Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance, and: The Evidence of Things Not Said (review)

Abstract

In his dedication to the posthumously published Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison eulogizes "That Vanished Tribe into Which [he] Was Born, / The American Negroes." As culled from over 2,000 manuscript pages by his literary executor, John McCallahan, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, traces the extinction of Alain Locke's "New Negro" by forces both intrinsic and extrinsic to the former Africans, not the least of which is the phenomenon of "passing," a Trojan Horse strategy that straddles the boundary between the intraracial and the interracial as simultaneous self-extinction and transcendence. Following a line of thought [End Page 462] already displayed by the accessorized identities of Rinehart in Invisible Man, Ellison's posthumous send-up of ethnic and racial machinations demonstrates, à la Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Morrison and others, that "passing" is the sine qua non of what it means "to be" an American. Thus, to a certain extent, Juneteenth can be read as an appended chapter to Jean Toomer's Cane, a book which, as Werner Sollors notes in his contribution to a new collection of essays on Toomer, analogously depicts the "disappearing African culture on the American continent." And if Ellison's work also foretells the coming "black" man, those "race men" whom Toomer had to both embrace and repel, James Baldwin's work in toto relentlessly puts "black men" on stage in order to both gape at and gaze beyond them. For Toomer and Baldwin, these reactions to the dilemma of race and racism in America add up to Ellisonian ambivalence, the theses and antitheses of twentieth-century America in the throes of giving birth to America "tomorrow," when men will one day live as they have been created, as equals.