Summary
Esther (prose)
At nine years old, Esther has curly hair and a serious face, but her cheeks are flat and dead. As she walks down the street she is uninterested in both white and black men until she hears her father mention King Barlo.
Barlo is in the middle of the street, completely unaware of everyone even though people are spitting tobacco juice near him. Everyone waits to hear what he has to say in his religious trance. Time passes and he finally says out loud that Jesus has been telling him things and that he was told to get on his knees. God said a big and powerful black man would arise and his head was in the clouds, but then chains were put on his feet and he was led to the coast and across the sea and he was not free.
Women cry as Barlo pauses. White folks are merely curious, but preachers wonder what to do about this prophet.
Barlo stands up tall and “to the people he assumes the outlines of his envisioned Africa” (25). As he tells the townspeople to open their eyes and ears to God, a few things happen. It seems like a loud voice is heard; angels and demons parade in the street; and King Barlo rides out of town on a bull. At that time a Negress draws a portrait of a black Madonna on the courthouse wall. King Barlo leaves town.
At sixteen years old, Esther dreams of fire and flames. She tries not to do this because she feels like she is a sinner. Another dream comes and she holds a black, woolly, singed baby, but its breath is sweet and she loves it.
At twenty-two, Esther works behind the counter of the family grocery store. She does not seem to care that she is nearly white and her father is rich. She does not care much about men but cannot stop thinking about the glorious Barlo. She decides she loves him, and since her life seems to be slipping by she also decides to tell him. However, she does not see him for five years. Her face pales.
At twenty-seven, Esther’s body is thin and beaten. She hears that King Barlo is back in town, having made a lot of money on cotton during the war. Esther is excited and goes to her door where she can see and hear him with a circle of men.
Filled with purpose to possess him, she feels fire in her veins and her dead dreams are carried away.
Late that night, Esther travels out into the cool silence. She wants her mind to be as “solid, contained, and blank as a sheet of darkened ice” (27), but she is excited.
She arrives at Nat Bowle’s place and hears Barlo within. The air is heavy with tobacco smoke and she feels dizzy. Barlo asks her what a “lil milk-white gal” (28) like her is doing there. She stammers that she is there for him. She looks straight into his eyes as he figures this out. People near him laugh coarsely. Someone says that is how the “dictie” (stuck-up) black people do it.
Esther suddenly sees Barlo as hideous. His drunkenness repulses her and she leaves. Outside, everything has vanished.
Conversion (poem)
The poet writes of the African Guardian of Souls who, drunk with rum and eating a cassava, has to give in to the new words of the wily white-faced god and now hears amen and hosanna.
Portrait in Georgia (poem)
The poet writes of a woman’s chestnut hair braided like a lyncher’s rope, her fiery eyes, her scarred lips, her breath smelling of cane, and her body, thin and white like burned black flesh.
Blood-Burning Moon (prose)
Dusk arrives, covering the Negro shanties with gold. The full moon through the door is an omen, and the women sing songs against its spell.
Louisa comes home from the white folks’ kitchen where she works. Bob Stone, the white son, loves her; Tom Burwell, a black fieldworker, also loves her. Both men jumble together in her mind when she looks at the moon, and she feels strange. She sings, but the rhythm is restless. Along her path animals behave strangely as if it were “a weird dawn or some ungodly awakening” (31). The women sing of the “Red nigger moon” and the “Blood-burning moon” (32).
In this factory town everything smells, feels, and tastes like cane. Old David Georgia stirs the syrup and tells tales of white folks. Someone mentions Louisa and Tom Burwell, who sits listening, becoming angry. He announces that Louisa is his girl, and when someone laughs he fights them.
Tom leaves and immediately feels the chill in the air. He shivers and shudders when he sees the moon. He finds Louisa in front of her house and proclaims his love for her. He tells her Bob Stone likes her too, and that he would cut Bob if he needed to.
Tom takes her hand and they sit there under the moon. An old woman hangs a lamp and lowers a bucket into the well.
Bob Stone walks out onto his veranda; while his cheeks are purple, his mind is definitively white. He imagines Louisa in the days of slavery and how as master he could have just had her. Now, though, he has to sneak around. It makes him angry that his family has lost control; he is also angry that they would not understand how he feels about Louisa. He decides he will go to her. He finds her lovely in her “Nigger way” (34) but is frustrated that there is something about her and black people that he just did not know, that he just could not get. He thinks of Tom and becomes even more frustrated. He cannot actually be a rival with a black man, Bob decides. Louisa is worth fighting for. She is a “beautiful nigger gal. why nigger? Why not, just gal? no, it was because she was nigger that he went to her” (35).
As Bob approaches he smells boiling cane and sees men gathered around the glow of a stove. They are talking about Tom and Bob, which fills him with incredible anger. He rushes to town, crashing into the cane and tasting it along with blood. When he thinks of Louisa and Tom, the veins in his head pulse. He wants Tom’s blood.
He comes out of the cane onto the road but struggles; he is blind and crazed. Animals nearby crow and howl. People, though, are hushed.
Bob finds Louisa and Tom. Bob lunges at Tom and forces him to fight. Tom finally whips out a knife and slashes Bob’s throat. Blood rushes from his throat as he tries in vain to stop it. People nearby hide in their homes and blow out the lights. Bob staggers into town and white men gather around him. Before he dies, he manages to say Tom’s name.
The white men rush like ants, gathering guns, kerosene, rope, and torches. Two cars with searchlights accompany them. They move down the road to the factory town, their silence seemingly flattening all Negros before them.
