A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life by Allyson Hobbs

Author:Allyson Hobbs [Hobbs, Allyson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, 19th Century, African American & Black, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Discrimination
ISBN: 9780674368101
Google: fmqABAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2014-10-13T22:26:35+00:00

Figure 4.2. Jean Toomer’s marriage license. Toomer married a white woman, Margery Latimer. Note that Toomer is listed as white.

Courtesy of James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

To live a hybrid existence in a racially segregated world was certainly “rough riding,” as Toomer told Jack McClure in 1922.42 Toomer suggested this impossibility in a letter to Sherwood Anderson and wrote, “The Negro’s curious position in this western civilization invariably forces him into one or the other of two extremes: either he denies Negro entirely (as much as he can) and seeks approximation to an Anglo-Saxon (white) ideal, or … he overemphasizes what is Negro.”43 Any other formulation was simply impossible. A choice must be made. Even Claude Barnett asked Toomer to pick one—he must either be black or white. Hardly at a loss for words to describe his racial position, Toomer’s answer was an unequivocal no. His answer was not audible, either to his contemporaries or to many critics later. Even astute scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, as well as Toomer’s closest friends, white and black, failed to comprehend him or the complexity of “race” as he envisioned it.

Hybridity and racial ambiguity were unworkable, even during the Harlem Renaissance, and therefore, the default option became passing as white. But it must be underscored that Toomer did not pass as a conscious act. Ultimately, Toomer disappeared from the black world and from the larger public and sought refuge in obscurity. He decided to study Eastern mysticism, Jungian psychology, and psychoanalysis. He joined the Society of Friends, and he became a follower of the spiritual leader George Gurdjieff.44 As Harlem exploded into a bloody riot in March 1935, as the Great Depression ravaged the publishing world and created breadlines that wrapped around Harlem’s once bustling streets, and as the Renaissance began to appear decadent, apolitical, and more of a fad than a meaningful movement, the option of claiming the kind of mixed-race identity that Toomer desired was dashed, not to appear again until the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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