Free In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker

utterly dominated by her father, whom she spent her whole, relatively short life trying to defy. She died when Toomer was fifteen, after the second of two mysterious at-home operations that, as described here, read like abortions. His grandmother was also dominated by her husband, until his health began to decline in old age. Then she, old and ill herself, blossomed magnificently from a sweet, silent shadow of her husband into a woman of high humor, memorable tales, satiric jibes at anything and everything. She is reported to have had “some dark blood.”
    It will no doubt be hard, if not impossible, for lovers of Cane to read The Wayward and the Seeking (the title is from one of Toomer’s poems) without feelings of disappointment and loss. Disappointment because the man who wrote so piercingly of “Negro” life in Cane chose to live his own life as a white man, while Hughes, Hurston, Du Bois, and other black writers were celebrating the blackness in themselves as well as in their work. Loss because it appears this choice undermined Toomer’s moral judgment: there were things in American life and in his own that he simply refused to see.
    Toomer’s refusal to acknowledge the racism around him is especially lamentable. He lived in Washington with his grandparents for nearly the first twenty years of his life, and when he left to attend the University of Wisconsin, he decided he would say nothing of his racial identity unless asked. If asked, he would say, basically, that he was an American. The subject “never came up,” he writes, and within two weeks he was “taking this white world as a matter of course, forgetting that I had been in a colored group.” He does not find it odd that when his schoolmates mistake him for an Indian they brutalize him so severely on the football field that he is forced to call time out for good. “If others had race prejudice that was their affair,” he wrote, “as long as it did not manifest itself against me.” Given this deliberate blindness, it is no wonder that the fiction he wrote after Cane depicts primarily white people and never documents their racism in any way; it is as if Toomer believed an absence of black people assured the absence of racism itself.
    To many who read this collection Toomer will appear to be, as he saw himself, a visionary in his assumption that he was “naturally and inevitably” an American—a “prototype” of the new race now evolving on the American continent, “neither white nor black.” They will note that it was not Toomer who ordained that a single drop of black blood makes one black. Toomer, looking more white than black, could as easily argue the opposite point: that several obvious drops of white blood make one white. They will think it heroic of Toomer to fling off racial labels and to insist on being simply “of the American race.” They will not be bothered by the thought that, during Toomer’s lifetime, only white people were treated simply as Americans.
    Other readers will no doubt consider Toomer a racial opportunist, like his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, Governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, who, according to Toomer, settled in New Orleans before the Civil War and commanded a regiment of federal troops during the war. After “the war ended and the black man [was] freed and enfranchised,” Pinch-back saw his “opportunity in the political arena. He claimed he had Negro blood, linked himself with the Negro cause, and rose to power.” Once having obtained power Pinchback did nothing of substance for the masses of black men who voted for him. He and his family lived richly among upper-class whites until his money began to dwindle from playing the horses too much. He then moved among “colored” people who were so nearly white that “they had never run up against the color line.” It was among these white and