Cane
JEAN TOOMER
1923

INTRODUCTION

Jean Toomer's eclectic Cane (1923) is a landmark work of African American literature and a classic book of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer's interwoven collection of sketches, poems, and short stories was embraced by critics and fellow writers, but it did not find a wider audience for many years. While some readers who initially praised the book believed he would be a leading author of his generation, Cane was the only book by Toomer to be published commercially in his lifetime. After his death in the late 1960s, he came to be considered a pioneering African American writer, and Cane was regarded an important contribution to literature. The book also proved to be inspirational to many African American authors, including Langston Hughes and Alice Walker.

One reason for Toomer's lack of success after Cane was that Toomer did not embrace such racial labels. He was of a mixed background, which included white, black, and Jewish ancestors, and he did not want to be labeled by any race whatsoever. He considered such labels limiting and thought of himself as a representative of a new kind of race, a blending, which he emphasized as American. His rejection of the label of "Negro writer" was believed to have hurt his literary career after Cane was published.

Inspired in part by his own experiences as the temporary head of a school for African Americans in Georgia, Toomer was fascinated with racial attitudes and came to some sense of understanding his own and those of others in early 1920s. On his way home to Washington, D.C., from Georgia, Toomer began writing sketches, poems, and stories inspired by his experience in the South. Some of these pieces were initially published in magazines and newspapers such as the Liberator, the Crisis, the Little Review, the Double Dealer, and Broom, and later became part of Cane.

In Cane, Toomer explores the folk traditions and culture of the South as well as the physical and psychological oppression of northern society and economic culture. The book is divided into three sections. The first section focuses primarily on the rural South through poems and prose sketches with women at their center. While these women are depicted as strong and independent, they also suffer because of their choices, which defy societal expectations. The second section, which begins with the prose poem "Seventh Street," explores the lives of African Americans in the North—Washington, D.C., and Chicago—who are estranged from nature and their racial community in the South. Their relationships with each other have become unclear and are often interrupted by their own shortcomings or bigger issues in society. Racial identity is also an issue. Toomer added this section at the request of his publisher who thought his book was too brief with just the first section and "Kabnis," the short story, which comprises the third section of the book. In this story, a northern African American comes to the South to teach at a school for blacks but lacks a coherent self-identity. He does not fully comprehend the society and life of the South, loses his job, and spirals downward with sex, drink, and a futile job at a wagon repair shop at which he essentially fails. As in "Kabnis," Cane as a whole "was primarily a song for an era that was ending," as Darwin T. Turner writes in his introduction to the 1975 edition of the book.

As was common with literature in the time period in which it was written, both sexuality and primitivism were central themes in Cane. While the book was embraced by critics and scholars for its celebration of folk traditions and peasant life, some were offended by Toomer's depiction of women's sexuality. Others embraced its frank and honest take on life in the South, appreciating that Toomer wanted to capture a southern black culture he saw was dying out.

BIOGRAPHY

JEAN TOOMER

Born Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer on december 26, 1894, the author was the product of the brief marriage between Nathan and Nina Toomer. His planter father was probably the poor son of a slave. His mother was the daughter of a prominent biracial politician, Pinckey Pinchback. Toomer was initially raised in Pinchback's household in a wealthy section of Washington, D.C., where his race was not an issue. From his uncle Bismarck Pinchback, Toomer gained a love of learning and literature. After living in his uncle's household in a black section of Washington, D.C., as a teenager, Toomer spent four years at various universities unable to stick with any of his studies. He then sold cars, was a physical education director, and worked in business.

By 1920, Toomer decided to become a writer. He focused on studying literature and produced a number of unpublished works. During this period, he also briefly took a job in Georgia as the head of a school for African Americans, an experience that inspired Cane (1923). His published literary career essentially ended after Cane as he refused to be labeled by his black heritage. Toomer then became a disciple of the spiritual leader Georges Gurdjieff and experimented with communal living. He became a Quaker in 1940, a belief system for which he wrote and lectured in the coming years. Though Toomer continued to write, all his future works were rejected by publishers in his lifetime. He died on March 30, 1967, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Cane is also noteworthy as a modernist text with complex, sometimes confusing, form and imagery, and touches of the avant-garde. Its experimentalism was the mark of another trend of the era in which it was written; Toomer was particularly influenced by Imagist poets. Some early critics were unsure of its form as well as content.

No matter what critics thought of the work, Cane helped shape African American literature in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. As Tracie Church Guzzio writes in American Writers,

Whatever the degree of its impact, it is clear that Cane helped liberate the African American artist by paving the way for exploring new forms and new voices, by revisiting past traditions, and by describing through poetry, rather than propaganda, the richness and humanity of African American life.

PLOT SUMMARY

Section 1

Chapter 1: Karintha

Cane opens with a sketch entitled "Karintha," which focuses on an attractive woman. Toomer writes that men were attracted to her "even as a child." By the age of twelve, she could get away with wild behavior unacceptable in others, but also was rumored to be sexually active, perhaps imitating her parents. This change came when she played house with a young boy. As she grew older, she would sleep with men when she felt like it, and they brought her money. She eventually had a baby: "A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest." Though Karintha continues to live this way and be a beauty at twenty, "Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon."

Chapter 2: Reapers

This descriptive poem describes African American harvesters as they prepare their instruments and do their cutting work. A worker's scythe catches a field rat and cuts it, but though there is blood on the blade, they continue to labor.

