Introduction
In speaking about How the Word is Passed,  his acclaimed investigation of how Americans memorialize slavery and the Civil War, the writer Clint Smith has argued that the stories we tell about our past frame our understanding of our present possibilities. That, in turn, affects the way we create and assess policies, resulting in "a material effect on people's lives." Like Smith and millions of Americans who are descended from people who were enslaved, my relatives and I have spent years piecing together our own family's story from oral histories, documents, genealogical databases, and more recently, DNA tests, About 100 years ago, my generation's parents and grandparents became part of the Great Migration from the rural South to the urban and industrial North and Midwest, creating a geographic distance between the history they lived and the histories they handed down to us..

Just as Clint Smith's exploration began with a desire to understand the experience of his grandfather's enslaved grandfather, mine has been motivated by the fact that my father's grandparents - whom he knew - had been enslaved. I knew his mother, Mattie Mitchell Pearson, but I didn't know about her parents until after she died. Through research I learned about her maternal grandfather, George Holsey, and his cousin, Bishop Lucius H. Holsey, a cofounder of the Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church. Holsey's life and work are memorialized in his autobiography and collected sermons. Reading the scholarship on Cousin Lucius brought me to Cane, the signature work of the largely-forgotten Harlem Renaissance writer, Jean Toomer.

At the time of its 1923 publication, Cane was hailed as a landmark literary work, both for its experimental form and its portrayal of Black American lives amid the passage from the agricultural to the modern age. In the foreword, the then-popular novelist Waldo Frank opined:

"It is a harbinger of the South’s literary maturity: of its emergence from the obsession put upon its minds by the unending racial crisis—an obsession from which writers have made their indirect escape through sentimentalism, exoticism, polemic, 'problem' fiction, and moral melodrama. It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation."

Cane's southern scenes and characters were inspired by Toomer's short stint as a substitute principal at a vocational school for Black students in Sparta, Georgia in the fall of 1921.  The book's poetic and prose sketches in the first and third section of the book are based on those experiences, while the middle section draws upon his life as a privileged member of the tiny mixed-race Black elite of Washington DC. He was also part of the multiracial group of radical artists and intellectuals in New York. It's in the final section where Toomer refers to the mixed-race "Halsey" family, as well as Bishop Lucius.

My grandmother Mattie's grandfather, George Holsey, raised his family on land owned by the same people who donated the land for the school. I can't help reading Cane and thinking that the Black people he is depicting are my people - my family, their neighbors, their existential struggles seen through the lens of his own conflicted sense of self. What I want to understand is the stories that those people told themselves and each other, the information sources they drew upon, and the structures of opportunity or oppression they perceived. I want to know how that information ecosystem led them to make the choices they made - to resist or accommodate Jim Crow, to stay in the South or flee, to worship with the CMEs, AMEs or the Baptists. I want to scrutinize Toomer's and Holsey's writings, alongside other sources to reconstruct my grandparents' world as it might have been.

This visualization is part a way of connecting what's known about the Hancock County Jean Toomer experienced with that of my grandparents. It's a first step in a larger project that is still evolving. I hope to bring that larger project to fruition in time for the centennial for the publication of Cane.

One of Toomer's literary biographers, Barbara Foley, notes that in the years before Toomer wrote Cane, he published journalism and poems that tried to articulate a vision of multiracial working class solidarity against what he saw as the depredations of industrial capitalism. He was paying attention to the attacks on the civil rights, workers' rights and civil liberties that proliferated after the end of World War I, Like other radical thinkers of his time, he hoped there would be more incidents like the November, 1919 uprising in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where white labor activists supported Black workers' efforts to form a sawmill workers' union. However, a gang murdered four of those white activists, labor organizing proceeded on largely segregated lines. By 1921, Toomer had spent time in both blue-collar jobs where people were focused on survival, not politics, and .in the salons of the cultural elites who saw themselves as voices for the masses. The pastiche that is Cane reflects many of those disconnects and disjunctures. 

Scholars also believe Cane reflects Toomer's struggle with his own family history. His father, Nathan Toomer, had been born in nearby Perry, Georgia, and before he met and married Toomer's mother, he had been married to two other women, both of whom had died. His first wife, Harriet, His second wife was Amanda America Dickson, (1849-1893), a biracial woman who'd been raised as white, had two children with a Confederate military officer, then inherited her slaveowner father's fortune, which she managed with her formerly enslaved mother. Dickson married Nathan Toomer a few years after winning a court battle to keep her inheritance, but the frail heiress died just two years later. Nathan Toomer ended up in protracted litigation with Amanda's mother and sons over her estate, that seemed to contribute to the ruin of his third marriage to Nina Pinchback, daughter of the PBS Pinchback, the Civil War hero, first Black Governor of Louisiana and its first elected Senator, and in the 1890s, a successful businessman and member of the DC Black elite. Although his family had lost most of its wealth by the early 1920s, Toomer struggled with the feeling that their lives of relative privilege made them complicit in the exploitation of the Black masses, particularly since  her father's inheritance from Amanda America Dickson's estate came from the plantation that the family continued to operate.


The centennial of the publication of Cane approaches at a time when many thinkers have noted the similarities between the state of the world a century ago and today: a world emerging unevenly from a global pandemic, riven with economic and political instability as a result of war, the expansion of voting rights to white women - and the enactment of laws and policies attacking the rights of immigrants, Black people,  and workers. As in Toomer's time, it is also a time when Black people with relative privilege are struggling to define what that means, and how the degree to which their own social locations and actions either contribute to, or impede the achievement of that vision.