot be ameliorated by material progress, Fern remains unmoved in the face of men "bringing her their bodies" and offering to buy her gifts. Moreover, because of Fern's lack of desire for men, "[a] sort of superstition [has] crept into their consciousness of her being somehow above them." As a result, Fern has become a sad, isolated "virgin" (a gray moth) who is "not to be approached by anyone." She is alone, playing the role of mystical stoic (Cane 16).

Returning to the story's opening, we can now see that the narrator focuses on Fern's appearance to unlock the secret of her mysterious stoicism. His endeavor, though, seems futile. Fern is a black hole that devours history with her eyes. The narrator says that Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in sort cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird's wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why, after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. (Cane 16)

The play of shadow and light in this description signifies racial hybridity, which the narrator imagines is the painful legacy of slavery (Scruggs and VanDemarr 149). Noting these signifiers, the narrator returns to her eyes, as if to question her about her origins. However, rather than revealing that history, her eyes only offer emptiness. A later reference to Fern's eyes show that they consume more than her personal history: "Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia's South" (Cane 17). Indeed, her eyes even swallow the narrator's question, for he "cannot tell" the reader why he seeks them. If Fern is a witness to the history of Africans in America, then she is a silent one who stoically swallows the pain of her people. Perhaps the spectator can catch a glimpse of the South's history from Fern, but she doesn't unpack its mystery. The narrator must work harder to get at the heart of Fern's stoicism.

In an effort to portray this tragic stoicism, which is an imperfect substitute for comprehending it completely, the narrator turns to the same strategy used by generations of African American slaves. He associates Fern, a woman whose family was enslaved and who is disenfranchised in the Jim Crow South, with a Jewish cantor, whose ancestors were enslaved in Egypt. Like the chorus of a blues song, the specific image of the cantor recurs three times in the story (once in each of the story's three main sections). The first iteration seems to be triggered by the narrator's observation that Fern's nose is "aquiline, Semitic." Following this observation, the narrator declares, "If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with iris, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like the mobile rivers, to their common delta." This identification extends to his deployment of the term "common delta," which refers both to the Mississippi delta, at the end of which stood New Orleans and a center of the slave trade, and the Nile delta, where Hebrew slaves toiled under Egyptian slavery. Linking the enslavement of Africans in America with the Biblical narrative of ancient Hebrews not only makes Fern's suffering understandable to the reader but also transplants the suffering of African Americans into a messianic narrative that promises redemption. The narrator taps into the Jewish eschatological belief that moral righteousness in the face of great anguish will be rewarded at the Messiah's return. Suffering in a godless world ruled by a will to power is unbearable; however, suffering in a covertly just world ruled by God's spirit is surmountable. Also, by paralleling the power of the cantor's song to touch the listener and the impact of the "curves of her profile," the narrator intimates that both the cantor and Fern have the ability to transform deep sorrow into profound beauty (Cane 16). At the same time, while the image of a "cantor" alludes to a resolute stoic facing a cruel historical fate, it also refers to a religious figure found in every modern Jewish community. Indeed, the cantor image in "Fern" connotes a modern religious community struggling with its tragic history, not simply biblical Hebrews.

In the first section of Fern, the narrator is a semi-omniscient spectator who maintains a certain degree of distance from the main character. In the following section, he becomes an active participant in the story, and the second iteration of the Jewish cantor image is far more complicated. Describing his first encounter with Fern, the narrator writes, "Some folks already thought that I was nosing around; I let it go at that, so far as questions were concerned. But at first sight of her I felt as if I heard a Jewish cantor sing." Despite the narrator's efforts to let go of his questions regarding Fern, he is drawn to her. The ethereal quality of this encounter is conveyed by synesthesia: when he sees Fern he feels as if he has heard a Jewish cantor. His direct contact with her is rerouted and transformed into vague stimuli that trigger transcendent memories instead of a sense of presence; this line suggests that the narrator does not really see her body but rather what he imagines it represents (Cane 17).

The narrator adds, "As if [the cantor's] singing rose above the unheard chorus of a folk-song," thus implying that the singing of a Jewish cantor exists on a transcendent plane beyond the resonance of the music of African Americans in the rural South. His comment also implies that Fern herself has transcended the culture of her own people, a claim supported by the narrator's earlier observation that the men regard her as "being somehow above them." Moreover, the narrator notes that Fern rests "listless-like on the railing of her porch, back propped against a post, head tilted a little because there was a nail in the porch post just where her head came which for some reason or other she never took the trouble to pull out." The image of the nail post connotes that she is not only a figure alienated from her community but also a spiritual ascetic with little concern for her own comfort (Cane 17).