Chapter 3: November Cotton Flower

This poem is set in the winter when the cotton disappeared, there was drought and desolation, and "dead birds were found / In wells a hundred feet below the ground." Yet when a cotton flower bloomed, people responded not with superstitious fear but by embracing its unexpected beauty.

Chapter 4: Becky

This is another sketch about a woman in the South. Becky is a white woman who had two black sons. After she had the first one, she was condemned by other whites in her community, who did not know who fathered the child. Becky faced similar criticism from African Americans, who also did not know the father's name. Still, Toomer writes, "White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who'd put His cross upon her and cast her out." Though she was outcast from the community, the railroad boss said she could live on a small piece of land located next to the railroad, while another man donated materials for a cabin, and yet another built the cabin at night—all so their actions could not be known.

When Becky lived in the cabin, she was not seen by the community. However, some citizens secretly left food for her. When her first son was five years old, he began being seen with a little brother in town. Her sons grew up to be bullies who could not hold jobs as adults. They left town after killing two men, and Becky still seemed to be living in her cabin. After awhile, the community was unsure if she was alive or dead and stopped leaving food. One Sunday, the story's unnamed narrator reports passing by the cabin on the road and seeing its chimney fall inside. The narrator is unsure if Becky was under the bricks, despite possibly hearing a groan, but did nothing to see if she was alive or dead. The narrator and his companion, Barlo, quickly left the scene, leaving only Barlo's Bible on the rubble.

Chapter 5: Face

"Face" is a descriptive poem about a strong old woman's face, touching on her hair, brows, eyes, and "her channeled muscles."

Chapter 6: Cotton Song

"Cotton Song" is a poetic song, a spiritual linking of the baling of cotton with God and the judgment day.

Chapter 7: Carma

"Carma" is about a strong black woman. Told from the perspective of a first-person narrator from the North, the story describes seeing her direct a mule-driven wagon down the road. The narrator then tells Carma's story. Her husband is now working on a chain gang because, the narrator believes, of Carma. When he was away from home working, she took on a series of lovers. Her husband found out about her infidelity and beat her. She ran away, taking a gun with her. He heard the gun go off later as she faked her own death. People searched for her, found her, and carried her home. She had no wounds on her body. Because of the deception, her husband slashed the man who found her, landing him in prison.

Chapter 8: Song of the Son

This poem focuses on nature, night, and the sun, emphasizing slaves and their soul's relationship to the soil they work.

Chapter 9: Georgia Dusk

Like "Song of the Son," the poem "Georgia Dusk" emphasizes the land, but one post-slavery where industry and mechanization have taken over.

Chapter 10: Fern

This sketch describes Fern and her story from the point of view of a first-person narrator from the North. He implies that she is half Jewish and half African American. The narrator emphasizes her eyes: "They were strange eyes. In this, that they sought nothing—that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied." While she slept with some black men when young, they received little from the experience but became obsessed with her. Though they gave themselves to her, Fern began to send them away, seeing herself as above them, and starts abstaining from sex.

Fern then spent her days sitting on her porch, with her eyes gazing at what is around her. It was when Fern was sitting on her porch that the narrator first saw her and was attracted to her. One evening, he walked along her road, stopped by her house, and suggested taking a walk. She is bothered by the peering eyes of her neighbors. Without thinking, he holds her in his arms; she eventually reacts physically, seems to have a spiritual vision, and faints in his arms in the canefield. Though her protectors in the southern community kept their eye on the narrator, he soon returned home but saw her from the train window as he left.

Chapter 11: Nullo

This impressionistic poem describes pine needles falling to the forest floor.

Chapter 12: Evening Song

This first-person poem uses nature imagery intermingled with the narrator's intimate physical description of a woman named Cloine.

Chapter 13: Esther

This sketch begins by describing Esther, another mixed-race female, as a young child. When she is nine, she sees King Barlo, a black man, go into a religious trance on the street. No one is afraid, but instead many in the community watch and listen to his words. After what he says seems to come true, he rides out of town on a black bull. His words and actions impressed Esther. As a teenager, she has related dreams, and by the time she is a young adult, she is working in her grocery store and thinks romantically only of Barlo. When she is twenty-seven years old, he returns to town and she decides she must have him. She goes to the house where he is staying and tells him she has come for him. He rejects her, and Esther understands that Barlo is not what she thought he was. "She steps out. There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared."

Chapter 14: Conversion

This brief poem describes an African religion losing ground and contrasts it with Christianity.

Chapter 15: Portrait in Georgia

Another brief poem, "Portrait in Georgia" discusses the physical appearance of a worn-down woman of the titular land.

Chapter 16: Blood-Burning Moon

This short story focuses on Louisa, a young black woman who works for a white family. Bob Stone, the youngest son of her employers, believed he had "won her." A black field worker named Tom Burwell also loved Louisa. She was stringing both of them along. In the forest, men are processing sugar cane. Tom becomes upset when the men talk about Louisa being with Bob. Tom gets into a physical confrontation with some of the men, then goes to Louisa's house. He tells her he loves her and he would cut Bob if he was involved with her. Louisa denies any involvement with Bob, and they sing together.

