Cane Study Guide

Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer on December 26, 1894, Jean Toomer was the first and only son of a formerly enslaved man named Nathan Pinchback and the heiress of a wealthy and well-connected multiracial family. Within two years, Nathan abandoned his family. Jean’s mother, Nina, took her son and moved back in with her parents in Washington, D.C. Angered by Nathan, Sr.’s behavior, the grandparents refused to call the boy by his name, instead referring to him as Eugene. Toomer spent his early years in Washington, D. C. and New Rochelle, New York, where he attended segregated schools for both Black and White children. Following his graduation from high school in 1910, Toomer traveled, took classes, and worked a series of jobs, around the country. During this time, he began to compose the pieces that make up Cane, which was published to critical acclaim in 1923. Throughout his life, Toomer resisted the idea of racial categorization, thanks in part to his multiracial heritage and his unique experience living on both sides of the color line and both in- and outside of the “colored aristocracy” that had established itself in Northern cities like Washington, D.C. He was often misidentified as having Indian heritage, and he married two white women, resulting in scandals both times because of the marriages’ multiracial status. His first wife, Margery Latimer, died in childbirth in 1932. His second wife, Marjorie Content, lasted until his death. Following the publication of Cane, Toomer never came out with another book, although he composed essays, volumes of poetry, and several autobiographies. In the middle of his life, Toomer became an acolyte of philosopher and spiritual teacher George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, and in his later years, he taught Gurdjieff’s principles to mixed groups of Black and White artists and intellectuals in New York City and Chicago. Toomer died in 1967, at the age of 72.

Cane is typically categorized under the heading of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement instigated by Black artists and engaging with Black American cultural expression that flourished in the 1920s and 19302. The Harlem Renaissance is at least in part a byproduct of the Great Migration, the massive movement of more than 6 million Black people from the American South to the industrialized cities in the North and American West—including New York City, the epicenter of the Harlem Renaissance—in search of economic and social opportunities they were denied in the South. During the early 20th century, life for Black people in the South was characterized by deep and abiding racism and segregation in the form of Jim Crow laws designed to undo the civil rights and social progress offered to newly emancipated formerly enslaved people following the Civil War. Lynchings—extrajudicial and often public executions of Black people accused of various crimes—were common throughout the period. Finally, Cane was published in 1923, early in the Prohibition Era. In 1920, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution outlawed the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. This was repealed in 1933 with the 21st Amendment. During Prohibition, some bootleggers became very rich distilling and selling illegal alcohol covertly. Speakeasies, secret and illegal establishments selling alcohol, sprang up across the country.

Jean Toomer read extensively and widely during the years in which he composed the pieces that ultimately came together in Cane. While the influence of books like W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks (1903) makes itself known in Toomer’s handling of race and racial issues in Cane, Toomer clearly found more proximate inspiration in the work of Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson. Waldo Frank’s 1909 modernist manifesto, Our America, described the still-young country’s need to find its own artistic and literary voice, something Toomer was attempting to articulate in his work. In 1919, American author Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, a book comprised of a series of loosely linked short stories depicting life in a small, midwestern American town. With its emphasis on the psychology of its protagonists rather than traditional plot, Winesburg is an early exemplar of American modernism, and readers can see its influence on Toomer in Cane’s loosely linked stories and the insistent focus on interiority and the emotional and spiritual experiences of the characters in its stories, poems, and vignettes. Throughout his life, Toomer resisted racial categorizations, although an awareness of racial fluidity—particularly the specter of multiracial people passing as White—runs throughout Cane. Similar themes occupy Passing, a novella published in 1929 by one of Toomer’s contemporaries and acquaintances, Nella Larsen.