Jean Toomer (born Nathan Pinchback Toomer; December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist commonly associated with modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, though he actively resisted the latter association. His reputation stems from his novel Cane (1923), which Toomer wrote during and after a stint as a school principal at a black school in rural Sparta, Georgia. The novel intertwines the stories of six women and includes an apparently autobiographical thread; sociologist Charles S. Johnson called it "the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation". He resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer and he identified as "American". For more than a decade Toomer was an influential follower and representative of the pioneering spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff.
Toomer continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. His first wife died soon after the birth of their daughter. After he married again in 1934, Toomer moved with his family from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There, he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. in 1894, the son of Nathan Toomer (1839–1906), a former enslaved man and farmer of mixed race, and his third wife, Nina Elizabeth Pinchback (1866–1909), whose parents became free people of color prior to the Civil War. His father was born into slavery in Chatham County, North Carolina and was later sold with members of his family to John Toomer, in Houston County, Georgia, in the 1850s. After the death of John Toomer, his brother Henry Toomer became owner of the family, with Nathan assigned to be his personal valet and assistant. Nathan would remain in this position after the Civil War and learned the ways of the white upper class. He later took his former enslaver's surname, "Toomer", after emancipation.
His father was married three times. His first marriage produced four daughters. After the death of his first wife, Nathan Sr. married Amanda America Dickson, a former enslaved woman of mixed race whose inheritance from her white father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored woman in America." She died intestate in 1893 after about a year of marriage. A legal struggle with her children, which did not end until years after his third marriage, left the senior Nathan with little to no inheritance.
In 1893, the now 54-year-old widower married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, another wealthy young woman of color. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of Nina Emily Hawthorne and politician P. B. S. Pinchback, both of mixed heritage. Her father was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but he ultimately acquiesced. Born from this union and named "Nathan" after his father, Toomer would later use "Jean" as his first name at the start his literary career.
Toomer's father soon abandoned his wife and his young son, returning to Georgia seeking to obtain a portion of his late second wife's estate. Nina divorced him and took back her maiden name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents in Washington D.C. Angered by her husband's abandonment, Nina's father insisted that they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather. He received a variety of nicknames by various family members. Toomer would see his father only once more, in 1897, before Nathan Sr.'s death in 1906.
As a child in Washington D.C., Toomer attended segregated black schools. After his mother remarried, they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, and the youth began to attend an all-white school. Toomer returned to D.C. after his mother's death in 1909, when he was 15, and he lived with his maternal grandparents. He graduated from the M Street High School, a prestigious academic black high school in the city with a national reputation.
Toomer was enumerated as "Eugene P." Toomer on the 1900 U.S. Census, living with his mother in the household of his grandparents, Pinkney and Nina E. Pinchback. Everyone in the household was recorded as black. Eugene lived with his grandparents in 1910 as well, at which time his race was recorded as mulatto. When he registered for the World War I draft in 1917, he styled his name Eugene Pinchback Toomer, and he was identified as black by the draft board. "Jean" Toomer lived in Manhattan, New York, in 1920 and 1930, and his race was recorded as white by the census enumerators. "Nathan" is also recorded as white on the 1940 U.S. Census. When "Jean" registered for the World War II draft in 1942, he was identified as Negro. "Nathan" Toomer's 1967 death certificate also records his race as white.
Between 1914 and 1917, Jean attended six institutions of higher education (the University of Wisconsin, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York), studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. His wide readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures that he attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing.
After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some short stories and continued writing during the volatile social period following World War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots victimizing black people occurred in numerous major industrial cities during the summer of 1919, which became known as Red Summer as a result. At the same time, it was a period of artistic ferment.
Toomer devoted eight months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject. Some of his early writing was political, and he published three essays from 1919 to 1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call. His work drew from the socialist and "New Negro" movements of New York. He also read new American writing, such as Waldo Frank's Our America (1919). In 1919, he adopted "Jean Toomer" as his literary name, and it was the way that he was known for most of his adult life.
By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications, wanting to be identified only as an American. He gained experience in both white and "colored" societies, and resisted being classified as a "Negro" writer. He grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales, as there was considerable interest in new black writers.
As Richard Eldridge noted, Toomer "sought to transcend standard definitions of race. I think he never claimed that he was a white man. He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life." William Andrews has noted he "was one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black."
In 1921, Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and manual labor college for black people in Sparta, Georgia. Southern schools were continuing to recruit teachers from the North, although they had also trained generations of teachers since the Civil War. The school was in the center of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where his father had lived. Exploring his father's roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white. Seeing the life of rural blacks, racial segregation, and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South led Toomer to identify more strongly as African American and with his father's past.
Several lynchings of black men took place in Georgia during 1921 and 1922, as whites continued to enforce white supremacy violently. In 1908, the state had ratified a constitution that disenfranchised most black people and many poor whites by raising barriers to voter registration. Other former Confederate states had passed similar laws since 1890, led by Mississippi, and they maintained such disenfranchisement essentially into the late 1960s.