Cane is a collection of stories, poems, and sketches in three sections. Cane appeared in 1923, receiving favorable reviews although it was not widely read. Rediscovered during the 1960’s, it has become one of the best-known and most respected African American works. Oddly, Jean Toomer was only a fraction African American; his ancestry was so mixed that some laws considered him white.

Cane is important in African American literature no matter what Toomer’s ethnic background was because it describes the black Southern rural experience, the black Northern urban experience, and intellectuals’ attempts to understand the connection between the two. It also uses experimental techniques to portray traditional experiences.

The first section, set in rural and small-town Georgia, contains stories about women and men’s attraction to them. The poems generally concern workers and landscape and often describe farm labor. Other poems in the first section are portraits. “Face” is a word picture of an old, sorrow-filled woman. “Portrait in Georgia” uses lynching imagery to describe a woman: “Hair—braided chestnut,/ coiled like a lyncher’s rope. . . .” “Nullo” is a portrait of rural Georgia, describing pine needles falling.

Three poems do not fit in any of these categories: In “Song of the Son,” the narrator realizes that all former slaves will soon be dead, but he will sing their song, as a tree grows from a seed; in “Evening Sun,” the narrator speaks of love at nightfall; “Conversion” describes negatively Africans’ conversion to Christianity in the Americas.

The second section, set in cities, primarily Washington, D.C., contains poetry, short stories, and cryptic word sketches. Many short stories in section two continue male-female relationship themes; some of the poems relate to city life, such as “Her Lips Are Copper Wire.”

Toomer’s word sketches combine the cryptic imagery of poetry with the flowing quality of prose. This is true especially in “Calling Jesus,” in which someone comes in “soft as a cotton boll brushed against the milk-pod cheek of Christ.” Similar descriptions appear in the short stories. In “Karintha,” for example, the title character carries “beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.”

In the short stories, the author often portrays people on society’s fringes to reveal the society itself. Becky, the white woman with sons of mixed race, is exiled by both communities. Townspeople are torn between their Christian duty to help her—to bring her food, build her a cabin—and their antagonism toward the mixing of races. The reader knows Becky only through townspeople’s reactions.

Toomer’s poetry often combines two aspects of African American experience: work songs and spirituals. “Cotton Song,” for example, begins like a work song: “Come, brother, come. Lets lift it.” A later stanza brings in elements of the spiritual: “Weary sinner’s bare feet trod,/ Softly, softly to the throne of God. . . .” Other poems are more traditional, such as “Song of the Son,” in which the narrator promises to sing his slave ancestors’ song when they are gone.

The final section of Cane, “Kabnis,” is a story originally written as drama. “Kabnis” is the most problematic part of Cane , but it also is the story that pulls the book together. The African American experience is displacement. Slavery displaced Africans from their homeland; emancipation freed slaves but also often displaced them. To escape the horrors of Southern persecution, many African Americans moved to Northern cities, again displacing themselves. Those who stayed in the South lived a way of life that was ending, as factories replaced farming. Ralph Kabnis is one of those displaced persons. An educated man from Washington, D.C.—considered Northern by any Southerner—Kabnis...