Jean Toomer's Eternal South

Abstract

"This book is the South," declared Waldo Frank in the 1923 foreword to his friend Jean Toomer's Cane (Frank 138). Toomer's fresh, new treatment of southern folk, he averred, made Cane "a harbinger of the South's literary maturity" (139). Yet neither man was southern. Frank was a white northeasterner who had visited the South on three occasions then wrote a bad novel, Holiday, ineptly interpreting southern culture and lynching. For his part, Jean Toomer visited the Deep South only twice, totaling less than three months. Nonetheless his own anonymous review of Cane, intended for publication in The Call, emphasized his achievement in depicting the South. 1 Noting the emergence of contemporary regionalists such as Frost, Sandburg, Masters, and Sherwood Anderson, he claimed that in the South, too, "a splendid birth was imminent" (Jones, Selected Essays 11). As to Cane, despite its inclusion of considerable material not set in Georgia, he emphasized that it all "is so evidently Southern in content" (15).

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