The Novel as a Masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance And a Canonical Work as In The American
In the afterword of Cane, Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr construct a surreal and renunciant reinterpretation of Darwin T. Turner’s introduction from 1975. The primary difference is that the afterword is updated by thirty-plus years of additional research. Byrd and Gates describe the novel as a masterwork of the Harlem Renaissance and a canonical work in both the American and the African American literary traditions within the first pages of the afterword. In the evaluation of Byrd and Gates’ afterword, it has been reviewed by Norton publishing as well as various critics such as Felicia R. Lee of the NY Times along with Robert Siegel of National Public Radio. Similar to Turner’s introduction, Byrd and Gates conducted massive amounts of research to fully understand and utilize the facts of Toomer’s life. The pair studied his unpublished biographies and gathered Toomer’s draft registration from June 5, 1917 along with a 1931 marriage certificate and a 1930 New York City census which makes a majority of the Afterword factually accurate.
The afterword in its entirety makes the book more relevant by providing more historical context to Toomer’s life. In a line on page 178, Byrd states “Like his grandfather and his father, Jean Toomer would live in both the black and the white worlds over the course of his life and in both worlds, the act of naming and self definition-would remain an obsession with him.” This line answers the ‘why’ and ‘how’ Toomer’s life became so divided. Due to this, an assumption can be made from Toomer’s travels from university to university in the 1910s. He was exposed more often to both the black and white worlds in his ventures and this pushed him the recreate a racial mask to hide behind given the current climate of the Jim Crow landscape.
Byrd and Gates’ afterword follows the historical and ideological perspective perfectly. It does this by conducting research dating back nearly eighty years and analyzing the climate of the 1910s and 1920s to see how the decades developed Toomer’s ideology regarding race and literature. The afterword supports the aforementioned thesis by creating a similar atmosphere Cane. It details the story of Toomer’s emergence as a literary author and his back-and-forth endeavors through the racial barrier in the hopes of rediscovering himself not as black or white, but as something more uniform than his past heritage. “An impotent nostalgia grips him. It becomes intolerable. He forces himself to narrow to a cabin silhouetted on a knoll about a mile away. Peace. Negroes within it are content.
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They farm. They sing. They love. They sleep. Kabnis wonders if perhaps they can feel him.If perhaps he gives them bad dreams, Things are so immediate in Georgia.” In this quote, the narrator (Toomer) shows an important flaw in the character of Kabnis. Kabnis is disconnected from everything in this scene. He thinks that all is immediate in Sparta, Georgia but he doesn't realize why which shows his racial isolation. This scene is a reflection of Toomer’s own isolation from the 1920s Georgia landscape and the afterword follows the same tone in describing the history that led to its conception.
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