SOURCE: “Sexuality and Liberation in Jean Toomer's ‘Withered Skin of Berries,’” in Callaloo, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 616-26.

In the following essay, Christensen assesses the flaws in “Withered Skin of Berries” and deems it “an indispensable part of our heritage from the Harlem Renaissance.”

The publication of The Wayward and the Seeking¹ in 1980 did not turn out to be a major event in American literature. For many people, Jean Toomer's claim to fame still begins and ends with Cane.² Yet, two selections included by Darwin T. Turner are closely related to Cane and the Harlem Renaissance. One of these, as Nellie Y. McKay indicates in detail in Jean Toomer, Artist,³ is the play, Natalie Mann. The other is the story, “Withered Skin of Berries,” which seems to me the most important text in the volume, not only because it is well written, but because in it Toomer goes...