The second section of "Fern" reflects Toomer's engagement with Frank's belief that Jewish spiritualism redeems suffering by transforming it into mystical stoicism and opens up the possibility of escape from the constraints of material existence. Fern's transcendence through the stoical self-denial of material things echoes Frank's celebration of mystical Jews who renounce materialism in Our America.

Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the mournful singing of a Jewish cantor and Fern's beautiful face suggests that Fern's struggle to swallow the pain of her people has made her beautiful. It is an ethereal beauty, one that rises above the poverty and racism of the Jim Crow South; yet, it is also rooted in the soil of the "Dixie Pike." The narrator acknowledges these roots when considering ways of ameliorating her condition: "picture if you can, this cream-colored solitary girl sitting at a tenement window looking down on the indifferent throngs of Harlem. Better that she listen to folk-songs at dusk in Georgia, you would say, and so would I." The narrator is caught in a terrible paradox: he yearns to preserve Fern's beauty, yet this beauty is ineluctably tied to her fragile existence on the blood soaked soil of the South. If Fern joined other African Americans in the Great Migration to northern cities, materialism and degradation caused by industrialization would only distance her from the life-force that sustains her beauty as well as torments her. Additionally, just as the entrancing chant of a cantor reminds Jews of their capacity to endure nobly through the worst persecution, Fern reminds her community that its suffering only deepens its beauty. This explains why the narrator, and the other men in the community who protect her, are anxious not to "see" her as an "out and out ... prostitute along State Street in Chicago," in "a southern town where white men are more aggressive," or as "a white man's concubine." Although their obligation is ineffable, they all feel they must do something to prevent the modern world from besmirching the fragile beauty that their ancestors' suffering has bequeathed to them (Cane 17; 17-18; 18). (10)

Toomer, though, seems conflicted about Fern's role in the community. After ail, those who become enamored of her leave her feeling "baffled and ashamed." Moreover, the narrator tells the story of a "young Negro [who] was looking at her spellbound. A white man passing in a buggy had to flick him with his whip if he was to get by without running him over." Being transfixed by Fern's beauty clearly makes one vulnerable to the racial violence of the South. The narrator, too, is bewitched by Fern: "And I felt bound to her. I too had my dreams: something I would do for her." Near the end of the second section, he laments, "Something I must do for her. There was myself. What could I do for her? Talk, of course. Push back the fringe of pines upon new horizons. To what purpose? and what for? Her? Myself?" The juxtaposition of these pathetic ejaculations and the lines "as if I heard a Jewish cantor sing.... And I felt bound to her" reveal the dual nature of the word "bound." On the one hand, it connotes subjugation and, particularly in this context, sexual subordination. On the other hand, it refers to the unifying force that ties a religious community to a common fate. The gravitational pull of Fern's vacant eyes links the narrator to the African American peasants of the South, thus limiting his personal autonomy and throwing his status as a modern, forward thinking man into question. Fern's eyes also force the narrator to confront his people's slave heritage; however, they do not offer a means for fully comprehending this heritage. Fern's hypnotic beauty reminds spectators of the noble stoicism of African Americans, but it also saddles them with an unmanageable burden (Cane 16; 17; 18).

In the third section it seems that the narrator is following the example set by Frank's representation of Ornstein; he attempts to act out the role of a priest who is destined to sanctify Fern as a sacred figure and interpret her message. Sadly, he succeeds

only in producing a traumatic disaster. The section opens with the narrator stopping to chat with Fern one evening. Although he introduces a variety of topics, ranging from "the new soft drink they had at old Pap's store" to the "Negro's migration north," she responds laconically to each with "a yassur or nassur, without further comment." The narrator eventually suggests they take a walk, reassuring her that this is not a prelude to a sexual encounter. While passing "people on all the porches gaping at" them, Fern utters "Doesn't it make you mad?" This comment hints at the tremendous burden Fern carries as a sacred figure. The narrator seems to understand her distress--he tells the reader "She meant the row of petty gossiping people. She meant the world"--but it does not alter his behavior (Cane 18; 19).