Later, Bob thinks about his relationship with Louisa, which he hides from his family despite his certain kind of sexual love for her. He becomes upset at the thought that she was also involved with Tom, and this furor grows when he comes upon the men in the woods and Louisa's duplicity is confirmed. Finding Louisa and Tom together, Bob confronts them. The men get into a physical confrontation. Tom slashes Bob's throat. When they learn what happened, the white men in the town hunt Tom down and beat him. He is burned at the stake. Louisa only sees the full moon, and she believes people, if not Tom, would join her if she sang.

Section 2

Chapter 17: Seventh Street

The focus of Cane shifts from the rural South to the industrialized North. In this first piece in the second section of the novel, Toomer uses poetry and prose to describe city life, jazz, the effects of World War I, and clubs and theaters in the part of town where African Americans live and where metaphorical blood flows. God and religion are also mentioned.

Chapter 18: Rhobert

This brief, obtuse, image-filled character sketch is about a man named Rhobert who is weighed down by the house he metaphorically wears on his head. Such a life physically affects him, but, despite bent legs caused by rickets, he bears his hardships.

Chapter 19: Avey

Another sketch with a first-person male narrator, the story focuses on his attraction since childhood to a young woman named Avey. City boys both black and white admired her, and the narrator went out of his way to get her attention. While they swam and danced together, he believed she would marry a college student who lived on the top floor of her apartment building when he saved enough money. Because the student was gone, she used all the boys in turn until their money gave out. Though the narrator becomes similarly involved and Avey kisses him on the deck of a ship, he does get close to her again for a year later when they are more intimately involved. His opinion of her changes because she seems to have no ambition in life, while he prepares to go to college. His opinion of her as lazy does not change while he is in college. When he meets her again in New York five years later, he tries to reconnect and improve her but then loses his passion for her all over again.

Chapter 20: Beehive

This poem describes a beehive and bees, comparing them to a city and its inhabitants. The narrator sees himself as one of the bees and wants to reconnect with the land.

Chapter 21: Storm Ending

This brief poem describes a thunder storm, which affects the flowers "And the sweet earth flying from the thunder."

Chapter 22: Theater

"Theater" is set at a theater with an African American audience, where the manager's brother, John, is attracted to one of the dancers, Dorris. He watches her as she rehearses, and she notices his gaze. Though they do not speak directly, they make assumptions about each other. Dorris dances for him, and John dreams about her. At the end of the dance, his attraction is dead. Dorris cries in her dressing room.

Chapter 23: Her Lips Are Copper Wire

This impressionistic poem celebrates the telephone and the physical contact of a kiss.

Chapter 24: Calling Jesus

This is a prosaic poem, which explores the concept of a woman's soul as "a little thrust-tailed dog that follows her, whimpering." The dog/soul is left in the vestibule when she comes home at night, but it is free to trail after her. At the poem's end, the narrator reports that "Some one … will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps."

Chapter 25: Box Seat

Dan Moore, a black man, calls on Muriel, a teacher, at the boarding house where she lives. He is in love with her, as his thoughts reveal, but she does not share the same feelings. She admires some of his character qualities but is ultimately not fond of him. Though Muriel is getting ready to go out with her friend Bernice, she spends some time talking to him. He tries to tell her to improve herself and declares his love, then Muriel refuses his advances.

At the theater with Bernice, Muriel watches crude entertainments and thinks about what happened with Dan. He shows up at the theater as well, which upsets Muriel. He watches her more than the entertainment. After two dwarves box, Mr. Barry, one of the dwarves, sings a song and gives a rose to Muriel. She is repulsed, ending Dan's feelings for her. He leaves.

Chapter 26: Prayer

This poem explores divisions within the body, the mind, and the body separated from the soul. The narrator acknowledges that his division and confusion have weakened him.

Chapter 27: Harvest Song

A longer poem, "Harvest Song" is a first-person poem about a reaper harvesting oats in the field all day long. He is tired at night, too tired to bind his cradled oats, and hungry. Toomer writes, "My pain is sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger."

Chapter 28: Bona and Paul

At a school for aspiring teachers in Chicago, a white female student, Bona, is attracted to Paul, a biracial student. Paul struggles with his racial identity, hiding it from the others who question the truth about his heritage.

Paul's white friend and roommate Art has arranged dates for them. Paul's date is Bona. The couple has problems communicating throughout the evening. She tells him that she loves him, and while he is ready to kiss her, she will not because he cannot say he loves her as well.

At Crimson Gardens, Paul feels more disconnected and different. He dances with Bona, but their communication problems continue and she becomes angry with him. Paul keeps her physically near, and their passion is restored by continuing to dance. They leave together before Art and Helen do. However, Bona leaves Paul after he goes back inside to explain his attraction to Bona to the black doorman.

Section 3

Chapter 29: Kabnis

The last section of Cane is the story "Kabnis." Ralph Kabnis is a mixed-race teacher who has come south from Washington, D.C., to teach at a school in Georgia. He is unhappy teaching at the school, which educates African Americans. The South in general also does not agree with him.

As the story opens, he is finding it hard to get to sleep, a situation made worse by a noisy chicken in the room next to his. Kabnis kills the chicken, a pet hen on the campus, and does not care about the consequences. While he sees beauty in the night, he can only see ugliness in the South, its culture, and its inhabitants. Kabnis finally falls asleep, looking forward to tomorrow, Sunday.

