Summary
Karintha (prose)
Men always desired Karintha, even when she was a small child. She was a whirl of energy and mischief, a wild flash. Rumors were spread even when she was young.
Houses in Georgia were two rooms: in one you cooked and ate, in the other you slept and made love. Karintha heard her parents doing that. She played “home” with a young boy.
Now she is a woman and has been married many times. She indulges men but feels contempt for them. Once she gave birth in the forest. A sawmill is nearby and fills the air with smoke; the smoke is so heavy that one can taste and feel it.
Karintha’s soul ripened too soon. Even when men bring her things they will never know her soul. She is twenty and her beauty is “perfect as dusk when the sun goes down” (6).
Reapers (poem)
The narrator describes black reapers who sharpen their scythes and swing them silently through the weeds. A field rat, startled, is sliced. The blade is now stained with blood and continues to swing.
November Cotton Flower (poem)
The poet paints a picture of a South where the winter is cold and the land is dry. The soil sucks up all the water from the streams and dead birds are found in wells. This is when the cotton flower blooms. It startles the old people and becomes significant. It is something never seen before, just like “Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, / Beauty so sudden for that time of year” (8).
Becky (prose)
Becky is a white woman with two Negro sons, but no one knows where she got them. White folks call her a shameless wench. She is emaciated, her breasts sagging. Her eyes are harsh and empty. Black folks say she has no self-respect.
Both white and black people build her a cabin and feed her children, even though they pray God will cast her out. She gets to live in the narrow bit of land between the railroad and the road. It is one room with a leaning chimney.
Trains pass by six times a day and the ground shakes. No one sees Becky but they toss out food, papers, prayers, and snuff. The boys run around, but still, no one sees her.
The boys grow up to be sullen and manipulative. People wonder if Becky died and they buried her. The boys drift from job to job, and no one knows if they are white or colored. There is still smoke coming from the chimney, and people feel a creepy sensation when they see it. Perhaps, they suggest, Becky is a ghost.
On Sunday the narrator and his friend Barlo are coming home from church. It is a still day. They are about to pass by the cabin and urge their horses on. They see smoke coming up from the chimney in the distance and feel fear stealing through their bodies. As they are about to pass a train rumbles by and the old chimney collapses. Barlo and the narrator are terrified and peer in, where they see piles of rubble. The narrator hears a groan. Barlo throws his Bible on the pile and it is still there. They whip their horses and flee.
Face (poem)
The poet describes a woman. Her hair is gray like streams of stars and her brows are curved with pain. Her eyes are misty with tears and her muscles are like clustered grapes ready for the worms.
Cotton Song (poem)
The narrator sings to his brothers to lift the rock and roll it away. Do not wait for Judgment Day. God’s body has a soul and they all have to roll. Weary feet trod on bales of cotton to God’s throne. With loud calls they proclaim they will not wait until Judgment Day.
Carma (prose)
The strong Carma drives the wagon easily down the dusty Georgia road. It is a bright, sunny day, dry and hot. Smoke rises from the sawmill. The railroad chugs and a black girl sings.
Dusk descends. The “pungent and composite” (14) smell of the farmyards is the smell of woman. She does not sing, but her body is a song. She dances in the forest.
Carma’s tale is a crude melodrama. Her husband Bane works the chain gangs because of her. He was gone working for a contractor and she had other men. When he returned he was angry and wanted to beat her, but she was too strong.
Carma grabbed a gun and ran into the cornfields, a place where “time and space have no meaning” (15). Bane and other men gathered and followed her into the field after they heard the gun go off. Someone tripped over her; they carried her into the house and put her on the sofa. They looked for her wound but did not see it, and Bane realized he’d been deceived twice because she only fired into the stalks. In anger he slashed one of the other men; now he is in the chain gang as a result.
Song of the Sun (poem)
The poet writes of the smoky, glowing night air and how he will pour the parting soul into song. It is a red land full of pine trees and he comes home to his son. Time is running out for his son and for the “song-lit race of slaves” (16), but the sun has not yet set. The soil can still receive the soul.
Negro slaves are like “dark purple ripened plums” (16) to squeeze and burst. Before the tree is stripped, one plum is saved for the poet; one seed becomes a tree that sings the songs of slavery.
Georgia Dusk (poem)
The poet writes how the sky grows dark because it is too lazy to pursue the sun. That night is a feast for hounds and men; it is a night where a “cane-lipped scented mouth” sings folk songs.
The sawmill blows the whistle and silence breaks. Smoke curls up; only stumps remain of trees. The men sing in the swamps, conjuring up memories of “king and caravan, / High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju man” (17). Voices sound; pine trees are guitars. The cane is a chorus. The singers’ songs are resinous; the sacred susurrus of the pines can make virgins of “cornfield concubines” (17).
Fern (prose)
Fern’s face flows into her eyes; that is all you see when you look at her. She has an aquiline, Semitic nose and creamy brown skin. Fern’s eyes suggest she is easy; they fool men. They become obsessed with her and do not want her to deny them. She tires of them and begins to turn them off. They do not know why exactly they are ashamed or confused, but as she denies them more, they become superstitious. She is as a virgin again.
If you walk up the Dixie Pike, the narrator explains, you will see Fern sitting indolently on her porch. She leans against a post but does not put her head all the way back because there is a nail there that she never troubles to remove. She gazes off into the pines. The whole countryside seems to flow into her eyes.
