Cane by Jean Toomer

Author:Jean Toomer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780871403124
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Published: 1923-11-12T22:00:00+00:00

THE END

AFTERWORD

“Song of the Son”:

The Emergence and Passing of Jean Toomer

by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In memoriam

To Charles T. Davis, beloved teacher, mentor, and pioneering scholar in African American Studies who set the highest standards for us and who generously prepared a way for us in the academy.

and

To Ingrid Saunders Jones, teacher, bibliophile, race woman, and leader in global commerce who nurtures and actualizes the dreams of so many.

Toomer

I did not wish to “rise above”

or “move beyond” my race. I wished

to contemplate who I was beyond

my body, this container of flesh.

I made up a language in which to exist.

I wondered what God breathed into me.

I wondered who I was beyond

this complicated, milk-skinned, genital-ed body.

I exercised it, watched it change and grow.

I spun like a dervish to see what would happen. Oh,

to be a Negro is—is?—

to be a Negro, is. To be.

(Jean Toomer)

—Elizabeth Alexander

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