On Sunday, Kabnis visits Fred Halsey, a prominent local mixed-race man, with Professor Layman, a black teacher and preacher. Layman and Halsey like Kabnis because he is not conceited like other African Americans from the North. The pair tells Kabnis that even though they may be "gentlemen," white people only see skin color.

Kabnis tells them he is contemptuous of the religious practices: "the preacher's hands are in the white man's pockets." He especially does not like the religious services for blacks in the South, finding the shouting uncomfortable.

The conversation turns to Kabnis's boss, Hanby, whom the men do not like, and then to a lynching a year back. Mame Lankins was lynched though she was pregnant. The baby survived her death and was cut out by a white man. He killed the baby and stuck it in a tree with a knife. Kabnis's already edgy state is further agitated when a rock is thrown through Halsey's window with a note. The note seems meant for Kabnis and tells him to return to the North.

Kabnis grows paranoid with every sound when he returns home. He is sure someone is out to get him when Halsey and Layman stop by. Halsey tries to reassure him that no one is after him and that he would have gotten killed already if that was their goal.

Layman and Halsey start a fire to make food, and Halsey passes around some liquor. Hanby, the head of the school, enters just as Kabnis passes the bottle to Halsey. Hanby tells Kabnis he must turn in his resignation tomorrow for drinking in his room. Kabnis is indignant, and Hanby tries to get them all to leave now. Halsey reminds Hanby that he has not paid a bill to Halsey and must do so tomorrow under the same threats that Hanby made to Kabnis. Halsey also says that Kabnis will now work for him doing physical labor.

Kabnis tries to take hold of the situation in his room with Halsey and Hanby, but cannot. Lewis, another black man, comes in. Kabnis learns that the rock and note were meant for him, thrown by other African Americans uncomfortable with his presence. After Lewis and Hanby leave, Kabnis wearily gives in. He will live at Halsey's and work in his shop.

A month later, Kabnis is working at the shop, where wagons are built and repaired. Waiting for lunch, Halsey, Kabnis, and Layman are joined by Lewis, who is planning on leaving town now. It is revealed that Lewis is disliked for his "queer opinions." Their discussion is interrupted by a white customer, Mr. Ramsay, who asks for his hatchet to be repaired. Kabnis is given the task but cannot complete it. His humiliation is furthered by the appearance of Hanby who demands an axle be shaped into a crow-bar.

Halsey's sister, Carrie K., shows up with lunch for Kabnis, Halsey, and Father John, Halsey's father who lives in the shop's cellar. Lewis is attracted to her, and while she initially shows interest, she retreats into propriety. She goes down to the Hole, the shop's cellar, to feed her blind and deaf elderly father. After Lewis asks about her future, Kabnis and Halsey invite him to join them for fun with female companions that night.

Later, Lewis, Kabnis, and Halsey are in the Hole with two women named Stella and Cora. Father John is also present. There is tension in the room as all but Father John, drink and talk about town gossip. Kabnis defensively talks to Lewis about who he is, before Halsey sends him to be distracted with Cora. Lying with Cora, his attention is diverted when Halsey begins to talk to Lewis about him. Kabnis spews information about his family, his past, and his opinion of the South. Lewis leaves when the pressure of the situation becomes too much.

The next morning, Halsey has to awaken Kabnis, Cora, and Stella, who are still asleep in the Hole. The women do not want to leave but get up and do so. Kabnis lingers down there, believing that Father John spoke to him in the night. Kabnis talks to him, sharing his opinions of life in the South. Carrie comes down to get Kabnis to go to work. Father John speaks of sin and says that white people make the Bible lie. Kabnis is contemptuous of the old man, while Carrie is reverent. After stumbling around, Kabnis finally goes upstairs to work as the sun rises.

THEMES

Regional Disconnectedness

Throughout Cane, Toomer implicitly contrasts the rural South with the urban North, considering the effects of pursuing the American dream of a better life on African Americans. For some, the differences between regions offer a chance to escape, while for others, the differences turn the dream to disappointment. Through many sketches and poems in the book, he shows what they lost by moving north, including the past and a sense of self as well as ties to a specific southern community. This theme is primarily explored in the second section of the book, with the sketches and poems therein, and the third section, which consists only of "Kabnis."

Unlike poems in section 1 such as "Nullo," "November Cotton Flower," "Reapers," and "Cotton Song," which use nature imagery related to the South to establish the rural connection to the land, the poems in section 2 emphasize the fast pace of life in the North as well as its disconnectedness. In "Seventh Street," for example, Toomer describes this differing pace and focus in Washington, D.C.: "Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts / Bootleggers in silken shirts / Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, / Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks."

More personal disconnectedness can be found in the sketch "Theater," in which a dancer named Dorris catches the attention of the theater manager's brother, John. They never speak but spend much of the sketch judging and imagining what it would be like to communicate and be close with the other. They never connect despite Dorris's dance for him, and Dorris ends up in tears in her dressing room. "Calling Jesus" emphasizes this fact further as a woman is described as literally disconnected from her soul, which follows her around in the form of a small dog.

Toomer talks about the weight of modern living in the sketch "Rhobert." The title character is described as wearing "a house like a monstrous diver's helmet, on his head." While Rhobert is praised for being able to hold up despite having legs weakened from rickets, he is also described as drowning from the pressures of city life and the materialism of modern society. This lifestyle kills his dreams and damages his relationship with his family. The sketch ends by emphasizing the losing battle Rhobert is fighting: "Brother, Rhobert is sinking. / Lets open our throats, brother, / Lets sing Deep River when he goes down."

