486 Making It New: 1900–1945who rationalize their physical desires into idealized abstractions or cower in drink,
daydreaming, or sex to hide their fears and avoid commitment. Here, too, are women
transfixed into virgins by men who do not understand them, wailing futilely against
society or neuroticized by the tensions between their subconscious physical desires
and their conscious conformity to the restrictive emotional codes that society
imposes. This is a more brutally material, more deeply insecure world than the one
evoked in the first section – all sense of folk culture and community has evaporated –
but here, too, finally, is a society marked by racial conflict rather than confluence,
without even the balm of custom to alleviate its more bigoted practices.
The final section of Cane was the first to be written, and it clearly has a more
autobiographical base than the others. It describes how an educated African-
American from the North, called Ralph Kabnis, visits the South. Written partly in the
form of a story and partly in dramatic from, it shows him witnessing racial prejudice
and violence, measuring the decline of the old ways and trades, and wondering if he
could become the “face” of the South and sing its songs. Frustrated in his search for
a way of life, he ends by experiencing a dark night of the soul: a party in a cellar, full
of drinking and sex, that offers him not even a moment of relief. Unlike Larsen,
however, Toomer is not content to leave the reader on this dying fall. The third
section, and Cane as a whole, ends with Kabnis crawling out of the cellar, as the sun
rises. “Gold-glowing child,” he observes, “it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song
slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town.” The hint
of a new beginning, the hope of renewal, is slight perhaps, but it is still there. And it
helps make the closing moments of Cane as much of a confluence, an innovative
mix, as the rest of this extraordinary book – poised as it is, on the cusp between
darkness and light, despair and possible redemption. Toomer was never to write so
well again. His later work bears the influence of the mystic Georgei I. Gurdjieff. Little
of it could find a publisher. And what little has been published – noble as it sometimes
is in its expression of Toomer’s lifelong desire to transcend what he saw as the narrow
divisions of race – is turgid and didactic to the point of tedium. The reputation of
Jean Toomer rests on just one work. But, with that, it is secure. It is one of the great
American experiments.
Unlike Toomer, another significant figure in the New Negro movement, Arna
Bontemps (1902–1973), dedicated himself to the recovery of a specifically black
history and culture. Born in Louisiana and raised in California, he accepted a teaching
position in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Later, he was to work at
Fisk University and the University of Illinois. Over the course of a long career he was
to produce many works in different genres, portraying the lives, past and present, of
African-Americans. Collaborating with Langston Hughes, he produced, among
many other books, several anthologies, The Poetry of the Negro (1949), The Book of
Negro Folklore (1959), and American Negro Poetry (1963). Working as a ghostwriter
with the blues musician and composer W. C. Handy, he wrote Father of the Blues
(1941). With the proletarian radical writer Jack Conroy, he wrote a number of books
for children, among them a tall tale entitled The Fast Sooner Hound (1942). The
books he produced by himself were equally various. They included more than aGGray_c04.indd 486ray_c 04 .indd 486 8 8/1/2011 7:54:04 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 04 AM