Summary
Seventh Street (poem and prose)
The poet writes of money burning in pockets, bootleggers, and Cadillacs whizzing down the street. Seventh Street comes from Prohibition and WWI. There is a section where black people live, bringing their black reddish blood into the whiteness of Washington. This Washington is soggy and wet; it needs to be shredded up.
If the blood suckers of that War drank the black blood they’d get dizzy, but then Prohibition would come in and stop it. Black blood flows down the streets, into theaters, offices, restaurants, and cabarets. It eddies and swirls. Even a “Nigger God” (41) would feel shame and call for Judgment Day.
Rhobert (prose)
Rhobert feels the weight of the house he did not build on his head. It is dead and he is crushed by it. He compares himself to a diver and thinks life is water that is compressing him. His head is stuffed and his legs are bowed down by rickets. God made this house and now God is a Red Cross man with a respiration pump waiting for him.
Rhobert does not care at all if he sees his wife and children again. One thing about Rhobert that does arouse compassion in others is his Adam’s apple and how his breathing is gasping and painful sometimes. He is an old bowlegged man straining for air.
He is sinking down into the mud. Maybe people will think he is great and call for a monument. Maybe people will sing for him when he descends.
Avey (prose)
All of us young men love Avey, the narrator announces. They would watch her leave the flat of a guy she visited. Tonight they see her there and Ned brags he could get her if everyone else did not get in his way. Ned knows a lot about women but none of the boys particularly likes him, because even though they all talk dirt, the way he does it is worse. His “smutty wisdom” (44) is unparalleled, however.
The narrator can never seem to change Avey's indifference towards him. He tries to impress her and help her learn to swim and dance, but it does not help. Other boys try to get her as long as their money holds out, and then they give up.
One night the narrator and Avey sit on a boat puffing up the Potomac, and Avey takes him in her arms. He is annoyed because it is not the kind of love he wants. She kisses his forehead, but he wants passion, not tenderness. She lays him in her lap, and he does not like it when she starts to sing a lullaby. He talks and talks, but finally lets her love him in her way.
The next summer he gets close to her again. They are on a rock called Lover’s Leap at Harpers Ferry. They hold hands, but only loosely because she does not want them tight. He wants to tell her how he feels, but it is hard. He does kiss her and hold her breast, but that is all. She will not talk about the college guy he knows she is with.
Over time, her indifference annoys him. He thinks she is lazy and indolent. He tries to forget her for two years when he goes away, but it is not as easy as he thinks it is. One day he gets a note from her. She says she has lost her school and is going away. The narrator asks Ned about this, and he says she is a whore.
Five years pass and the narrator hears she is in New York. He doesn’t have any money, but he makes it there and gets a job in a shipyard. He never sees her, and he returns home.
One dusky evening he sees her on U Street and she recognizes him. She tells him he looks older and he notices her fine clothes. The man she is with leaves when she tells him to do so, and he starts to get a notion of what she is.
The narrator often goes up to a place in Soldier’s Home to look out over the city of Washington at night. He is friends with the policeman there because he knows the narrator is not there for inappropriate reasons.
One night the narrator takes Avey there. They hear strains of music in the distance and sit together. He talks to her about what she needs to do to have a better life. He does not feel any pressure on his hand and looks down to see her sleeping heavily. His fleeting thoughts of doing something passionate with her fade. He covers her with a blanket and lets this Orphan-woman sleep.
Beehive (poem)
The poet writes of a beehive filled with a million bees passing in and out and intently droning. He says that he is like a drone on my back getting drunk on honey, but he wishes he could fly out into the night sky and curl up in a flower.
Storm Ending (poem)
The poet writes of the claps of thunder blooming like flowers in the sky. Flowers are engrossed in the natural forces of sun and rain, and the earth tries to retreat from the thunder.
Theater (prose)
Howard Theater’s walls soak up the black life of the neighborhood. They throb with jazz and open up to the people at night. During the day all is quiet and dark while the musicians sleep, but soon there is syncopation in the air and light in the dark.
John is the manager’s brother and his face is half shadow, half lit with orange. His body and thoughts seem separate. He watches the chorus girls drift in, and he especially watches Dorris.
The pianist starts to play jazz and the girls dance spontaneously. John thinks about how the director will soon tame them; the audience will paint their faces white and call them beautiful.
The girls whirl about and laugh. Men clap, and the walls seem to sing and close in. Men and girls are pressed, as is John.
The director wants to start rehearsal. The music starts and John watches Dorris. He desires her, but wonders if they would make sense together. Dorris sees him looking, and asks her dancing partner who he is. The girl replies he is the manager’s brother and is snobby. Dorris angrily asks if she is not as good as him, saying that she knows a lot of respectable folks.
The director chastises them for talking. John watches and thinks about how he wants Dorris but she might bore him. He should touch her. It can’t be done. It can be done. Let her go.
