Cane

By Jean Toomer

First published in 1923, “Cane” by Jean Toomer, is one of the most significant books to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Jean Toomer, born Nathaniel Pinchback Toomer in Washington D. C. in 1894, was raised by his mother and her wealthy parents after being abandoned by his father as a baby. While he spent much of his life on the East Coast and at various colleges in Chicago and Wisconsin, he worked for several months in 1921 as a principal at a newly formed agricultural and industrial school for blacks in rural Sparta, Georgia, near where his father had lived. This experience gave Toomer a new-found understanding of the struggle of African-Americans in a society full of white supremacy and racial violence. At the end of his time in the South, Toomer began writing “Cane” and based the book on both the rural and urban lives of blacks in early 20th century America. The novel is organized into a series of loosely and thematically related vignettes and contains numerous literary styles, such as prose, poetry, and dramatic play-like passages of dialogue. “Cane” is a classic masterpiece of modernism and an important testament on the lives and struggles of African-Americans in the early part of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420973020

Jean Toomer

Jean Toomer (1894-1967) was an American writer and prominent fixture during the Harlem Renaissance. He was born into a mixed-race family, including his grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, who was the first U.S. governor of African American descent. Toomer attended multiple universities focusing on a wide range of subjects like sociology, history and philosophy. He began writing essays about the African American experience, particularly in the southern states. His best-known work, Cane, was published in 1923 and was revered among both Black and white critics. It catapulted Toomer’s career making him one of the most recognizable writers of his era.

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CANE

By JEAN TOOMER

TO MY GRANDMOTHER…

Cane

By Jean Toomer

Foreword by Waldo Frank

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7302-0

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

KARINTHA

REAPERS

NOVEMBER COTTON FLOWER

BECKY

FACE

COTTON SONG

CARMA

SONG OF THE SON

GEORGIA DUSK

FERN

NULLO

EVENING SONG

ESTHER

CONVERSION

PORTRAIT IN GEORGIA

BLOOD-BURNING MOON

SEVENTH STREET

RHOBERT

AVEY

BEEHIVE

STORM ENDING

THEATER

HER LIPS ARE COPPER WIRE

CALLING JESUS

BOX SEAT

PRAYER

HARVEST SONG

BONA AND PAUL

KABNIS

FOREWORD

Reading this book, I had the vision of a land, heretofore sunk in the mists of muteness, suddenly rising up into the eminence of song. Innumerable books have been written about the South; some good books have been written in the South. This book is the South. I do not mean that Cane covers the South or is the South’s full voice. Merely this: 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. A poet has arisen in that land who writes, not as a Southerner, not as a rebel against Southerners, not as a Negro, not as apologist or priest or critic: who writes as a poet. The fashioning of beauty is ever foremost in his inspiration: not forcedly but simply, and because these ultimate aspects of his world are to him more real than all its specific problems. He has made songs and lovely stories of his land . . . not of its yesterday, but of its immediate life. And that has been enough.

How rare this is will be clear to those who have followed with concern the struggle of the South toward literary expression, and the particular trial of that portion of its folk whose skin is dark. The gifted Negro has been too often thwarted from becoming a poet because his world was forever forcing him to recollect that he was a Negro. The artist must lose such lesser identities in the great well of life. The English poet is not forever protesting and recalling that he is English. It is so natural and easy for him to be English that he can sing as a man. The French novelist is not forever noting: This is French. It is so atmospheric for him to be French, that he can devote himself to saying: This is human. This is an imperative condition for the creating of deep art. The whole will and mind of the creator must go below the surfaces of race. And this has been an almost impossible condition for the American Negro to achieve, forced every moment of his life into a specific and superficial plane of consciousness.

The first negative significance of Cane is that this so natural and restrictive state of mind is completely lacking. For Toomer, the Southland is not a problem to be solved; it is a field of loveliness to be sung: the Georgia Negro is not a downtrodden soul to be uplifted; he is material for gorgeous painting: the segregated self-conscious brown belt of Washington is not a topic to be discussed and exposed; it is a subject of beauty and of drama, worthy of creation in literary form.

It seems to me, therefore, that this is a first book in more ways than one. It is a harbinger of the South’s literary maturity: of its emergence from the obsession put upon its minds by the unending racial crisis—an obsession from which writers have made their indirect escape through sentimentalism, exoticism, polemic, problem fiction, and moral melodrama. It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation. And, as the initial work of a man of twenty-seven, it is the harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt.

