‘Calling Jesus’ by Jean Toomer

“What happens if W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is considered the first hybrid poetry collection?” asks the poet Terrance Hayes in his recent critical book, Watch Your Language. The slave spirituals of the South echo through Du Bois’ study, making it an important influence on Jean Toomer’s hybrid work Cane (1923), which mingles verse, prose and drama to imagine the same lives. Originally published as a magazine piece called “Nora”, “Calling Jesus” comes in the second part of the book, which is concerned with the African American migration from the agricultural South to the cities of the North. It describes a woman whose soul is like a cowed, “thrust-tailed dog”, left outside the large house in which she lodges, longing at night for the “dream-fluted cane” she has left behind. There is something almost clairvoyant about the way that in Cane — his only work of fiction — Toomer seems to catch perceptions that had never been written down before (“sensitive things like nostrils, quiver”). The verbal music of this three-paragraph portrait — which follows Toomer’s extraordinary lyric of the electric age, “Her Lips are Copper Wire” — trembles with tenderness for its subject and her soul left out in the cold (“filled with chills till morning”).

First published as “Nora” in The Double Dealer, September 1922, and reprinted as “Calling Jesus” in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923. Available to read here

‘Karintha’ by Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1894.

Toomer’s major work Cane was heavily influenced by his early career as an educator in rural Georgia. ‘Karintha’, the first piece in Cane, announces many of the work’s larger themes and strange style. The brief, impressionistic story touches on female sexuality and male desire, and shifts between prose and poetry, anticipating the form of Cane to come – is this a novel? A story cycle? A collection of fragments? A century after its composition, Cane still feels odd and fresh.

First published in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923 and available to read here

‘Fern’ by Jean Toomer

This has to be number one, because it’s haunted me for 30 years, ever since that first reading, age 19, English undergraduate at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. I have driven my own students mad with it ever since. That first line, daaamn, it grabbed me by the throat: “Face flowed into her eyes…” It made me sit up and ask what was possible on the page, and to ask what I was allowed to do as a writer. Fern is a bewitching woman with that way of attracting men and not giving a damn, standing on her veranda, eyes all in the distance, neck-back inches away from an errant nail in the wall, unknowable, indefinable. The narrator is obsessed by her, they go out one day, she faints – or perhaps it’s a sexual metaphor – whatever the case, in the end, nothing is really concluded or even understood. You’re left with the odd impression that Fern or women like Fern will be standing there swaying forever, perplexing men, and also with the idea that women like this are probably very easy to understand, if men could make listening more important than conjuring enigmas of hurt and beautiful women. Toomer’s style is often odd, his prose is full of unapologetic lyricism, sensuality, and even now, when I read him, I want to sway, sway, like a cornflower, want to be lost in the sound of the South, this bewitching, complex place, so packed full of pain and beauty.

The more I learned about Toomer himself, the more fascinated I became, about the mixed race heritage that he seemed to deny, at why he was never quite the cream of the Harlem Renaissance crop like Zora Neale Hurston and Baldwin, at why he remained that confounding thing, a ‘writer’s writer’, which is to say, not commercially successful. Some reports suggest his eventual spiritual conversion gave him insurmountable writer’s block. I think every word of his anti-narrative prose was a gift, and that Toomer was doing something with language that no other black writer then or since has quite accomplished. It’s not just the surrealism, or the beauty, or the pain. He gave no fucks, and every part of my learning, rebel-self responded viscerally.

First published in Cane, Boni and Liveright, 1923. Read the story online here