Cane by Jean Toomer

My mother's bookshelves were the atlas by which I first plotted the coordinates of the world. The titles on their spines indicated the directions, like points on a compass rose. Afternoons spent crouching along the wall of bookshelves, I tried to develop a sense of where we came from and to whom we belonged. The books were a record of my mother's coming of age during the black feminist flowering of the 1970s and 80s. Many bore stamps showing they'd come from Amistad Books, the black women-owned bookstore we frequented throughout my childhood. Some others had journeyed to the shelves having followed my mother from that unknowable territory: her life before we were born.

My mother's books defined my idea of the possible. Because of them, I took some things for granted. We could call this inheritance, or tradition. The summer before college I snagged a few on extended loan: June Jordan's Civil Wars; Lorraine Hansberry's To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. These were the survival gear carried to a numbing job in a copy shop located in the basement of a law firm's tower. I read on my lunch break and during the bus rides to and from downtown, passing the landscapes where I grew up but were not really my home, fulfilling a generational imperative to propel myself by achievement. This was where I came from; it was not where I belonged. The path leading away from home was narrow, I dared not detour. The books were suggestions of how to be in this world, and how far one could go.

And like all my favorite books, they were worlds that pointed to worlds beyond. It was in Walker that I first encountered the figure of Jean Toomer, making scattered appearances across the collection's pages and finally the subject of an essay of his own. In "The Divided Life of Jean Toomer," Walker, a native daughter of the region that inspired his 1923 masterpiece Cane, attempts to reconcile Toomer's gifts and contradictions: his clairvoyance and short-sightedness, his women who are as often icons of freedom as marionettes.

The result of Toomer's brief voyage in the South, Cane is itself a journey: from south to north and back again, migrating between poetry and prose, traversing interior and exterior terrain. It was written as the Great Migration was under way, a movement spurred by the old yearnings of a people breaking time, at once world-historical and the news. It is the record Toomer attempted to make of what he was seeing, hearing, feeling:

The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.

This song of an end seemed to announce a beginning—the dawn Alain Locke described two years later in his epoch-defining polemic "Enter the New Negro": "We have not been watching in the right direction; set North and South on a sectional axis, we have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking."

But the light of the coming Harlem Renaissance cast too narrow a beam. Jean Toomer wanted to fly behind the sun. Not long after Cane's publication, Toomer resolved that he was something even more novel: neither black nor white, but American. Miscegenated, self-revising, he belonged, finally to his country, its problems, its promises. (He occasionally masqueraded as Native or Arab).

It was his answer to the question of where he came from and to whom he belonged. Seeking direction from mystic teachers of the old New Age, Toomer shaped a morality with the self at the center, unaccountable to larger struggles.

My first year of college, I took a survey of African-American literature. One day, the scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin was a most extraordinary substitute for our professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The book for that week's session was Cane. My heart came to attention as I watched her assume the lectern. Following the way-markers set by my mother's bookshelves, I had arrived, in a sense, at home: reading as I had been taught, first by my mother, then by her books.

Over subsequent nomadic years, packing and unpacking my boxes of books, I laugh to find the number of copies of Cane among them. I stock them like provisions, a load worth carrying.

I have never stopped reading Cane, I am always reading it. It is not finished for me. I have barely begun.

What a pleasure to be beginning again with you.