Mixed Race Studies

The Hunter and the Farmer: Jean Toomer’s Depression-Era Masculinist Writings

AmeriQuests
Volume 6, Number 1 (2008)

Anastasia C. Curwood, Visiting Fellow
James Weldon Johnson Institute for Race and Difference
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In 1937, after he had written the novel Cane, left the African-American culture of Harlem, studied under the mystic Georges Gurdjieff in France, lost his wife to childbirth, and married for the second time, Jean Toomer sought to publish a series of essays. The subjects varied, but the most common theme was masculinity—men’s prerogatives, natures, and responsibilities. He theorized women’s temperaments as well, but it was clearly the study of maleness that captured his attention.

Toomer’s interest was noteworthy given the fact that he became ever more concerned with sexuality and gender as he left behind his African-American identity. Toomer did not intend to “pass,” as is commonly assumed—he actually wanted to be raceless, or of the “American” race. In his adopted home in the Pennsylvania countryside, Toomer attempted to construct his life based entirely on his masculinity. In Toomer’s opinion, his entire household—his white wife, his light-skinned daughter, and various temporary occupants—was a social experiment in supporting his masculine genius and creativity.

This essay is an intellectual history of Toomer’s self-construction. Using his diaries and published and unpublished writings, I will explain how Toomer saw his own male identity and how, although he had renounced his blackness, his racial identity mediated his ideal of his gender.

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“Split At The Root”: The Reformation of The Mulatto Hero/Heroine

AmeriQuests (Online)
Vanderbilt University
Volume 6, Number 1
2008-11-18

Tia L. Gafford, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies
Mercer University

Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy offers a valuable insight on the development of a holistic and natural model for patriarchy in the 19th century. Harper combines normally diametrically opposed ideologies of masculinity and femininely in the characters of Dr. Frank Latimer and Iola Leroy who become cultural heros/heroines by embracing a Black consciousness. By addressing what she considers to be a more cohesive productive society, Harper contextualizes the mulatto racial and social visions against the backdrop of the post-Reconstruction South. Within this new radical mixed race, Dr. Latimer and Iola Leroy rescues this normative stereotypical version and redefines them as the pre-cursors of Alain Locke’s “New Negro.” By rejecting whiteness as a mean to emancipate themselves out of an otherwise racial bondage, Iola Leroy and Dr. Latimer embrace the “one drop” rule. By “casting themselves” into the racial “pot,” Harper sets the mulatto up to ideally “work for the people.”

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