The narrator sees her and feels bound to her. He had dreams of her. He did not know what to do for her. How could he push back the pines? Anyone else would have wanted to take her away too.
One evening he walks to her house and her family makes room for him. He does not know what to talk about, but he finally asks if she wants to take a walk. He tries to tell her with his eyes that he had no ulterior motives and he thinks she believes him.
As they walk, people look and talk, and she asks if it makes him mad. He does feel strange at dusk because he always feels strange at Georgia dusk. He says that at that time “things unseen to men were tangibly immediate” (21); maybe this is a vision. Being on the soil of one’s ancestors can do things like this.
He holds Fern, and her eyes enrapture him. They hold God in them. Suddenly she rushes away, falls to her knees, and sways. Her body writhes and she sputters out nonsense words, occasionally evoking Christ Jesus. She sings brokenly, and it seems like she is anguished as she pounds her head on the ground. She faints in his arms.
People do not like that he held her; they threaten him, but never do anything. He goes back to the North. He does see her on her porch as he leaves, though. Nothing happens. She is still living.
Nullo (poem)
The poet writes of golden pine needles falling to the forest path. Cows will tread on them. Rabbits do not pay attention to them. The forest does not catch fire.
Evening Song (poem)
The poet writes of a woman named Cloine whose lips part. She makes him feel like the full moon rises on the water of his heart. She sleeps and he will sleep soon too. She is curled up like water where the moon-waves begin. She shines and dreams and her lips press against his heart.
Analysis
Paradoxically, the thing that makes Cane so easy to write about is what makes it so difficult to write about: there is so much to say. Each poem and story has inspired dozens upon dozens of critical pieces; each work can be discussed in innumerable contexts. It is a remarkably fecund work and one cannot expect to plumb all of its depths upon a first or even second reading. Nevertheless, these analyses will endeavor to illuminate some of the many interpretations of the work and provide a satisfying, albeit imperfect, understanding of its themes, style, ideas, and more.
Cane has three parts, the first two including both prose works and poems and the third structured as a drama. There are similar themes that run throughout them, such as the relationships between men and women, the landscape of the South, the echoes of slavery, violence, and the rhythms of nature/cyclical nature of life. Toomer experiments with a variety of styles, mimicking slave spirituals, adopting modernist styling, and using abstruse language and metaphors.
Although in some respects the work seems more like a collage or montage in its fragmented disunity, it is unified thematically and even aesthetically in the curved lines suggestive of a circle found on the blank pages dividing the three parts. Critic Bernard Bell writes of the work’s “intricately structured, incantational” style, suggesting its three-part structure may allude to the Freudian theory of personality, a Hegelian construct, or religious philosopher Gurdjieff’s triad (the intellect, the emotions, and the body).
There is a narrator, but he is not easy to pin down. The poems have a more generic poetic voice, while “Karintha,” “Becky,” “Carma,” and “Fern” have a more direct and individualized voice. He is particularly present in “Becky,” in which he and Barlo visit the spectral cabin, and “Fern,” in which he is romantically interested in that woman.
In terms of those women, they are not individuals but rather are interpreted, transformed, and made into metaphors by the narrator. They mediate between the past and the present and are, as critic Janet M. Whyde writes, “not women but shadows of women.” Karintha is the embodiment of desire, described in terms of light, energy, and color. Men’s desire for her subsumes her. Her body is connected to the past and she is merely a sign and “a passive object whose meaning is imposed on her from the outside.” Karintha is perhaps the best example of a woman laboring under the male gaze. She is an object of desire and her power only stems from her ability to attract men. She is almost like a goddess in this respect, but Toomer does indicate that her power will wane. She is already aging, she lost a child, her soul is “a growing thing ripened too soon” (6).
Becky’s body becomes more blatantly absent. She is essentially created by the white and black communities and then becomes a sign. The house she lives in replaces her physical form and “like the difference between white and black in interpretation of her body, her house/body collapses.” In “Carma” we see sexual conflict over her body as an embodiment of the historical conflict over Africans’ bodies. She is a placeholder, a link to the African past, her body a “site of the conflict of slavery redux, where sexual conflict is transmuted into historical conflict by the usurpation of her body.” Even the narrator turns her tale into merely “the crudest melodrama” (15). Fern is erotic, mysterious, a loose woman, a virgin, and a mystic.
A more nebulous but just as important “character” is the South. Many of the works in Part 1 contain images of: cane and fields; forests of tall pines; alluring dusky sunsets; flowers blooming in the midst of cold winters; bright suns; and vistas redolent with the heavy smells of sawdust and smoke. “Song of the Son” is perhaps the most evocative in terms of describing the land. The poet celebrates the “sawdust glow of night” (16) and “the velvet pine-smoke air” (16). He addresses the “land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree” (16) and its “plaintive soil” (16) that sings “an everlasting song” (16) and is “caroling softly souls of slavery” (16). He explores folk heritage and the slave past for inspiration; he also puns on “Son of God” to suggest death-in-life, which is the ever-present fact of the Southern soil. While linking African Americans inexorably to the land can smack of primitivism, it is also an undeniable reality that Toomer probes. Though there is the curse of slavery on the land, many Northern blacks are nostalgic for it. The strong rapport between black people and the land can bring about emotional and spiritual strength (this is contrasted with the sterility that comes from being in the North, which will become clear in Part 2). The narrator in “Song of the Son” evinces both awe and melancholy as he appreciates the land but remembers the “Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums” (16) that are “squeezed, and bursting” (16). Violence is a central part of life in the South.
