Toomer, Jean - Nellie Y. McKay (essay date 1984)

Nellie Y. McKay (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: “Finding a Different Place: Cane (2),” in Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 125-50.

[In the following essay, McKay interprets the second section of Cane as an exploration of Toomer's urban experience in the North.]

I

After the violence and despair at the conclusion of “Blood-Burning Moon,” the narrator shifts the action from the rural South to the northern urban environment, and, in Section 2, he explores a new kind of black experience. Many factors contributed to the movement of large numbers of blacks to the North in the early part of the twentieth century, but the motives were always associated with improved economic, educational, and social status and a desire to escape the ignorance and violence of southern black life. The shift brought monumental changes, both negative and...

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