When the narrator and Fern reach the canebrake, the settling dusk prepares the narrator for a religious experience: "I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.... When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can come to one." At this moment, he takes Fern in his arms. What happens next is not clearly articulated in the text. The narrator explains, "I must have dote something--what, I don't know, in the confusion of my emotion. She sprang up. Rushed some distance from me. Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying." Fern then collapses in a convulsive fit: Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her. It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice. A child's voice, uncertain, or an old man's. Dusk hid her, I could hear only her song. It seemed to me as though she were pounding her head in anguish upon the ground. I rushed to her. She fainted in my arms. (17)

Taken most literally, this is Fern's response to the narrator's sexual advance (the result of his own confusion). She rejects him, yet she experiences something oddly similar to an orgasm. Her extremities become engorged with fluid, and she begins to ejaculate "convulsive sounds" and "calls to Christ Jesus" At this climactic moment, Fern becomes a Jewish cantor "singing with a broken voice" and collapses in the narrator's arms, overcome by her burden (Cane 19). The scene doses with Fern's body hidden at dusk. Overtaxed, the body that has swallowed the blood-soaked landscape disappears in the night.

Juxtaposing this scene with Frank's portrait of Ornstein illuminates Toomer's ambivalence about his mentor's glorification of suffering and religious piety. We can see that Fern, like Ornstein, acts as a conduit for a repressed past and that Frank's attempt to figure Ornstein's performances as utopian prophecy informs Toomer's text with one vital difference. Toomer refigures this mystic figure as weak and helpless, thereby rejecting Frank's celebration of suffering as well as the typological association between oppressed African Americans and the ancient Hebrews in bondage in Egypt.

Given Toomer's preoccupation with Our America, we can assume that he was familiar with Frank's portrait of Ornstein, especially as Frank states near the beginning of the portrait that "Since there is no good American music save that of the Indians and the Negroes, [Ornstein's] music is as American as any" (Our America 187). This statement, which echoes Du Bois's sentiments, not only grounds Ornstein in the soil of America but also links his music explicitly to African American culture. Also, in an undated letter (.probably from 1922), Frank declares his desire to be at a meeting between Toomer and Ornstein (Letter to Toomer, n.d.). Moreover, in another letter Toomer aligns Frank's mysticism with the power rising from the souls of the descendents of slaves: "Something wonderfully strong and beautiful burns within you. The sweet freshness, the fragrance of Spanish Needle. The power and surge of the Enslaved" (Letter to Toomer, 23 July 1923; emphasis added). (11) This description of the "power and surge" of an ancient slave identity has the same tropic structure as Frank's character study of Ornstein and Toomer's description of Fern's canefield breakdown.

In both the description of Fern's breakdown and Frank's portrait of Ornstein, there are images of building pressure and subsequent release in the form of music. Toomer says that Fern "is tortured by something she can't let out"; it rises from within her like "boiling sap" until it "spatter[s]" up through her throat and comes out as the "broken voice" of a "Jewish cantor" (Cane 19). Similarly, Frank says that Ornstein's music is the "full throated cry of the young Jew" releasing the "passion and pain and storm of deep repression" onto American soil. He adds that the "weight of sorrow of the Jew" becomes a "tidal pour of energy in faith" (Our America 187). Reading these passages together emphasizes that the rising passion in both Fern and Ornstein has deeper sources than its immediate cultural context. For Fern, the "calls to Christ Jesus" are overtaken by an ancient "broken voice" that the narrator identifies with the "Jewish cantor" (Cane 19). Frank says that Ornstein's music is not Russian but Hebrew. From these deep sources rises music that is as beautiful as it is tragic.

Comparing the canebrake scene in "Fern" to Frank's portrait of Ornstein also helps explicate the source of Fern's pain and agony. According to Frank, Ornstein is a conduit for the pain and suffering Jews have endured throughout history and have repressed under the soul-smothering power of American materialism. His music is an eruption of "breaks of fire, interstices of light, America's release" that obliterates the apparatus of repression even as it tortures his body (Our America 187). Fern also takes on the burden of her people's history. Prior to her convulsions, the narrator says, "Her eyes, unusually weird and open, held me. Held God. He flowed in as I've seen the countryside flow in. Seen men" (Cane 19). She has swallowed soil bloodied by generations of slavery and is haunted by the spirits of "ancestors," but now she is a conduit for a holy spirit that will release this collective unconscious. In the canebrake, the demons, repressed by the false promises of material progress, pour through her, torturing her just as the cathartic and aggressive release of repressed suffering burns the wailing Ornstein. The narrator mistakenly believes that he has caused Fern to fall to her knees, but it is rather the tragic history of African Americans that overwhelms her. In this collapsed state, the repressed history of slavery sings out through her body. Just as Ornstein expresses the repressed demons of the American Jew in Hebraic music, Fern conveys her people's repressed history in a voice that resonates with the deeply rooted pain of slavery and racism.

