Toomer's Washington, D.C.

Toomer grew up among Washington, D.C. African-American elite, the grandson of P.B.S. Pinchback, a former Reconstruction governor of Louisiana.

Langston Hughes' account of twenties D.C. sheds light on it various social strata, with its "blue-vein" societies and Seventh Street neighborhoods described in Cane.

The years 1880-1920 were the heyday of Washington's black aristocracy, but the capital's reputation for elitism and intraracial color prejudice persisted well past World War I. Langston Hughes, writing about his experiences in Washington in the mid-1920s, commented upon the Negro aristocrats' propensity to boast about their college degrees and possessions, their "well-ancestored" pedigrees, and their light skins. Recalling with distaste one young Washingtonian's proud claim that at his fraternity dance the women were "nothing but pinks . . . --looki[ng] just like 'fay' women," Hughes concluded that his associates' ideals "seemed most Nordic and un-Negro . . . . [T]hey appeared to be moving away from the masses of the race rather than holding an identity with them." The works of Jean Toomer and other Washington-based black writers, he learned, were unknown in "society" circles: "In supposedly intellectual gatherings I listened to conversations as arid as the sides of the Washington monument." Seventh Street, by contrast, was "always teemingly alive with dark working people who hadn't yet acquired 'culture' and the manners of stage ambassadors, and pinks and blacks and yellows were still friends without apologies" (Hughes, "Wonderful" 226-27). Seventh Street blacks, "folks with practically no family trees at all . . . who work hard for a living with their hands, . . . looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud" (Hughes, Big [End Page 294] Sea 208-09). It was the migrants of Seventh Street, not the "pinks" of the capital's upper-class enclaves, who inspired Hughes's prolific poetic production during his 1920s Washington period (Rampersad 103). [from Barbara Foley "Jean Toomer's Washington"]