Biography

Jean Toomer's greatest contribution to the Harlem Renaissance, and to American literature in general, was Cane (1922), an expertly intertwined series of poems, prose sketches, and a play dealing with African Americans and their connection with their folk heritage. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised by his mother and grandfather, Toomer began writing in his mid-twenties after he had abandoned his quest for a college degree. His stories and poems appeared in avant-garde journals like Broom and Prairie as well as the important African American journals such as the Liberator, Crisis, and Opportunity. Though a large portion of Cane takes place in the South, Toomer's only prolonged experience in there was a four-month stint as superintendent in a black school in Georgia. Cane's lyricism and its combined images of rural and urban blacks earned it immediate critical acclaim, but although Toomer continued to write, he never again achieved the success of that one distinctive collection.

Explorations

Cane (1923) is a complex book; like Eliot's Waste Land, it attempts to assemble fragments and memories into an overview of modern experience. Toomer writes about African American experience, and southern experience, as does Hurston -- but the aura of loneliness and disconnection is distinctly different and special to Toomer's achievement.

1. Compare the opening of Fern to the opening of Porter's Flowering Judas or to that of a story from Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Describe the distinct qualities of Toomer's beginning. Why open the story with a paragraph as complex as the one which begins Fern?

2. In this story, as opposed to Porter's or Anderson's, we have a narrator who is distinct, limited in what he knows, and a participant in the action. What are the advantages of telling Fern's story in this way, as opposed to using omniscient narration? How does the narrative viewpoint here intensify not just the language in which the story is told, but the plot itself? Does the story prove to be ultimately "about" the narrator himself in some way? If so, how?