Combes, Nina Eliza Pinchback, 1866-1909

In 1893, the widower Nathan at age 54 married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, a wealthy young woman of color. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of people of color who had been free before the Civil War. Her father, P. B. S. Pinchback, was of majority European heritage, from several nationalities, and also of African and Cherokee descent. Born free in Mississippi, he was raised by his white planter father. After his father's death in 1848, he and his mother moved to the free state of Ohio. Pinchback served as an officer in the Union Army in Louisiana.

After the war Pinchback stayed in Louisiana, where he became a Republican politician during the Reconstruction era. He served briefly as governor of Louisiana, the first African American to serve as governor of any U.S. state. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1872 and 1873, respectively, but lost challenges to his seats by Democrats in Congress. In 1891-1892, white Democrats had regained control of the Louisiana legislature and were imposing Jim Crow laws; the Pinchbacks left the state and moved to Washington, D.C., where they easily became part of the elite class of people of color. P. B. S. Pinchback was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but ultimately acquiesced in her choice.

After frequent travels, the senior Nathan Toomer abandoned his wife and son, and returned to Georgia. Unable to pay alimony, he was seeking to gain some of his late second wife's estate. Nina divorced him and took back her name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents. At that time, angered by her husband's abandonment, her father insisted they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather. The boy also was given a variety of nicknames by various family members. He saw his father once in 1897 in Washington, DC after he had gone to Georgia; the father died in 1906.

As a child in Washington, Pinchback attended segregated black schools. (He did not take the name Jean Toomer until starting his literary career.) When his mother remarried and they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, the youth attended an all-white school. After his mother's death in 1909, when he was 15, Pinchback returned to Washington to live with his maternal Pinchback grandparents.