The theme of contrast finds its ultimate fruition in the final section and story of the book, "Kabnis." The title character, Ralph Kabnis, is an African American teacher from the North living in the South. At the beginning of the story, he is a teacher at a school for African Americans, but he finds life in the South difficult. Kabnis is unhappy with his living quarters, the rules imposed on him at the school, and southern culture in general. Early in the story he prays,

Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valley, heaving with folk-songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and … tortures me.

As the story progresses, Kabnis shows how disconnected he is, though he has ancestors from Georgia. He states that he does not like how people act in church in the South, offended by their loud proclamations of worship. Though some in the community like and help Kabnis, such as Halsey and Layman, he believes others are out to get him. When a threatening note is thrown with a rock through Halsey's window, Kabnis mistakenly believes it is targeting him. While the others try to set him straight, he cannot accept their explanation of southern behavior. Eventually, Kabnis gives up. He does not fight being fired as a teacher, and while Halsey employs him in his wagon repair shop, Kabnis cannot do the work and is only good for giving into baser instincts. He cannot reclaim what he and his people have lost by living in the North.

Racial Identity

In several sketches in sections 1 and 2, Toomer explores the idea of racial identity, especially as an isolating factor. Several characters in the book are of mixed race and this leads to questions about who they are, what they stand for, and decisions contrary to the norms of their immediate society. While being of mixed race has undoubtedly furthered some American dreams, making it easier to reject part of a heritage that the dreamer finds to be a burden, the abandonment of part of one's self is rarely shown as bringing peace or happiness.

In the first section's "Fern," for example, the title character is implied to be part Jewish and part African American. Initially, Fern gives herself to men and has many admirers. Toomer writes, "As she grew up, new men who came to town felt as almost everyone did who ever saw her: that they would not be denied. Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies." Eventually, she withdraws herself from sexual activity—a choice at odds with the rest of her community—and comes to be seen as regarding herself as above everyone else; she "became a virgin." She isolates herself at home and stares at the landscape from her porch. The sketch's white male narrator dares challenge this isolation and learns of her anger at the world. While the narrator becomes connected to God and land through holding Fern, she is still isolated and alone at the story's end.

In section 2, Paul in "Bona and Paul" is in some ways more isolated than Fern. A mixed-race student at a school for teachers in the North, Paul hides his racial identity and passes for white among his fellow students. However, many have guessed at his true racial makeup; Helen thinks, "Not one girl had really loved Paul; he fascinated them." Art, his roommate, thinks that he always has to answer questions about Paul's race and wonders, "What in the hell's getting into Paul of late, anyway? Christ, but he's getting moony. Its his blood. Dark blood: moony." Bona, a fellow student who is white, is interested in Paul, and Art arranges for them to go on a double date with him and his love interest, Helen. At Crimson Gardens, Paul, and even Art, feels the stares of those who wonder what Paul is. This situation makes Paul feel isolated even from his own small group. Paul is left alone in the end after he tries to explain himself to the African American doorman; Bona does not wait after she hears who he is. Paul's troubles with racial identity leave him isolated from everyone else.

Power of Womanhood

Many of Toomer's sketches feature prominent women characters. In the first section of Cane especially, the sketches explore life in the South through pieces about women who often act in defiance of society's expectations in some way. They often pay a price for their sexual independence, though this pursuit of self is a prominent part of the American dream.

Cane opens with "Karintha," about a woman who men desire and bring their money to, but they "do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing that ripened too soon … they will die not having found it out." "Becky," the next sketch, focuses on a white woman who has two African American sons. While she is publicly rejected by the community, both black and white, for her choices, she spends all her time in her cabin, which some local citizens secretively built for her, while she is regularly fed by others.

"Carma" has even more power. Like Karintha, Carma makes her own sexual choices. She chooses to have numerous affairs while married to her husband, who beats her. However, he ends up on the chain gang for slashing the man who found her when she faked her own death. In "Blood-Burning Moon," Louisa also engenders violence by stringing along two men, one white and one black, each of whom believes that he solely possesses her. Tom and Bob eventually find out about each other, and the white man, Bob, has his rival killed by a mob.

While the title character in "Esther" technically fails to control her sexual destiny—King Barlo is nothing like what she built him up to be her whole life—she also chooses to live her life her way and take risks by even approaching Barlo when he returns to town. In all such sketches in Cane women assert their sexual authority without a hint of self-doubt.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Great Migration

Beginning in 1914 as World War I broke out, African Americans moved from the South primarily to large urban centers in the Northeast (New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore), Midwest (Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis), and West (Los Angeles). The Great Migration, as this movement came to be called, reached an early peak in the 1920s. There are several reasons for this population shift. While the Great Migration was part of a greater trend of urbanization, which was happening throughout the United States in the 1920s, African Americans had more specific motivations for leaving the South.

In many facets of southern life, African Americans faced racial segregation at nearly every turn. Jim Crow laws were southern state laws, which enforced this segregation. For example, in many southern states, African Americans were forced to attend separate schools from white students. They also had separate accommodations in most public places such as trains, buses, libraries, restaurants, and even drinking fountains. In some states, housing restrictions were placed on African Americans who were not allowed to live in certain parts of some communities. In addition, African Americans' right to vote was often limited by such laws, which required a poll tax or literacy test as a prerequisite for casting a ballot.