Tom knows they are coming and tries to run, but they capture him. They bind his wrists and drag him to the factory where there are already stakes and wood. Louisa tries to get to him but she is pushed back. The men pour kerosene on the floorboards and bind Tom to the stake. His eyes are stony. The men throw torches on the pile and the flames and smoke billow.
The smell of burning flesh fills the air. Tom’s eyes pop, his head lolls. The mob yells gleefully, like the yelling of a hundred mobs. Its echo floats through the town. The full moon is an evil omen, and Louisa knows she must sing to it. She wonders if Tom will come.
Analysis
The remaining works in Part 1 contain two poems and two prose pieces. The collage structure continues unabated, though there are repeated motifs and images: pine, sawmills and sawdust, dusk, cane, smoke, cotton, faces, burning, silence, and eyes. Though Toomer suggests in passages regarding the land a reverence for its beauty and the profound and moving struggles of African Americans, he interweaves these with allusions, some implicit and some more explicit, to its bloody, oppressive past. The landscape has hidden history, plants metaphorically nourished by blood at the roots, and scars hidden under both clothes and time.
The apocalyptic climax of Part 1, “Blood-Burning Moon,” brings those shadowy intimations of the South’s violent history to the fore. This is one of the few pieces that has white characters, and their burning and lynching of Tom Burwell is a stunning but not altogether shocking example of Reconstruction/Jim Crow-era violence. Critic Rachel Farebrother writes, “Toomer describes the unthinking violence of the white mob as a wordless, mechanized hum that rolls forward uncontrollably, breaking everything in its path.” He also describes the scene as “white men like ants upon a forge rushed about” (36). Farebrother connects the white mob with the depiction of white people in “Esther.” In Barlo’s religious vision describing the enslavement of Africans, he calls them “little white-ant biddies” (25), which suggests the same unrelenting wave of white oppressors swarming over their prey.
The history of African Americans, Toomer reminds readers, is the history of Africans brought over to America against their will to labor as slaves on Southern farms and plantations. Everything about their culture, history, and sometimes even skin color, is a result of this forced diaspora. Barlo articulates this in his vision when he states that those white men took the black man and “tied his feet to chains. They led him t th coast, they led him t th sea, they led him across the ocean an they didn’t set him free” (25).
The two poems in this section address also address this history. “Conversion” depicts the “African Guardian of Souls” (29) feasting on a new fruit and giving up old words for weak new words of the “white-faced sardonic god” (29), while “Portrait in Georgia” depicts a mulatto woman with chestnut hair whose body is as “black flesh after flame” (30). Land, religion, and the body, then, all bear the marks of the Middle Passage and slavery.
“Blood-Burning Moon” is also notable for its engagement with ideas of race and identity. Critic Charles Harmon discusses Toomer’s racial ambivalence and racial confusion on terms of Toomer’s biography and Cane. Harmon uses Roland Barthes’s “neither/norism” to articulate how Toomer states two opposites, balances one by the other, and then rejects them both. In Cane Toomer “describes a longing for organic connections between self and universe even as it rejects all available modes whereby such a connection can be effected.” In “Blood-Burning Moon” Bob and Tom perform their racial identities even while they demonstrate an aloofness from them. Bob begins with a slave master’s view, sauntering through the trees and imagining Louisa bending over the hearth. He is angry that he cannot take her as he wishes, and is also angry at his family’s loss of power. He then wonders if he can conceive of her as just a woman, not a “nigger” (35), but concludes, as Harmon writes, “he is attracted to Louisa precisely because her race connotes for him images of tabooed sexual release.” Tom, too, is not entirely accepting of racial expectations because he does not accept that Bob is his superior and vows to cut him if he needs to. Both men are skeptical of the orthodox racial identities, but both men eventually perform as they ought to. Harmon explains, “what characters do in Cane’s first section is perform their whiteness or their blackness. Sometimes the characters (and Toomer’s narrator) believe in these racial performances, but sometimes they do not.”
Though race can be performed, it cannot be ignored. It is embedded in Toomer’s descriptions of his characters, and in nature itself. In “Esther” Toomer uses words like “starched” (24),“like a little white child” (24), “near-white” (26), “dull silk” (27), and “gray” (27) to describe Esther, while Barlo is “black. Magnetically so… A clean-muscled, magnificent, black-skinned Negro (24)” In “Blood-Burning Moon” Bob is white and Louisa has skin the color of “oak leaves on young trees in fall” (31). When she thinks of her two lovers she says Tom’s “black balanced, and pulled against, the white of Stone” (31). In both pieces dusk is the time of day where racial difference collapses or collides. In the former work “dusk is falling rapidly” (25) as Barlo comes to the climactic conclusion of his vision. Esther travels to see him after sundown when all is dark. In the latter work the full moon rises out of the dusk, and “up from the deep dusk of a cleared spot on the edge of the forest a mellow glow arose and spread fan-wise into the low-hanging heavens” (32). Bob ventures into the gloom and the dust from the white mob covers the town already thickened by smoke and the smell of cane. Esther dreams of union with Barlo, which, as critic Catherine L. Innes writes, “not only emphasizes the theme of fusion of opposites…but also redemption…which is linked also with the imagery of dusk and dawn, and the connotations of a fading beauty and a new promise.” Dusk, that moment when the setting sun illuminates (but not too much), is a time of the invisible and the aesthetic. It is “a moment of fusion of dark and light, of past and future; a mingling of colors—the moment when it is neither day nor night but both, a moment which is matched by and reminds one of the dawn. It is a moment of intuitive apprehension rather than logical distinction.”