Here again, though, Toomer does not merely imitate Frank. Toomer's sharpest misgivings are revealed in the description of the cantor's "broken voice" (Cane 19). In some ways, a "broken voice" might be considered the equivalent of Ornstein's wailing, but Toomer then takes it a step further with the qualifiers "A child's voice, uncertain, or an old man's." Whereas Ornstein conveys a young Jew's "lust of a new world's conquest," Fern's sexual desire is replaced by the mournfulness of an impotent old man or a sexually latent child. The narrator embraces her just as Frank embraces Leo Ornstein, but rather than becoming a prophet bent in prayer, Fern is a martyr who collapses under the burden of transforming tragic history into sanctified beauty. Unlike Ornstein, Fern never turns the corner from "suffering to longing." Moreover, while Frank is able to transform Ornstein's blood-ringing performance into a prophetic vision of a Jewish vanguard, Toomer's narrator is unable to do the same with Fern's agonizing fit. Fern's failure to bring a "birth of faith" (Frank's words to describe Ornstein's music) to full fruition results in the complete annihilation of Fern's identity under darkness and pain (Our America 187). Although influenced by Frank, Toomer's allusions to the cantor signify paralyzing pain, not revolutionary strength.

The narrator doses with the following pronouncement: "Her name, against the chance that you might happen down that way, is Fernie May Rosen" (Cane 19). The name Rosen confirms Fern's actual German-Jewish roots, which the narrator hints at when he describes her "Semitic nose" earlier in the text (Cane 16). This final pronouncement collapses the metaphorical identification: Fern is not like a Jew; she is both black and Jewish. In Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr argue that here the narrator suddenly "reveals [Fern's] miscegenated past": the unutterable secret behind "the mysteries in Cane's first section" (149, 158). This interpretation is hot wholly accurate since Fern's face is already a signifier of her hybridity. The narrator doesn't really "reveal" her past; by literally naming it, he legitimizes it. Along these lines, the term "miscegenated" is out of place, for it obscures the possibility of cross-racial love, a theme that runs throughout Cane. Striving to rewrite the story of the 'tragic mulatto,' Toomer was loath to represent the intermingling of races as the "crime" of miscegenation "that springs from the primal crime of slavery" (Scruggs and VanDemarr 158). To him, racial hybridity did not simply signify the crimes of the past but rather embodied the ineluctable march of human evolution. Moreover, Fern's stoicism does not signify an embrace of a spiritual past but rather a resolve to be the face of the material future.

The final image of "Fern" is not a painful reminder of ancient suffering but the portrait of the peaceful resolve of a new racial amalgam. With her "eyes vaguely focused on the sunset.., her face flow[ing] into them, the countryside and something that [the narrator calls God] flowing into them," Fern gazes expressionlessly at the past as she stands on the precipice of the future (Cane 19). This reading aligns with George Hutchinson's claim that the "reference to [Fern's] 'weird' mystical eyes as a 'common delta' into which both God and the Southern landscape flow, evokes Toomer's consistent trope (from the 1910s through the 1930s) of a river signifying the dissolution of the 'old' races into the 'New World Soul' " (Hutchinson 377). Put another way, the fact of Fern's biracial identity undercuts the significance of historical identification between African Americans and Jews and the meaning given to suffering by weaving it into messianic prophecy.