By the 1920s, the South was still dominated by agricultural and rural communities. Many blacks worked as sharecroppers through the late 1910s, but a boll weevil (a type of beetle) infestation of cotton fields in this time period left the already poor farmers even more economically devastated. The potential for starvation was a compelling factor to seek jobs elsewhere.

The North was believed to be less segregated than the South and held the promise of better employment. World War I temporarily cut down on the number of immigrants from Europe at a time when the number of factory and service jobs increased because of the needs of the war. Many men also left their jobs to serve in the armed forces. Thus more jobs were available in industrial cities in the North for African Americans. Work shortages meant opportunities for many blacks looking for a better life. Labor agents abounded, working to convince blacks to move north and take jobs. Some companies, such as railroad companies, needed workers so badly that they funded some African Americans' travel from the South to the North.

Approximately one million African Americans left the South for the North during the Great Migration, increasing the black population in those cities an average of 20 percent between 1910 and 1930. The Great Migration completely transformed the black population of certain cities. For example, in Detroit the population of African Americans was only 6,000 in 1910. By 1929, the number had increased to 120,000. The Great Migration continued until about 1930 when the Great Depression caused the need for workers in the North to abate.

The effects of the Great Migration on the African Americans who made the journey was profound. While they faced some difficulties adjusting to life in the northern urban centers, workers earned higher wages than they did in the South. Their children received better educations. It also affected blacks left behind in the South. While some white planters and employers tried to prevent blacks from leaving en masse through intimidation and other means, other business owners and farmers promised better pay and treatment to their workers who stayed. There was some change in many whites' attitudes and behavior toward blacks in the South, though racist attitudes continued to dominate.

Harlem Renaissance

One result of the Great Migration was the Harlem Renaissance, a term used to describe a blossoming of African American culture, literature, music, and arts in New York City in the 1920s. Many of the blacks who moved from the South to New York City during the Great Migration settled in Harlem. They developed a change in attitude, becoming what was termed the "New Negro." Discarding the docile slave mentality, the New Negro was smart, eloquent, urban, and confident. Blacks found an expression for this new attitude in cultural forms.

The artists, musicians, and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance used their works as social and political critiques and as an expression of what they experienced as African Americans. They wanted to challenge racism and racial stereotypes promulgated by the white community to create a new cultural identity, which would encourage the black race. Many who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, such as painter Aaron Douglas and poet Langston Hughes, were also influenced by a quest to understand their African ancestors.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

When Cane was published in 1923, only about 1,000 copies were initially printed. However, a few critics as well as literary editors and authors embraced the book as a powerful work from the beginning. Such readers responded positively to Toomer's experimental form, artistic structure and style, and his unique take on the subject matter—African American life.

In the introduction to the original printing of Cane, Waldo Frank writes, "A poet has arisen among our American youth who has known how to turn the essences and materials of his Southland into the essences and materials of literature." However, not all critics of the time responded as enthusiastically, as some were befuddled by the book's mix of forms. Writing in the New Republic, Robert Littell comments, "Cane is an interesting, occasionally beautiful and often queer book of exploration into old country and new ways of thinking."

Cane was only reprinted once while Toomer was alive, in 1927. After his death, the book eventually came to be widely read and a significant example of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Cane found widespread audience in the 1960s with the coming of the Black Arts movement when both students and scholars rediscovered the book and Toomer, and claimed him as an important black author. In 1965, Robert Bone acknowledged that it was one of the leading works of the Harlem Renaissance. In his article "The Harlem School," Bone claims, "Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style."

Over the years, such critics and scholars have praised Cane for its realistic depiction of life in the South and of African Americans. Toomer received critical kudos because he resisted the stereotypical depictions of African Americans that were common at the time. Yet some of the book's content was controversial, including Toomer's depiction of women, especially in the book's first section, and his exploration of their sexuality. Others noted the prideful way he depicted women.

Cane's form was an issue as well. There has been some critical debate over exactly what kind of book Cane is. Some critics call it a novel, though Toomer himself rejected this label. It has been described variously as one prose poem or even a cycle of short stories. Dismissing this controversy in the New York Times, prominent African American author Alice Walker writes,

Some critics called the book a novel, some called it a prose poem, some did not know what to call it; but all agreed that "Cane" was original, and a welcome change from earlier fiction that took a didactic or hortatory position on black and interracial American life.

Toomer's book continues to be regarded as a significant work into the early twenty-first century. As Karen Jackson Ford asserts in Split-Gut Song, "Through lyricism and impressionism, Toomer achieves an accuracy of representation that exceeds realism. Either way the argument is made, realism or 'higher' realism, Cane is valued for its authentic depiction of African America."

CRITICISM

William Dow

In the following excerpt, Dow explains how, by speaking from and to different points of view in the different sections of Cane, Toomer emphasizes the individuality among people often assumed to share a common perspective.

"I want great art. This means I want great design." Jean Toomer, "Open Letter to Gorham Munson"

Part of Toomer's "great design" in Cane is that his text, like any written text and paralleling any oral performance, is by someone and to someone. It is, then, a social transaction that does not present what is said to the exclusion of who says it to whom and for what purpose. Although Cane's characters receive relatively brief treatment, the identity of the novel's narrator is presented in more fully developed terms, both as a process of consciousness and unconsciousness and as a subject impinged on and affected by interactions with his characters and narratee. The narrator renders his "individuality" through a socialized interdependence based on forms of direct address and a creative negotiation of narrative authority. Toomer's radically new formal transgressions, which follow his radical positions on race and culture, speak to the need to understand Cane in terms of both stylistic function and thematic expression.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

A theatrical presentation of Cane was released in 2006 by Chezia Thompson Cager. It is called Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923 Cane, and it is available on compact disc from the Spectrum of Poetic Fire.

