Comprising three self-contained yet interrelated sections of prose, poetry, and a play, Cane presents scenes of African-American life and features characters that attempt to reconcile opposites of the African-American experience. The book’s narrative events seem disconnected, and time flows irregularly. Cane moves in a circular manner, evidenced in part by the half-circles that appear before each section. Toomer’s “innovative experiments with time and plot progression,” argues Robert B. Jones, “demonstrate an ever-present attempt to collapse self and world, lyrical and narrative—in sum, to introduce poetic strategies into narrative” (43). Cane’s fusion of prose, poetry, and drama makes it difficult to define the book as a novel. To be sure, Cane’s ambiguous genre and Toomer’s treatment of land and race dualities contribute to its continuing appeal.
Part 1, set in rural Georgia, establishes half of Cane’s race and land binaries. Darwin T. Turner describes the poems and short stories in Part 1 as “redolent with images of nature, Africa, and sensuous appeals to eye and ear” (135). While linking African Americans with the natural world raises the issue of primitivism, Turner believed that an undeniable link exists between African Americans and Southern land. He viewed the complicated link as beneficial despite its negative connotations: “Toomer firmly believed that the black peasant’s alienation from the soil had caused him to become emotionally sterile” (Benson and Dillard 79). When African Americans share a strong rapport with the land, they are emotionally and spiritually strong. Southern land, however, carries the curse of slavery, which makes problematic its relationship to African Americans. Race and land issues surface throughout Part 1, but are especially prevalent in the poem “Song of the Son.” Toomer focuses on slavery and land:
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch’s sun declines,
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee.
The speaker directly addresses the Southern landscape to which he returns. He identifies his geographic origins, “the land that has nourished and given him an appreciation for the songs of the race” (Benson and Dillard 52). The speaker’s homecoming also prophesies Ralph Kabnis’s return to Georgia, although the tone in “Song of the Son” is one of awe rather than fear. The “epoch” is slavery, which, along with Southern land, contributes to African-American identity. The speaker apparently feels comfortable with these opposing forces of his consciousness and self.
Antithetical to the first section, Part 2 takes place in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Dynamics of race and land shift as the artificial world of the North contrasts with the natural world of the South, which provides the second half of Cane’s race and land binaries. Part 2 paints a complex portrait of the urban African American’s task of creating a solid identity in a white reality that they are part of and alienated from. This is apparent in the hybrid poem-prose piece “Seventh Street”:
Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life, who set you flowing? … White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, in brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets?
The blood of African Americans has infiltrated the social system of the largely white North.
Many Northern African Americans long for the South, or at least experience nostalgia for it. In “Calling Jesus,” for example, Nora imagines “the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of Southern cotton, will steal in and cover it [Nora’s soul] that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane” (58). Racial demarcations change along with geography: whereas the lines between black and white were sharp in Part 1, race in Part 2 is now an ambiguous category. “Theater,” perhaps Toomer’s most complex and impressive articulation of this phenomenon, features black and white dichotomies and ambiguities throughout its surreal narrative. “Box Seat” also addresses some of the same issues, but “Bona and Paul,” the final story of Part 2, encapsulates the binaries of race and land and sets the stage for “Kabnis.” Toomer writes:
Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the slanting roofs of unpainted cabins tinted lavender. A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a Southern planter.
Paul identifies his race, at least in part, by his geographic location; his transplantation has “removed [him] from a natural surrounding, so that Paul can identify only with the sun, not with the stench of the city” (Benson and Dillard 83). The North is not an African American’s homeland, so assimilation into Northern society requires that a black person surrender a part, if not all, of his or her blackness.
Toomer based Ralph Kabnis, the title character of Cane’s third section, on his experiences as a schoolteacher in Sparta, Georgia. Kabnis, whose story Toomer relates in prose and drama, feels so divided by his associations with the South and North, with the black and white worlds, that not even returning to his Georgia home can help him create a unified self. Kabnis’s metaphysical struggles mirror Toomer’s own spiritual concerns. Nellie Y. McKay notes that Toomer “wished … to deemphasize racial or cultural divisions among groups of people who were all Americans because he wanted to align himself with things that stressed common experiences, forms, and spirit” (198–99). Despite Toomer’s desire to transcend race categories, he acknowledged his African descent and portrayed African Americans in writing. Kabnis either cannot or will not acknowledge his divided origins and embrace his African-American identity—he fails to synthesize the novel’s race and land binaries. Kabnis, therefore, reflects and contributes to the fragmented themes and form of Cane, which readers still try to decipher more than eighty years after its original publication.
Sources
Benson, Brian Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard. Jean Toomer. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 389. Edited by Kenneth E. Eble. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Jones, Robert B. Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988.
Toomer, Jean. Cane. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton, 1988.
Turner, Darwin T., ed. Introduction to the 1975 edition of Cane, 121–138. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1988.