Summary
Box Seat (prose)
Houses seem like shy girls perched on the asphalt body of a dreaming black man. Dan Moore walks down Thirteenth Street and sings shrilly. He arrives at the house but cannot seem to find the bell. He wonders if people will think he is trying to break in to the house like some Jack the Ripper or baboon. He would tell those people to keep their hands off him because he is Dan Moore, Jesus touched him, and he was born in a canefield.
Finally he raps on the door. It is silent. Eventually it opens. The old woman, Mrs. Pribby, knows he is there for Muriel and flits about saying she will be down in a second. Dan dislikes her. He waits for Muriel and it seems like the house is closing in.
Muriel comes into the room. She is fleshy and energetic, her face orange and her hair curly. Dan thinks he loves her. Muriel is a bit annoyed to see him and asks why he came. He says he knows the last few months have been hard for her. She informs him she is going to a show with her friend Bernice. She thinks to herself that she does love Dan, but that he is selfish and the town does not want her to love him.
She asks him why he doesn’t get a job and settle down. This question frustrates him and he wonders why ten minutes of love has to be surrounded by all this dross. She tells him he is selfish and that for her part she has tried to do something beautiful with her life. Her animalism and passion stirs him, but he replies that there is no such thing as happiness.
He throws himself before her and she warns him about Mrs. Pribby in the next room. He does not care, and begs her to leave with him. His fingers close on her tightly; he desires to possess her. She tries to push him off, and he thinks her face close-up is ugly.
Something raps on the newspaper in the next room and the two separate. Muriel gets ready to leave, because it is eight at night and Bernice is ready for her. Dan follows her to the door.
People are arriving at the theater. Muriel and Bernice, a “cross between a washerwoman and a blue-blood lady” (62), look for their seats. Muriel is a little flustered that she has bobbed hair and decides to keep her shawl on. The mass of people grows; Muriel can see that she knows a lot of them since she is a local teacher.
Muriel thinks to herself that she should not see Dan again because he makes her feel strange. Unfortunately, though, she sees him in the crowd. She feels like he would attack, gore, and rape. Bernice asks about him, and she deflects.
Dan sits down next to a massive Negress whose seems to have roots that spread down under the city streets. His heart beats wildly. The people crush him, but his eyes meet Muriel’s.
Muriel wonders to herself why he can’t do anything right. Bernice gossips next to her, and the orchestra readies.
Dan watches her. He thinks she is a she-slave, someone who does what she is bid. She claps and smiles and fawns. But, he wonders, maybe he is worse because he loves her and praises her?
When Dan fidgets, people near him start to get annoyed, and a fight almost breaks out.
On stage, dwarves dressed up like prizefighters box for a championship. It is bloody and grotesque. They fight cruelly and are made to bow. Through this, Dan thinks bitterly of women and their foolish feminist talk. He ruminates on an old man born into slavery who saw things—who saw Walt Whitman, Grant, and Lincoln.
The audience roars for more, and the winning dwarf comes out and sings a sentimental love song. Dan is disgusted and wants to pull the building down. The dwarf sings directly to Muriel. He offers her a rose touched with his blood. She is nauseous but takes it even though she does not want to. The dwarf seems threatening.
Dan stands up and yells, “Jesus was once a leper!” (67.) People gape and stare, and one man threatens him. They go to an alley to fight, but Dan forgets about him and keeps walking.
Prayer (poem)
The poet writes that his body is opaque to his soul and his mind is opaque to his soul. He is weak and gives too much, and thus confuses the body with the soul.
Harvest Song (poem)
The poet proclaims he is a reaper, fatigued and hungry. He tastes nothing and his throat is dry. His eyes are caked with dust, and he wishes he could see the other reapers. He fears to call out for grain, and fears the truth of his hunger. His ears are also caked with dust and he wishes he could hear their songs. He beats against his harvesting and his pain seems sweet. Finally, this pain “will not / bring me knowledge of my hunger” (69).
Bona and Paul (prose)
The young men and women are all ready to be teachers. They prepare and drill. Bona says she is sick; she watches and admires Paul from the bleachers. When it is time for basketball she insists on playing. She and Paul whirl as they block each other. He catches her and she squeezes him. He feels like everyone is watching.
In his Chicago dorm room later, Paul watches the sun and imagines it setting in Georgia. He imagines himself at Bona’s window. Paul is clearly aware that he is mixed-race and Bona is white.
Paul’s roommate Art enters and says he has to meet a girl. Paul does not want to, and Art wonders if it’s his dark blood that makes him so moony. He tells Paul that he has a good chance with this girl and that she is serious and smart.
The two young men are ready to go out. They arrive at the girls’ place, and while they wait Art plays a bit of jazz. Paul wonders if he is more himself during the day when he plays. Bona and Helen approach and Bona feels her spirits drop. She feels resentful and thinks Paul looks critical.