Dorris wants to dance, and she is in front. The director smiles and thinks she will be a leading lady someday. Dorris looks at John with burning eyes and wonders if he could love her and give her a home and kids. She keeps dancing.
The walls press in on John and Dorris. John dreams of them together in nature, her face smelling of canefields.
When the pianist crashes a chord, the reverie is broken. Dorris stops dancing and looks at John, but his shadowy face seems like a dead thing. She rushes into her dressing room and cries.
Her Lips are Copper Wire (poem)
The poet writes that a woman’s lips glow and sway like drunken people. Her breath is moist against him. Her words flow up and down the billboards. He tells her to take the tape off her lips and kiss him “till they are incandescent” (55).
Calling Jesus (prose)
Her soul is like a little dog that follows her. She keeps it outside at night, but someone comes in and covers it and puts it near her.
When she goes to bed at night, the narrator says, you can feel the little thing shivering and calling near you. The narrator says he has seen her soul tagging behind her into the streets lined with chestnuts, the alleys, the shanties. She leaves it outside in the vestibule. Someone brings it in to her where she sleeps, “cradled in dream-fluted cane” (56).
Analysis
In Part 2 Toomer takes his novel to the North, though the South is never that far away. Instead of cabins, forests, and fields of cane, he now writes of streets, theaters, clubs, and electricity. The South was depicted in a dreamlike way, but the North has its own surreal quality. The streets with black blood, the flashes of light and snippets of jazz, the whirl of dancers, and the flash of gaudy clothing over quickly past the reader like scenes from looking out a train window. Dynamic movement and energy are everywhere—on stage, in the wires, and in the streets.
Also, not only the setting but also the language of the work changes in this section. Critic Rachel Farebrother notes, “Toomer creates a sharp break with his lyrical, poetical language in part one; the reader is faced with a jazz aesthetic of syncopated rhythms.” Toomer was a fan of jazz, unsurprisingly, and even told a friend in a letter that Cane would “curiously blend the rhythm of peasanty [sic] with the rhythm of achiness. A syncopation, a slow jazz, a sharp intense motion, subtilized, fused to a terse lyricism.” Many critics write about the influence of jazz on the work, noting how it is an urban music compared to the blues and spirituals that derive from the rural South. Frederik L. Rusch identifies the very structure of Cane as improvisational, as variations on a theme. It is balanced but explosive, unified but fragmented. There is no real time sequence or even a real plot; both of these absences embody the jazz aesthetic.
In terms of historical context, Toomer’s urban milieu owes itself to the Great Migration, a wave of African American migration out of the South to Northern cities in the 1910s and during WWI in which the migrants sought better jobs in wartime factories and to escape the weight of slavery and racism in the South. Northern cities such as Detroit, St. Louis, Washington D.C., and Manhattan (particularly the neighborhood of Harlem) were transformed by this wave of black men and women. Toomer evokes the Great Migration in his lines describing the U District from “Seventh Street”: “Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War” (41).
The African American experience in the North may not be as explicitly centered on slavery (though clearly they are only in the North because their ancestors were brought there as slaves), but the racism is all-pervasive. Those traveling North did not find it to be a Mecca of racial inclusion. “Seventh Street” has a bitter tone and violent imagery in its evocation of “black reddish blood [seeping] into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington” (41). In the poem “Beehive,” the poet compares the North to a hive with “a million bees” (49) who dully drone on. He wishes he could “fly out past the moon / And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower” (49).
The way slavery manifests itself in the North is, as critic Janet M. Whyde explains, self-imposed. The characters are “active agents of their own psychological imprisonment.” Bernard Bell agrees, saying “Part Two is on the corruption of the mind when it is enslaved by the genteel mores of society as well as the mind when it has rid itself of that form of oppression.” The character of Rhobert is malnourished, beaten down by the struggles of life in the North. He is weary, compressed, struggling, and eventually dead. Whyde notes, “the consequence of capitulation to white values is obliteration, but Rhobert’s idle-class version also carries with it the threat of more genera; acceptance…Rhobert, then, is a sign of the more general struggle for control of the black community.” Similarly, in “Avey” the narrator has a narrow conception of the world and tries to fit Avey within it. He lambasts her for her laziness and indolence and gets caught up in his own ambitions. He can only write about her obliquely, finding it impossible to see her as a real person. When he calls her an orphan at the end, “he cuts her off from her roots and denies her the power to signify the racial heritage that they share but that he has repudiated or put to sleep in himself.”
Similarly, in “Theater,” John is an embodiment of the all-powerful male gaze, subjecting Dorris to his fantasies and desires, ultimately rejecting her. She tries to use her body to entice him, incorporating aspects of her African heritage, but he falls back on the social and class differences between them as reason to retreat back into the shadow. He has no interest in Dorris’s actual reality, instead constructing a false one in his daydream. He is all “mind” and she is all “body,” he concludes, and never the twain shall meet.
