Symbols of racial possibilities: Perspectives on Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer

The question of hybridity is a complex social issue that commonly addresses agendas of heart, politics, and mind. It is a question that is both deeply personal and overtly political and addresses the entire spectrum of American society. Hybridity, in my view, can be used to interrogate a society rooted in ideas of race definition. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Jean Toomer's Cane, and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man depict the struggles of the mixed-race characters as they seek an identity of wholeness through attempting to live up to a social prescription of sameness. These characters wander in search of a raceless society; they cross boundaries of language and live in silence in a dichotomized world of public conformity and private duality despite their efforts to unite the two.