Free In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker Page A

near-white neighbors that Toomer grew up.
    Like his grandfather, Toomer apparently used his “connection” to black people only once, when it was to his advantage to do so. When he was attempting to publish excerpts from Cane, he sent some stories to the Liberator, one of whose editors was black writer Claude McKay. He explained that though he was of French, Welsh, Negro, German, and Jewish and Indian ancestry, his “growing need for artistic expression” pulled him “deeper and deeper into the Negro group. And as my powers of receptivity increased, I found myself loving it in a way that I could never love the other. It has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me. A visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk-songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I had heard many false accents about, and of which till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to life and responded to them. Now I cannot conceive of myself as aloof and separated.”
    Once Cane was published, however, Toomer told a different story. When his publisher asked him to “feature” himself as a Negro for Cane’s publicity, Toomer replied that as he was not a Negro, he could not feature himself as one. He dropped out of literary circles, joined a Gurdjieffian commune intent on self-realization, met the well-connected white novelist Margery Latimer and married her. She died a year later in childbirth. His second wife, the affluent Marjorie Content Toomer, also white, settled down with him on a farm among the “tolerant Quakers” of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where, after seventy-three years of living as “an American,” Toomer died in a nursing home.
    A few of us will realize that Cane was not only his finest work but that it is also in part based on the essence of stories told to Toomer by his grandmother, she of the “dark blood” to whom the book is dedicated, and that many of the women in Cane are modeled on the tragic indecisiveness and weakness of his mother’s life. Cane was for Toomer a double “swan song.” He meant it to memorialize a culture he thought was dying, whose folk spirit he considered beautiful, but he was also saying good-bye to the “Negro” he felt dying in himself. Cane then is a parting gift, and no less precious because of that. I think Jean Toomer would want us to keep its beauty, but let him go.
    1980

A WRITER BECAUSE OF, NOT IN SPITE OF, HER CHILDREN
    A NOTHER WRITER AND I were discussing the difficulty of working immediately after the birth of our children. “I wrote nothing for a year,” I offered, “that didn’t sound as though a baby were screaming right through the middle of it.” “And I,” she said, leaning forward, “was so stricken with melancholia whenever I tried to think of writing that I spent months in a stupor. Luckily,” she added, still frowning at this dismal memory, “I always had full-time help.” Having had a sitter only three afternoons a week, I thought she had a nerve comparing her hard time to mine.
    What this woman and I needed to put our lives in perspective was a copy of Buchi Emecheta’s book Second Class Citizen.
    It was the dedication page of this novel that made me read it, because it is exactly the kind of dedication I could not imagine making myself.
    To my dear children,
    Florence, Sylvester, Jake, Christy and Alice,
    without whose sweet background noises
    this book would not have been written.
    What kind of woman would think the “background noises” of five children “sweet”? I thought the dedication might camouflage the author’s unadmitted maternal guilt, but Emecheta is a writer and a mother, and it is because she is both that she writes at all.
    Adah,