GREAT BOOKS 25:

JEAN TOOMER’S CANE WITH ISMAIL MUHAMMAD

Jean Toomer’s 1923 Cane is one of America’s literary masterpieces: a book that captures the dynamism and rhythm of American English through characters that could not exist anywhere else in the world. The short novel is comprised of stories, tales, poetry and even songs, and in breaking with conventional genre it also broke with assumptions of who and what a book of modernist writing can feature. As a person who identified himself as the first “true American,” Toomer was educated in both black and white schools the 1920s. For a while he lived in Georgia where Cane is set, peopled by African-Americans and whites who are living through the volatile, gorgeous and violent reality structured by but not entirely determined by our country’s troubled race relations. But Cane is not a sociological treatise on race relations but as Ismail Muhammad explains, a book that resists and upends such interpretations. Toomer was furious when Cane was first marketed as a book by and about the African-American experience. While Toomer considered Cane the "swan song" of African-American folk culture rapidly destroyed by the industrialization of the South and the north-bound migration of African Americans during the era of Jim Crow, he did not want the book to be read only as a book about African-Americans. As Ismail Muhammad explains in an essay for the Paris Review, "far from being a book that [...] is intended to transcend blackness, Cane is the site where Toomer most artfully theorizes a surprisingly contemporary notion of what blackness means."

I spoke with writer and critic Ismail Muhammad to understand why Toomer’s single published book ranks among the great masterpieces of modernism, how to read a book celebrated as a major achievement of the Harlem renaissance without pigeonholing and limiting its ambition, scope and achievement, and what Toomer's notion of "what blackness means" is so relevant back then and still today.