How typical is Cane of the South’s still virgin soil and of its pressing seeds! and the book’s chaos of verse, tale, drama, its rhythmic rolling shift from lyricism to narrative, from mystery to intimate pathos! But read the book through and you will see a complex and significant form take substance from its chaos. Part One is the primitive and evanescent black world of Georgia. Part Two is the threshing and suffering brown world of Washington, lifted by opportunity and contact into the anguish of self-conscious struggle. Part Three is Georgia again . . . the invasion into this black womb of the ferment seed: the neurotic, educated, spiritually stirring Negro. As a broad form this is superb, and the very looseness and unexpected waves of the book’s parts make Cane still more South, still more of an aesthetic equivalent of the land.

What a land it is! What an Aeschylean beauty to its fateful problem! Those of you who love our South will find here some of your love. Those of you who know it not will perhaps begin to understand what a warm splendor is at last at dawn.

A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,

An orgy for some genius of the South

With bloodshot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth

Surprised in making folk-songs . . . .

So, in his still sometimes clumsy stride (for Toomer is finally a poet in prose) the author gives you an inkling of his revelation. An individual force, wise enough to drink humbly at this great spring of his land . . . such is the first impression of Jean Toomer. But beyond this wisdom and this power (which shows itself perhaps most splendidly in his complete freedom from the sense of persecution), there rises a figure more significant: the artist, hard, self-immolating, the artist who is not interested in races, whose domain is Life. The book’s final Part is no longer promise; it is achievement. It is no mere dawn: it is a bit of the full morning. These materials . . . the ancient black man, mute, inaccessible, and yet so mystically close to the new tumultuous members of his race, the simple slave Past, the shredding Negro Present, the iridescent passionate dream of the Tomorrow . . . are made and measured by a craftsman into an unforgettable music. The notes of his counterpoint are particular, the themes are of intimate connection with us Americans. But the result is that abstract and absolute thing called Art.

WALDO FRANK.

KARINTHA

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,

O can’t you see it, O can’t you see it,

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon

… When the sun goes down.

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Old men rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road. At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one’s ears to itching. But no one ever thought to make her stop because of it. She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children… Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower. Already, rumors were out about her. Homes in Georgia are most often built on the two-room plan. In one, you cook and eat, in the other you sleep, and there love goes on. Karintha had seen or heard, perhaps she had felt her parents loving. One could but imitate one’s parents, for to follow them was the way of God. She played home with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding. That started the whole thing. Old men could no longer ride her hobby-horse upon their knees. But young men counted faster.

Her skin is like dusk,

O can’t you see it,

Her skin is like dusk,

When the sun goes down.

Karintha is a woman. She who carries beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. She has been married many times. Old men remind her that a few years back they rode her hobby-horse upon their knees. Karintha smiles, and indulges them when she is in the mood for it. She has contempt for them. Karintha is a woman. Young men run stills to make her money. Young men go to the big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money. These are the young men who thought that all they had to do was to count time. But Karintha is a woman, and she has had a child. A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest. Pine-needles are smooth and sweet. They are elastic to the feet of rabbits… A sawmill was nearby. Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered. It is a year before one completely burns. Meanwhile, the smoke curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about the trees, curls up, and spreads itself out over the valley… Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy you tasted it in water. Some one made a song:

Smoke is on the hills. Rise up.

Smoke is on the hills, O rise

And take my soul to Jesus.

Karintha is a woman. Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon. They will bring their money; they will die not having found it out… Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Karintha…

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,

O can’t you see it, O can’t you see it,

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon

… When the sun goes down.

Goes down…

REAPERS

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones

Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones

In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,

And start their silent swinging, one by one.

Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,

And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,

His belly close to ground. I see the blade,

Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

NOVEMBER COTTON FLOWER

Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,

Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams; dead birds were found

In wells a hundred feet below the ground—

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.

Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed

Significance. Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

BECKY

Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.

Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks’ mouths. She wouldn’t tell. Common,

Reviews for Cane

[alcracka · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A wonderful, magisterial voice - at its best, up there with Whitman - but young and unfinished. It has that explosive, tightrope feel of some early works by brilliant writers. It's known as the first important Black novel of the Harlem Renaissance, which is funny because it's not a novel and Toomer liked to insist he wasn't Black. It's hard to see which he hated and feared the most - women or himself.

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It took me 10 days to read this short book. It includes poems, short vignettes about (fictional?) women (which annoyed me, because why?), and then 2 short stories. There does not seem to be a common setting, but it's not clear that it's more specific than "in the south". The two short stories were difficult—the dialect is unlike any I have tried to read before (for example, "y" is "you"). I think these stories would be much more effective if performed—the difficulty of the confusing dialogue stream would be made obvious, and I think the dialect is easier to understand if pronounced. I chose to read/pronounce "y" as a sort of combination of "yuh" and "yeh", but quick.But I am done. 1001 books read #173.

