by Irie Bliss

Created on: March 05, 2008

The imagery associated with dusk, that Jean Toomer utilizes in his literary montage Cane, symbolize not only his struggle with duality as a Southern Black man in the early 1920s, but also represent his desire to fuse together contradicting forces such as the light and dark, north and the south, and more importantly, black and white. Each character in Cane represents a different aspect of the rural South that Toomer grew up in. Likewise, their stories, illuminated by the setting sun, each give a glimpse into the South's deep sadness and majestic beauty.

Although born in Washington, D.C., Toomer became a child of the Southern Reconstruction era after his father left them and his mother moved the family to live with her parents in Georgia. Later as a young man, he lived in New York and then returned to D.C. His travels and interactions with different people sparked in him a quest to step outside the color lines, but also created a rift in his understanding of race. Race was always an issue for Toomer and he often felt conflicted when they clashed, upsetting his "search for the attainment of spiritual balance" (Gates and McKay 1168). Toomer described himself as being a mixture of "Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and some dark blood," and often it was difficult for others to judge his ethnicity. Yet despite his mixed appearance, he wanted to be thought of as simply an "American," living in the melting pot that was the United States, rather than as black or white. He summed up his opinion on his own race in "The Crock of Problems" stating, "I am at once no one of the races and I am all of them. I belong to no one of them and I belong to all. I am, in a strict racial sense, a member of a new race" and he continued saying, "Heredity and environment will combine to produce a race which will be at once interracial and unique. It may be the turning point for the return of mankind, now divided into hostile races, to one unified race, namely, to the human race" (Toomer 58-59). His desire to be considered only an American never dwindled and up until his death in 1967, he insisted that he was "of no particular race" (Gates and McKay 1169). After years of struggling to find identity and peace with the racial issues of the time, Toomer eventually wrote Cane in 1923, which he describes as "a song that helped [him] to put the racial disquiet within himself to rest" (1168). In his own words, he explained that the literary assortment of prose and poetry was

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