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.
The language in this quote, and indeed in the whole piece, is dreamy and mysterious. Karintha does not seem like a real, living, breathing woman. Instead she is elusive in her beauty and her feminine, earthy energy. She is more akin to an animal, giving birth on the forest floor. There is distance between the narrator and the woman he describes. She has power, yes, but she is also a figure whom the narrator circumscribes and falls short of understanding.
Carma's tale is the crudest melodrama.
While this line rings true in the sense that Carma's life is difficult and full of sorrow, it is also a reductive and demeaning line both on its own terms and when placed in a larger context. The narrator of this piece sees Carma as an object and as a placeholder in his plot. As janet M. Whyde writes, "the male/female dichotomy disappears in her body, which is not only hermaphroditic, but also directly linked to the African past." The story of slavery plays out over Carma's body: "Her body becomes, in fact, the site of the conflict of slavery redux, where sexual conflict is transmuted into historical conflict by the hermeneutical usurpation of her body." The narrator robs her, uses her, and appropriates her story.
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 in time returned to thee,
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
In these lines from "Song of the Son" it becomes clear that the poet is a Son of the South, returning to his homeland and marveling at its complicated beauty. The world he knew is vanishing, but he is pleased to be home. This poet finds inspiration and beauty here, rather than the stultification and stagnation of the North. There is a degree of primitivism expressed in the poem, but it is more than just a universal desire to use slavery and Southern blacks as a source to promote of creative energy: rather, it is about the poet himself, journeying home and trying to negotiate his racial identity. He provides nuance by the haunting memory of violence that permeates the South, acknowledging the allure of the land at the same time that he expresses apprehension of the blood in the soil.
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a ju-ju man,
Go singing through the footprints of the swamp.
Toomer occasionally makes direct reference to the even longer history of Africans in America: the fact that they were brought from Africa to the New World and had to adapt to the vicissitudes of life on a new continent and as slaves. In these lines Toomer conjures up the glorious history of Africans, complete with ceremony, ritual, and power. This atavism, much like peer Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," is a way to assert that African-Americans do have history, and that that history is ancient, valuable, and worth remembering and celebrating. "Race memories" is an apposite phrase as well, because deeply-rooted memories or emotions are prevalent throughout Cane; characters often feel a connection to land or God or the past.
She alone is left to take the baby in her arm. But what a baby! Black, singed, woolly, tobacco-juice baby—ugly as sin. Once held to her breast, miraculous thing: its breath is sweet and its lips can nibble. She loves it frantically.
Esther is mixed-race and from a wealthy household. She looks like a white child and seems very detached from her black heritage. The only way she can find to articulate this detachment and search for identity is to sexually fixate on Barlo, a man of prophecy and pride. He is fully African, fully black. She comes to vest all of her hopes and desires in him, and this dream she has of an incredibly black baby is a potent manifestation of that vesting. As critic Frederik L. Rusch writes, "Esther cannot achieve real blackness, just fantasy blackness."
The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.
The power of the Southern landscape is very clear in this piece, and specifically in this quote. The full moon is an omen. It is a light shining on the landscape that will reveal something terrible. It is a white face, just like the faces of the men who murder Tom. The women try to defy what they read in its face but ultimately fail to do so; the tragedy happens regardless.
Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington.
"Seventh Street" sets the tone for the pieces to come in Part 2. The language is fragmented, jazzy, and flowing. Black people are described metonymically as blood streaming through the white streets. Their physical presence and their culture are infiltrating the streets of Washington D.C. and forever altering its racial and cultural makeup. The language and tone Toomer uses, though, is cynical and maybe even a little sardonic. There is a sense of detachment, disunity, and alienation that will play out in the subsequent pieces.
Her lips are copper wire
whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog
This short poem is one of the more positive evocations of Northern life, tying the electricity of the poet's love's lips to the electricity lighting up urban areas in the early 20th century. Lips, breath, and tongue help convey the soul's electrical current. Power and energy are themes throughout Cane, but instead of deriving from the landscape or the weight of history as they do in the South, power derives from means more tied to modernity.
I talk. An when I really talk, it pays th best of them t listen. The old man is a good listener. He's deaf; but he's a good listener. An I can talk t him. Tell him anything.
Kabnis proclaims the old man is a good listener and that he can tell him anything; also, he asserts that what he has to say is worth listening to. In actuality, Kabnis is disconnected from his listener. He and the old man are not communicating. Kabnis talks at him, ignoring his position as a connection to history, to black heritage. Kabnis is utterly self-centered, blind to his estrangement from that history and heritage.
Enough to draw a denial from you. Cant 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.
Lewis is the opposite of Kabnis, though both are intellectuals come from the North to the South. Lewis knows who he is. He has an understanding of his identity as a black man. He engages with the legacy of slavery in the Southern landscape and does not laugh about it or discuss it in prurient terms for an audience. He knows he does not fit in with the community here, though, for in his questioning, listening, and probing, he alienates those who are more stubbornly convinced they've got it all figured out. He sees Kabnis for who he is: a shallow, self-centered, and close-minded figure in a clownish robe, cavorting and mocking in order to forestall having to come to any self-knowledge and its concomitant of true racial identity and pride.
