RACES: Just Americans

No Negro can legally marry a white woman in any Southern State. But Wisconsin does not mind, nor California. Last week at Carmel, Calif., "Provincetown of the Pacific Coast," there was an intellectual charivari. A parade of Carmel artists and authors marched to the cottage of Jean Toomer, 36, Negro philosopher (Cane), psychologist and lecturer, and Novelist Margery Bodine Latimer (This Is My Body), 33. It had just been revealed that they were married four months ago at Portage, Wis. Bridegroom Toomer, who has a small mustache and few Negroid characteristics, told the story of their romance.

One of Jean Toomer's grandfathers was Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a mulatto carpet-bagger who became Acting Governor of Louisiana but was refused a U. S. Senate seat in 1876. After attending the University of Wisconsin. Jean Toomer became an exponent of Georges Gurdjieff, the Armenian-Greek cultist who founded the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau, France, and whose most famed disciple was the late Katherine Mansfield (TIME, March 24, 1930). Last autumn Disciple Toomer took a mixed party of eight, all white except himself, to a farmhouse outside Portage, birthplace of Novelist Latimer. She was one of the party. All slept in two rooms on cots, following the Gurdjieff method, made themselves uncomfortable to break down thought and body habits, sat around nights discussing their reactions.

"As a result of the experiment." said Jean ^ Toomer last week, "I am satisfied that it is entirely possible to eradicate the false veneer of civilization with its unnatural inhibitions, its selfishness, petty meanness and unnatural behavior. . . . Adults can be re-educated to become as natural as little children, before civilization stamps out their true or subconscious instincts. I am satisfied that an interior life exists in all of us. a true life which will come to the surface under proper conditions.''

Early in the experiment, he added, he discovered that his own reaction drew him to Novelist Latimer. likewise a onetime Wisconsin student, who first heard of her future husband when she submitted articles to a magazine he edited. They were married. So re-educated had one member of the experimental houseparty become—Newspaperwoman Sara Roberts —that she neglected to report the nuptials.

"Americans probably do not realize it," Bridegroom Toomer told his callers last week, "but there are no racial barriers any more, because there are so many Americans with strains of Negro, Indian and Oriental blood. As I see America, it is like a great stomach into which are thrown the elements which make up the life blood. From this source is coming a distinct race of people. They will achieve tremendous works of art, literature and music. They will not be white, black or yellow—just Americans."

"You do not protest against a person's religion." concluded his bride. "Why should you judge people by their color? I and hundreds of others have taken my husband for what he is—a brilliant man."