My purpose here is to trace Toomer's self-reflective narrators in the three sections of Cane in order to show how Toomer raises the issue of "social transaction" implied by the choice of narrative method and by the identification of narrator, narratee, and reader. In effect, Toomer does not assert cognitive authority but concentrates instead on articulating modes of narrative authority and patterns of feeling that directly modify not how we understand the world so much as how we engage it. He suggests that there are modes other than "race" that afford significant ways of resisting the dominant cultural emphases on difference. I want to show how these concepts and modes are inflected by the geographical movements of the book, what shifts in the identification of narrator and narratee are implied by shifts in the nature of the communal experience in Cane's three sections, and how the subjectivities of characters, narrators, and real and implied readers have been shaped by different communal experiences. Cane is a productive rewriting of "race," allowing for the recognition of multiple authentic African American voices, identifications complicated by class, gender, and geography, and greatly enriched by the significant modulations in narrative address that Toomer undertakes.

An emblem of the last geographical movement in Cane, "Kabnis" signals the narrator's return to rural Georgia from the urban environments of Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and thus the novel comes full circle. Unlike the narratees in the preceding parts, the narrattee in Part Three is not represented by a character, nor is he mentioned explicitly by the narrator. Instead, the emphasis shifts: the intervening narrator and the character Kabnis point to the autobiographical Toomer: "Toomer places himself at the center of 'Kabnis'"; the narrator tells his "story." But for both the narrator and Kabnis, their desires, their subjectivities, cannot be satisfactorily articulated until they find a means with which to mediate them. Paralleling Kabnis's struggles to do so, the narrator commingles the private with public in "Kabnis," using a self-addressed and autobiographical "you" and a tone of voice that runs the gamut from the stridency of the orator to the tenderness of the poet: "Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes." He can be nurturing: "Dead blind father of a muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them. (speak, Father!)." He can be sardonic: "[Hanby] is well dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinned Negro who thinks there is no one quite so suave and polished as himself," and he can be merely a neutral describer of actions: "He stands by the hearth, rocking backward and forward. He stretches his hands out to the fire." On the one hand, "Kabnis" renders a kind of individual and communal tragic subjectivity in which the narrator dramatizes the forces destroying the folk culture and causing racial oppression. On the other, "Kabnis" is as much about the narrator's self-exploration (and Toomer's own) as it is a portrayal of communal subjectivities and experience.

"Kabnis" brings a new shaping of subjectivities, most notably those of the narrator and Kabnis. The narrator integrates into Kabnis strong undercurrents of irony, parody, and the burlesque, and casts the story into a kind of mock-epic form. Unlike Carma, Fern, and Karintha whose minds the narrator cannot penetrate, the narrator does know the mind of Kabnis. Yet the subjectivity the narrator produces (his own and Kabnis's) creates a mysterious and elusive atmosphere, particularly in the context of Kabnis's many roles: as a protagonist in the drama, as an educated outsider, as a poet who wants to become the "lips of the south," as "a ridiculous pathetic figure in his showy robe." The first section in the drama portrays Kabnis's isolated subjectivity, which is countered in the following sections when Kabnis comes into contact with the community. With communal contact, mostly among Sempter's black men, Kabnis searches for the security of self, and the identity of a racial self, in others.

But Kabnis fails to find this self and to integrate into the community of "peace." Instead, he feels "suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him." Although he dreams of giving words to the South, he can neither reconcile the cultures of North and South nor, even in moments of heightened self-consciousness, face his racial past. Indeed, Lewis confronts Kabnis with the memory of the past he can either deny and let "die an impotent and meaningless death, or use … to become a sustaining, spiritual force behind a reawakened sense of race consciousness":

Lewis: The old man as symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past, what do you think he would say if he could see you? You look at him, Kabnis.

Kabnis: Just like any done-up preacher is what he looks like to me. Jam some false teeth in his mouth and crank him, an youd have God Almighty spit in torrents all around th floor. Oh, hell, an he reminds me of that black cockroach over yonder. An besides, he aint my past. My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—

Lewis: And black.

Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.

Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Can't hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season's multi-colored leaves, tarnished, burned, Split, shredded; easily burned. No use.

Despite such denials. Kabnis, from a certain perspective, represents the narrator of the first two sections who tries to become integrated into the community and must humble himself and suffer humility in his attempt to do so. Kabnis's intense loneliness, his consuming self-centeredness, and his various "denials," elations, and disintegrations are parts that the narrator later tries to bring together into a "soft circle," a spirit of individual and communal consciousness.

In addressing the community and the narratee the participant-narrator resorts to an invocatory, imperative form: "Night winds fare the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing. Hear their song." "The night winds in Georgia," the narrator urges, "are vagrant poets whispering," and the "weird chill of their song," a song which serves as a refrain for "Kabnis," must be listened to:

    White-man's land
    Niggers sing.
    burn, bear black children
    till poor rivers glory
    In Camp Ground.