Reading "Fern" 's ending back into the rest of the story reveals the text to be an implicit repudiation of Frank's spiritualism. Toomer implies that attempts to sanctify those who stand merely as conduits of past suffering are not only doomed to failure but are also irrelevant. He may have been aware of the hostility directed at Frank imbedded in "Fern," for it is one of the stories that he sent out for publication without showing his mentor (Letter to Frank, 19 July 1922). Moreover, his later comments on the story once again reveal the deep ambivalence that clouded his relationship with Frank. In a letter to Frank probably written in early 1923, Toomer says that in "Fern" the "dominant emotion is a sadness derived from a sense of fading." He adds, "There is nothing about [Fern] of the buoyant expression of a new race" (Jean Toomer Reader 24). These lines resemble Toomer's tortured rumination over his sociopolitical impotence and his identification with the gray moth in his notebook. Indeed, the lack of 'buoyancy' in both "Fern" and in his notebook suggest the fragility at the core of Toomer's writing. Such fragility also generates much of Cane's enduring pathos. As they struggle to delineate the recondite meaning behind Toomer's imagery, Cane's readers experience the difficulty of holding together the slippery elements of his identity.

Toomer's excursion seems to have exhausted him. In an undated letter (probably written in late February 1923) to Gorham Munson, he displays little patience for considering the fragile triumph of his story: "I agree with you in all you say about Fern. Too much [Sherwood] Anderson. Too much waste. I could work it over, but I don't think it's important enough to spend the time on. I'm through with that phase. Next!" (Letter to Gorham Munson). "Fern" was too personal, too close to his own skin for him to tolerate. Yet, his next phase was fraught with the same tensions. The underlying themes of "Fern" echo throughout Cane.

The intellectual partnership between Frank and Toomer ended in acrimony shortly after the publication of Cane in 1923. One reason for the rupture of their bond was Frank's inability to recognize the hybridity that Toomer valued in his own racial identity. Frank, in their personal relations and, more important, in his foreword to Cane, figured Toomer as struggling to transcend the constrictions of "Negro identity." As Daniel Terris comments in "Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and the Critique of Racial Voyeurism," "By dwelling at such length upon Toomer's transcendence of his Negro background [in the 'Forward'], Frank had effectively highlighted that very ancestry" (Terris 108). While Frank regarded ancestries as discrete entities that could be embraced, regenerated, and ultimately transcended, Toomer's ancestry was a confluence of lineages that could neither be easily embraced nor completely transcended. Instead, he imagined rivers carrying racial characteristics in solution, flowing through history to a "common delta." That is to say, Toomer preferred to see race as continually evolving toward a paragon of hybridity. Humans can neither stop this evolution nor embrace it; they can only submit to it and find serenity in the evidence of transformation.

Nevertheless, Frank's influence on Toomer's literary development should not be dismissed, for his glorious impudence in the face of nativists' scorn blazed a path for Toomer's own challenge to America's white Christian hegemony. Frank was also an early modernist who promoted the bold experimentation of a rising vanguard of young writers and advanced the notion that the fractures of modern identity provided openings from which ameliorated identities could appear. Frank validated Toomer's quest for new literary forms that would match his sense of racial hybridity. Such validation led Toomer to replace the figure of the tragic mulatta with a racially hybrid archetype destined for a triumphant future.

Works Cited

Anderson, Martin. Liner notes. Piano Music by Leo Ornstein. Perf. Marc-Andre Hamelin. CD. Hyperion, 2002.

Austin, Mary. "New York: Dictator of American Criticism." The Nation 31 July 1920: 129-30.

Boelhower, William. "No Free Gifts: Toomer's 'Fern' and the Harlem Renaissance," Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance. Eds. Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feiths. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 193-209.

Bourne, Randolph S. "The Jew and Trans-National America." War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919. Ed. Carl Resek. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. 124-33.

Fahy, Thomas. "The Enslaving Power of Folksong in Jean Toomer's Cane." Literature and Music. Ed. Michael J. Meyer. New York: Rodopi, 2002.47-63.

Frank, Waldo. Letter to Jean Toomer. n.d. Box 3, folder 83. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

--. Letter to Jean Toomer. 23 July 1923. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

--. Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1973.

--. Our America. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919.

Hutchinson, George. "Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse." Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 683-92.

McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Scruggs, Charles, and Lee VanDemarr. Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

Terris, Daniel. "Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and the Critique of Racial Voyeurism." Race and the Modern Artist. Eds. Heather Hathaway, Josef Jarab, and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 92-114.

Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. Ed. Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton, 1988.

--. A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings. Ed. Frederik L. Rusch. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

--. Letter to Gorham Munson. n.d. Box 6, folder 184. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

--. Letter to the Liberator. 19 Aug. 1922. Toomer, Jean Toomer Reader 15.

