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In 1923, Toomer’s most famous work, Cane, won the approval of critics and his fellow artists, though the book never sold well. Sometimes referred to as a prose poem, Cane is not easily categorized; it includes verse and prose pieces. For young black writers, like Jessie Fauset and Charles S. Johnson, Toomer’s unconventional work confirmed the belief that African American artists could form a movement and use art to fulfill political aims. At a time when the Harlem Renaissance was just beginning to take shape, Toomer’s Cane, with its candid picture of rural and urban African American life, its picture of women, and its critique of modern industrialism, provided much-needed encouragement and promise; Cane endured as one of the most important works of the Harlem Renaissance.
Cane also proved to be Toomer’s best work. He left New York for France, and although he received generous financial support from Mabel Dodge, he did not manage to publish anything that gained the acclaim of Cane. In 1924 he traveled to Fontainebleau to study with the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, whose work he later taught in America. He experimented with communal living, and in 1932 he married a woman he met in one of these communities, Marjorie Latimer, a white woman from a prestigious New England family. She died in childbirth after only one year of marriage. In 1934, Toomer married another white woman, also named Marjorie. These marriages caught the attention of the media, and in his later years Toomer was often evasive about the question of his race. After the 1920s, Toomer virtually disappeared from the literary scene, but he did not stop writing. His unpublished plays, poems, and autobiographical sketches were collected in The Wayward and the Seeking(1980) after his death.
[3696] Dorothea Lange, Plantation Overseer. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1936),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-009596-C DLC].
White overseer and landowner with black workers. Sharecropping initially appealed to freedmen because it promised benefits they had previously been denied. However, most sharecroppers ended up working in conditions that weren’t much better than slavery, while whites retained economic, social, and political power.
[4099] Anonymous, Tenants (c. 1880-1900),
courtesy of Duke University, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Photograph of African American tenant farmers or sharecroppers in the field. Although sharecropping gave African American families more control over their labor, it was rarely lucrative.
[5510] J. C. Coovert, White Cotton, Black Pickers and a Gin (1915),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-120480 DLC].
Cotton was an important but resource-taxing and labor-intensive southern crop. Although the Southern Agrarians romanticized agricultural life, work on cotton plantations was difficult and rarely lucrative for African Americans.
[7104] Marion Post Wolcott, Cut Sugarcane Being Carried to the Trucks for USSC (1939),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-051089-E].
Photograph of a worker for the United States Sugar Corporation in Clewiston, Florida. African Americans labored in harsh conditions for many southern agricultural companies.