LIKE HIS PRECURSOR Walt Whitman, Jean Toomer contained multitudes. By turns he was a free-thinking rationalist, a practitioner of Physical Culture, a vitalist, a mystical disciple of George Gurdjieff, and a Quaker. Toomer’s great work Cane (1923) displays a similar plurality: it contains stories, sketches, expressionist drama, lyric poems and graphics (arcs approaching but never completing a circle). Its settings – rural Georgia, Chicago, Washington DC – are as variable as its moods, which range from elegy to satire. I will argue that the most consequential vacillation in Cane concerns Toomer’s disposition towards the African American spirituality that it dramatises.

In a letter to his friend Waldo Frank, Toomer commended the ‘violen[t]’ emotional ‘powe[r]’ he found in rural Black churches. ‘Their religious emotion’, he wrote, is ‘very near the sublime’. Even so, he added, ‘[t]heir theology is a farce (Christ is so immediate)’. The two judgements seem incongruous: the sublime evokes wonder, farce provokes derision. If ‘the sublime’ names a process in which sensuous apprehension gives way to supersensual transcendence, how can a religion of immediacy court the sublime? By ‘farce’, Toomer can only mean that a properly transcendent reality (Christ) has been absurdly domesticated, so as to become fully available to sensation.

A short sketch, the tonally ambiguous ‘Calling Jesus’, elucidates Toomer’s meaning. Its centre is a ‘calling’ woman who imagines two figures: Jesus and a lover who will rescue her. As she calls, these become one figure: the dream of ‘Some one’ who comes to comfort her and who is ‘soft as a cotton boll brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ […] soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton’ (56). The biblical Christ – who allowed his body to be humiliated and broken – is replaced by a confected Christ, a pliant object of wish-fulfilment. Whether of cheek or foot, the image of cotton inevitably conjures the commodity that drove Black oppression.