--. Letter to Mae Wright. 4 Aug. 1922. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

--. Letter to Mae Wright. 21 Aug. 1922. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

--. Letter to Waldo Frank. 24 Mar. 1922. Waldo Frank Papers, Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Lib., U of Pennsylvania.

--. Notebook. ca. 1920s. Box 60, folder 1411, ts. Jean Toomer Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Lib., Yale U.

Notes

(1.) See Houston Baker, Jr., "Journey Toward Black Art: Jean Toomer's Cane," in Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988), 11-44; and Hargis Westerfield, "Jean Toomer's 'Fern': A Mythical Dimension" and Louise Blackwell, "Jean Toomer's Cane and Biblical Myth," in Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation, Therman B. O'Daniel, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1988), 269-71; 437-44.

(2.) Scruggs and VanDemarr offer another notable exception. They contend that "Fern's mysticism is 'prophetic,' because she speaks for her community as a historical witness and as a link to communal origins. Her role is one that Frank saw as the most important contribution that Jews could make to America's future, but in 'Carma' Toomer had already suggested that 'God had left the Moses-people for the nigger' " (149).

(3.) In this letter, Toomer writes, "Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish and Indian.... I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling." The emphasis here is clearly not on identification with any one group but rather on racial hybridity.

(4.) When quoting from Toomer's and Frank's unpublished and published writing, I have not changed deviations from standard grammar and spelling unless they impede comprehension.

(5.) The currency of the queen-bee trope in early blues music--much less Toomer's exposure to it--is difficult to substantiate. Diane Bogus, argues that the "Queen B" archetype--which is her composite term that encompasses self-confident and sexually transgressive "Queen Bulldykers/Bulldaggers," "Queen Bees" and "Queen Bitches"--is African in origin and reappears throughout black literature, including in the work of Harlem Renaissance writers Claude McKay and Langston Hughes. See Diane Bogus, "The 'Queen B' Figure in Black Literature," in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds. (New York: New York UP, 1990), 275-90. See also Jerry Wasserman, "Queen Bee, King Bee: The Color Purple and the Blues," Canadian Review of American Studies 30.3 (2000): 301-16; and Hazel Carby, "It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues," in Feminisms, Robin R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, eds. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991), 746-58. Toomer may also be referring to Bee Palmer, who was called the "Shimmie Queen" for her sexually suggestive dancing. In 1920-1921, Palmer starred in a traveling revue entitled "Oh Bee!" As a white woman described by one critic as "exceedingly blond," she embodied whiteness as Bessie Smith embodied blackness. In either case, the term refers to racial purity rather than hybridity. See Dennis Pereyra and Suzanne Fischer, "Bee Palmer," The Red Hot Jazz Archive: A History of Jazz before 1930, 10 Jan. 2006, Web.

(6.) "Avey," in particular, seems to have been based on Mae Wright.

(7.) Scruggs and VanDeman" reprinted Toomer's response to Mary Ausrin in its entirety as an appendix.

(8.) See Frank to Toomer, n.d., Jean Toomer Papers, box 3, folder 83; and Toomer to Frank, 5 May 1922, Waldo Frank Papers.

(9.) Fahy offers a similar argument. He writes, "Songs are one way to preserve communal history ... making them an active part of the town's memory.... Fern provides access to both nature and a culture that has been lost by black men who left the South. Fern's act of singing and creating song also reinforces her symbolic role as a domestic virgin-mother within the community. The local men essentially 'make' her a virgin in order to preserve this ideal" (48). However, although one might argue that a cantor's role in the Jewish community is to preserve the culture of the Old Country, Fahy ignores Toomer's deployment of the cantor image and its relation to the transfiguration of suffering into beauty.

(10.) Boelhower takes a similar approach (defining it as "archaeological") to analyzing the canebrake scene. He argues that "there is a force, a puissance, that belongs not only to Fern but also to the canebrake, even though it is Fern that acts it out. It is the saplike energy that constitutes the symbolic order mentioned previously that requires us to become archeologists" (204).

(11.) This is the same letter (a canonical letter in Toomer scholarship) in which Toomer declares, "the Negro is ... in the process of solution. As an entity, the race is loosing [sic] its body ... the Negro of the folk song has all but passed away: the Negro of the emotional church is fading. A hundred years from now these Negroes, if they exist at all will be in art.... America needs these elements. They are passing. Let us grab hold of them while there is still time" (Jean Toomer Reader 24).