The four walk down the dark boulevard. Bona's face is pale in the moonlight. She tells Paul she loves him, but he cannot say it back. This is cruel to her, and she rushes ahead to Art and Helen.
At the bustling Crimson Gardens, Paul feels different and set apart from everyone. He looks at his companions; they seem relaxed and beautiful. He wonders who they are.
Art notices Paul’s attitude as they place their order with the waiter, but he becomes absorbed in a little tiff with Helen. The drinks come and a girl begins to sing. Paul moves closer to Bona. He wonders about her being from the South and if it means she knows to neither love nor hate. But she did say she loves him. He wants to know her, not to love her.
He asks her if she knows what he is thinking, and tells her she will before the night is over.
The couples continue to drink and dance. Bona asks why he is cold, and tells him she hates him. They dance together contemptuously and passionately. Paul sees a black man looking at him, speculating about his intentions. Paul rushes to him and tells him things are beautiful, and that he does not know her but danced with her. To him her face is a petal of dusk, and he is going to gather it. The black man understands, and he and Paul shake hands. When Paul goes to where he left Bona, she is gone.
Analysis
In the last few pieces of Part 2, Toomer continues with his depiction of the North as a soulless place, albeit one filled with entertainment and culture. His men are contemptuous and domineering, and his women are disappointed and melancholy. Dan, Muriel, Bona, and Paul are exceptionally estranged from each other, incapable of really knowing each other. Critic Janet Whyde notes, “oppression of the body…takes the form of repression of physical desires and passions.”
As discussed in the last analysis, the North is not a traditionally African American place. Though small numbers existed due to limited slavery and free black communities, African Americans only began to migrate there en masse during WWI in the Great Migration. Any real assimilation into the North naturally required an assumption of white values that could prove to be, as Toomer demonstrates, deadening or demoralizing.
“Box Seat” is mostly told from Dan Moore’s perspective. He is all interior, his thoughts piling up and crashing into one another; an example is when he waits for Muriel and Toomer writes, “The next world savior is coming up that way. Coming up. A continent sinks down. The new-world Christ will need consummate skill to walk upon the waters where huge bubbles burst…Dan turns to the piano and glances through a stack of jazz music sheets. Ji-ji-bo, JI-JI-BO” (58). He is at times nervous, angry, frustrated, dismissive, impassioned, and indifferent. He cannot seem to pin down an opinion or a desire. He prides himself on being “born in a canefield” (57) but this authenticity eludes him. Muriel complains that he does not have a job and that he is selfish. He interrupts the performance and agitates for a fight, but then leaves before it can be consummated.
Dan’s Southern heritage and his various frustrations in the North, along with blackness and the complexities of Paul in “Bona and Paul,” are of endless concern to critics working with the binary of Cane as either authentic expression of a unified race spirit as embodied by the South or a fragmented and indeterminate expression of the divided nature of Toomer’s own soul. Critic Catherine Gunther Kodat acknowledges the seductiveness of this binary, but claims that the text is more complicated than that: the text is “a dialectical exploration of structures used to define and represent the self.” Toomer affirms racial identity but then adds threats of dominance to it. He also takes many social stereotypes such as the mysterious woman, the city, and the artist, putting them into a “modernist idiom [that] forces a reckoning with those particular notions of representation that seemingly had been built to last, invested with universally identifiable characteristics and designed to be all-too-easily graspable.”
Paul’s situation in Chicago is a complicated example of how binaries of white and black are difficult to uphold, especially within one person. Paul is mixed-race and has many white friends and a white love interest. He attends Crimson Gardens for a party; even though it is a segregated club, because he is light-skinned, attractive, and with white people, the partygoers and doorman are content to wonder if he is Japanese, Italian, Indian, or any other race but African. Inside, Paul immediately feels uncomfortable, but he turns that discomfort into a profound rumination on how his difference makes him feel more powerful. Toomer writes, “Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was a fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real” (74). After this realization, Paul knows he still wants to be with Bona; however, he wants to be with her as himself, and he articulates that to the doorman. This, though, is not fated to be. When he returns, Bona and Art are both gone. Critic Gino Michael Pellegrini writes, “this conclusion implies that if Paul has indeed come to terms with the stares and his mixed racial background and perhaps chanced upon the beginnings of a mixed-race identity…then his was a deeply subjective and solitary experience, understood by him at that moment and not communicable to a broader audience. In other words, the conclusion confirms the marginal and solitary position that he occupies.”
Finally, what do we make of the poem “Harvest Song"? The reaper, a figure from the South, overpowers the knowledge of his hunger by beating his hand and feeling the pain. There is a conflation of mind, body, and spirit that is powerful and meaningful. It also acts as a response to Dan and Paul, who sublimate bodily desires and authentic expressions of those desires in their quest to conform to societal expectations.
