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"My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine."
Jean Toomer to Horace Liveright1
Of all people, Jean Toomer wrote Cane. For a long time, this fact has made critics a little uneasy, a little wistful. The elusiveness of the text itself is the source of some of this wistfulness, and this feeling is only compounded by the elusiveness of Toomer the man. Still, critics have devised serviceable methods to control the ambiguity of both text and author. The currently routine way to read Cane controls the ambiguity of the text itself by interpreting it in a manner similar to the routine way to read that once-mysterious landmark, The Waste Land. Faced with an intriguing array of textual shards, Toomer's critics patiently triangulate behind the words of Cane until they reach what Nellie Y McKay has called Toomer's "song of celebration to the elements that constitute Afro-American experience" (33). In the same way that The Waste Land arranges fragments of desiccated gloom in order to adumbrate a between-the-lines intuition of vernal hope, Cane, according to many critics, arranges fragmentary representations of racial confusion in order to communicate a between-the-lines intuition of racial coherence. In the words of Houston Baker, "As the reader struggles to fit the details together," he or she takes "a journey toward liberating black American art" (80).
The other elusiveness I have mentioned-that of Toomer himselfis not disposed of so easily. As is well known, Toomer took offense at marketing Cane as a work of African American literature. Although he did not always deny the possibility of having African American ancestry, he disliked having any racial designation whatsoever (besides "American") placed upon him. His biographers have made clear that partly in response to having race be an aspect of his literary persona, Toomer stopped writing the kinds of books that appealed to the audience that admired Cane. Instead of writing other modernist texts, after Cane Toomer mostly wrote linear (and in his life unpublished) books-books that tend to dwell with numbing clarity upon the serenity he found in various philosophical systems. Many of these writings have now been dutifully read and analyzed by scholars of Cane. Still, it remains fair to say that critics have...