[nymith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cane is a slim work of fiction that defies category, interspersing poetry with prose in a willfully modernist style that facinates for its seeming innocence, as if Jean Toomer had no idea just how strange his writing was. Darwin T. Turner, in his introduction to the Norton "Liveright" edition, focuses on the racial implications and quotes Toomer on the same. This view is reasonable but somewhat myopic. Toomer's prose is invaded by poems, lyrics, and drama; most of the prose ignores the traditional beginning, middle and end of a "story" and functions closer to prose poems or spontaneous tales. Cane is meant to be listened to; you are meant to concentrate as if in the presence of an oral storyteller.The book is divided into three parts, bound together by focusing on the lives of black men and women; their scorched emotions juxtaposed with depictions of the landscapes around them, the latter described in a sensuous style reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence. Part 1 is in the agrarian setting of rural Georgia. It's grim stuff, verging on southern gothic; a world of religious obsession, fear, sudden violence and extensive bigotry. The stories focus on the lives of women; men are seen only in relation to women who've gone into a hibernation of feeling or sold themselves for an easier time of it. Names and phrases thread between the sketches, tying together into a cohesive look at a poor, closed off sawmill town. There are moments later when the author's voice becomes slightly shrill in its depiction of race relations, but this first segment is universal in its portrayal of the numbness induced by suffering and deprivation. The poems are left to become the only refuge (and that rarely) of tenderness in Cane.Part 2, written primarily to lengthen the book, takes to the north and the city. For the clearest example of the change in the writing, just compare the first lines of each segment. Part 1: "Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down." Part 2: "Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War." Part 2 takes up the props and scenery of the Jazz Age, focusing attention on the lives of men, moving at a swift pace and leaning on dialogue and stream-of-conciousness. At times, Toomer experiments with the drama format to depict what the characters are thinking underneath their interactions (later on, Eugene O'Neill would incorporate that technique into his play Strange Interlude). Though the northern characters are materially better off, they still struggle to understand one another, locked so deeply in their minds that they cannot act...Part 3 is built rather loosely in the form of a play, centering around the character of Ralph Kabnis, a northerner come to teach in Georgia, bringing Cane back to where it started. Gothic elements return with a silent old man living in a basement, the outsider Lewis who is viewed with suspicion, the memories of brutal racial murders and Kabnis' own violence. Kabnis is a coward, too frightened to act except in the spontaneous slaughter of chickens. He hides from his demons, raving, wearing a mask of superiority and despising the quiet, watchful Lewis. This segment draws heavily on dialogue and a negro dialect which is rather taxing to read but not half so incomprehensible as the Roxy-narrated chapters of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson. And while the character of Kabnis is impossible to like, his story, and thus the "novel" that Cane isn't, end on a deeply haunting note.A quick word about the poetry, which ranges in style from the structure of gospel lyric to the unrhymed techniques typical of modernists. The poems form bridges around and between each sketch, sometimes standing alone and sometimes used to create emphasis. There are moments when one phrase will overlap with an ambivalent cut-in:Words form in the eyes of the dwarf:Do not shrink. Do not be afraid of me.JesusSee how my eyes look at you.the Son of GodI too was made in His image.was once-I give you the rose.Muriel, tight in her revulsion, sees black, and daintily reaches for the offering. As her hand touches it, Dan springs up from his seat and shouts:"JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!"Yes, Cane is historically important as one of the earliest works of the Harlem Renaissance and as a modernist experiment, but that's window-dressing. It is a grim and challenging work, but if you're prepared, it's also rewarding. It's a brief series of visions: sharp, unsettling and fascinating, possessing a somber sense of beauty. A book to savor.

[gazzy_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Poetic prose stories of America written by a star of the Harlem Renaissance.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.

I find it impossible this morning to attempt comment on a lynching or a literary reflection thereof. Despite my tone deaf groaning as of late about dialect, the final parable in this tome touched me. Earnest. Cane is a modernist mélange of prose and verse. A Biblical air is present but the motivations are Freudian.

This book was recommended to me about 10 years ago by a childhood friend. That friend was entitled to his own weary blues.

[mojomomma_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A collection of short stories about black life in the early 20th century, written by a man who sometimes passed as white during his life! The information at the end of the book about how Toomer dealt with race was quite interesting.