[In The Wayward and the Seeking] race is unequivocally the overriding preoccupation of Jean Toomer's life: not Blackness or even being a Negro, but having (or having to have) a race at all. For a man who apparently had no more Negro blood than Dumas père or Pushkin, the drop or two that he does, or might have … bedevils his days and his intellect. (p. 1)
What makes Toomer's position on race so interesting to speculate on, is the fact that the best work he did came from three months in Sparta, Georgia, during which he identified with "black people, life and soul."… Of the stories included here, "Withered Skin of Berries" is quite the best, rivaling easily the heights achieved in Cane. But it was Toomer's artistic and racial sensitivity that made him so expert in rendering the machinations of race and color-as-class. He has indisputably keen insight into the "tragic mulatto" theme popular in the period and he is never ambivalent or fuzzy when dissecting the black middle class. His autobiographical material, the play, the short stories, are extraordinary in that respect. But aside from his fascinating, marvelously written autobiographies, there is little else of similar power. The aphorisms, maxims, and a long, bad Whitmanesque poem expounding racelessness and universal harmony are embarrassing. (p. 13)
Toni Morrison, "Jean Toomer's Art of Darkness," in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1980, The Washington Post), July 13, 1980, pp. 1, 13.
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