SOURCE: “Solving the Critical Conundrum of Jean Toomer's ‘Box Seat,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 301-05.

In the following essay, Flowers contends that Toomer effectively explores 1920s class division among African Americans in “Box Seat.”

Contemporary critics tend to read Jean Toomer's Cane as the odyssey of the black writer in search of racial heritage. Consequently, since “Box Seat,” one of Cane's short stories, is set in the city, it is treated as part of the urban leg of the odyssey.¹ In numerous letters and journal entries, Toomer encourages this approach by citing a 1921 trip to Georgia as the impetus for Cane. Admittedly, Toomer's leaving the amenities of Washington, D.C., for the privations of the rural South does indeed ring of odyssey. Nellie McKay, however, reveals that the teaching position which took Toomer to Georgia was but one in a series of...