Moreover, as in Parts One and Two, lyricism, "White paint on the wealthier houses has the chill blue glitter of distant stars," interfuses with speculation and uncertainty to dominate the descriptions: "it seems huge, limitless in the candle light"; "Someone is coming down the stairs." The narrator, as part of his self-examination, struggles to discover and interrogate reality, and at times casts doubt not only on his own declarations and predispositions but on the literal reality of his characters' perceptions. This doubt spreads to the narrator's reliance on the narratee's assent and approval. The narrator's earlier confidential attitudes toward the "you," which "encourage actual readers to see themselves reflected in that pronoun" are in this section conspicuously absent.

What replaces this particular narrator-you relationship is Toomer's use of a self-addressed you. Kabnis directs his inner thoughts to "God Almighty, Dear God, Dear Jesus," then to a self-reflective self. "Get up you damn fool. Look around. What's beautiful there?", before addressing his own feelings. "Oh no, I won't let that emotion come up in me. Stay down. I tell you." He later returns to a remonstrative self. "Come, Ralph, old man, pull yourself together." In this section the comments of an omniscient narrator, "Kabnis' mind clears," alternate with Kabnis's various addresses to Jesus, "Jesus how still everything is," and to himself, "Come, Ralph, pull yourself together … You know, Ralph, old man, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see a ghost." Hence the text accommodates a variety of "you's" as it earlier accommodated a variety of "I's." But Kabnis's "you" is self-directed, revealing, insofar as a character-speaker emerges in the text. Kabnis's solipsism and his failure to resolve his differences with the community.

Toomer wished to create "a new idiom which could introduce a greater diversity of perspective and voices, and elements that his lyrical narrative, his poetical or realistic descriptions could not include." But stylistic diversity is, to say the least, everywhere, in Cane. The narrator, wishing to engage the "you" and to establish a relation between the narratee and actual reader in Part One, can use the "you's" to substitute or disguise a self-referential "I" in Part Two. The narrator in this section, though less reflective than in the first section, continues to foster sympathy for real-world sufferers and continues to assume that his narratees are in perfect sympathy with him. The narrator in Part Three works against the grain of the protagonist's discourse, providing it with a meaning that, though not explicitly articulated, is (silently) conveyed to the reader behind the protagonist's back. Through such narrative interventions and a posturing of the "you," the narrator emphasizes the fact that the author exists, in all his ambiguities, complexities, and failures, and is very much in the text.

What is the purpose of Cane's diverse narrative stances and strategies? As Toomer said of Cane, "There is nothing about these pieces of the buoyant expression of a new race" and the stories emphasize that socially one's "position here is transient." But paralleling Toomer's "spiritualization of experience," there is a social configuration, evoked by the narrator, which includes a consciousness that the stories, poems, and dramatic form of the text involve the reader in acts of judgment, call for social transactions, and create spaces in which racial meanings are renegotiated. Cane's poems can be seen in this light, in which direct address and invocatory voices take the form of a spiritual, "Cotton song": "Shackles fall upon the Judgement Day / But lets not wait for it", an imagistic lyric, "Her Lips Are Copper Wire": "and press your lips to mine / till they fare incandescent," or a communal hymn, as in "Harvest Song":

    O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
    harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is
    sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not
    bring me knowledge of my hunger.

Hence there is a constant tension between conflicting strategies: between the narrator's self-reflectiveness, whereby the story draws attention to its status as art, and forms of narrative, whereby the story is concerned with its informational, thematic contents. Self-reflectiveness as a mode of exercising narrative authority has the signal advantage that it cannot be deceptive: the artistic "folk song" being laid claim to cannot be mistaken for anything but what it is. So, it is significant that the mode adopted by the narrator of Cane, for which he takes responsibility, is self-reflectiveness. It remains for the narrator to incorporate into his own art of narration the advantages of artistic indirection with the certainty of effects. Finally, unlike the storytelling in many modernist texts, Cane does not drive the teller out of the tale. Rather, as part of Toomer's "intimate connection of things," the narrator is an essential clement in mediating between his self-designation, his own spiritual life and survival, and that of his fictional communities, narratee, and readers. To this end, social interdependence and its racial implications in Cane, even if non-transcendent and derived from "a knowledge of [Toomer's] futility to check solution," become the heart of a "great design."

Source: William Dow, "'Always your heart': the 'Great Design' of Toomer's Cane," in MELUS, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 2002, pp.59-89.

SOURCES

Bone, Robert, "The Harlem School," in The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed., Yale University Press, 1965, pp. 65-94.

Ford, Karen Jackson, "The Scratching Choruses of Modernity," in Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity, The University of Alabama Press, 2005, pp. 2-29.

Frank, Waldo, "Foreword," in Cane, University Place Press, 1967, pp. vii-xi.

Guzzio, Tracie Church, "Jean Toomer," in American Writers, Supplement 9, edited by Jay Parini, Charles Scribner's Sons, 2002.

Littell, Robert, Review of Cane, in the New Republic, December 23, 1923, p. 126.

Toomer, Jean, Cane, Boni & Liveright, 1923; reprint, Liveright, 1975, reissued 1993.

Turner, Darwin T., "Introduction," in Cane, Liveright, 1975, reissued 1993, pp. ix-xxv.

Walker, Alice, "The Divided Life of Jean Toomer," in the New York Times, July 13, 1980, sec. 7, p. 11.