society; black characters wondering how their world has led them astray, how their childhoods steered them wrong. Carma's mannish appearance gives her a freedom from all the men (except the narrator) that Karintha will never have. Esther, too, has freedom from the men who are always around to pressure the characters with physical beauty, but her soul matures wrapped around the mistaken impression she has of one particular man, King Barlo. Avey, like Karintha, is the object of men's desires, and she ends up exhausted. Muriel might as well be from a different planet as Karintha, because it would be virtually impossible for them to understand one another—Muriel is concerned about her reputation, both with her landlady and out in the public theater, which Dan Moore feels is an unhealthy suppression of her true sexual nature (unaware, of course, of the tragic results that leaving sexuality unchained caused for Karintha).

Toomer himself said that the true end of this book's circle was the story of Bona and Paul. Here, readers see the theme of sexual predation work itself out in healthy, robust competition: Bona is certainly Paul's match, not because she uses her feminine beauty to control him but because she puts an effort into being his equal. The theme of racial inequity, though, is not solved. There are two ways to read the ending. The most direct reading is that Bona, watching Paul shake hands with a black doorman, realizes the full implications of his racial identity, and leaves, implying that racial merging could never happen even for two people attracted to one another as these. The less simple reading, more in keeping with the sad tone of the book, is that Paul loses his chance at love because he has hesitated, taking too long deciding what he wants his identity to be. If Karintha is all response, giving the young and old men what they want, Paul is the opposite—all thought and little action.

The story of Kabnis, then, makes an excellent beginning. Like Toomer himself, Kabnis is a light-skinned educator seeking self-identity in the South—the character's quest begins where the author's did. And the mud of Georgia pulls Kabnis down. He starts off as a sophisticate, to some extent even a little snobbish about the locals' primitive beliefs, and he ends up a bib-overalled laborer: like the others only less skilled, and so infantilized by liquor that he is unable to stand on his own two feet.

In this, the largest section of Cane, there is much confusion, made worse by the jumbled rambling of the stream-of-consciousness narration, which brings Ralph Kabnis' confused thoughts to life. There is Kabnis' self-hatred, which if anything is fueled by the violence and callousness of the white community that surrounds him. There is religious mystery, in the form of Father John, who sits day and night at the table in the Hole; defiance in Louis; resignation in Halsey; and surrender in Hanby. The only character who is content and secure in this section is Carrie K.

Sister of Fred Halsey, she is considered an "adolescent." When Kabnis thinks about her, he does consider her body, shying away from thinking of her sexually the way that the old and young men tried to avoid thinking of Karintha when she was too young. "There is a slight stoop to her shoulders," Kabnis observes. "The curves of her body blend with this to a soft, rounded charm." His thought about the curves of her body indicates that he could easily sexualize her in the way that Karintha is sexualized in her youth.

Toomer shifts to Louis' point of view for the thought that Kabnis comes near to, the idea that young Carrie K. is wasting her virginity. Like Dan Moore, he worries that society is depriving her of life. "He sees the nascent woman, her flesh already stiffening to cartilage, drying to bone. Her spirit-bloom, even now touched sullen, bitter. Her rich beauty fading…." The cause, Louis assumes, is the society around her. "The sin-bogies of respectable southern colored folk clamor at her: 'Look out! Be a good girl. Look out!'" In another context, readers might be tempted to go along with his fear, but not within a book that starts with the story of Karintha, who is ruined at an early age precisely because no one told her to look out.

Carrie is rooted to her society, not anchored by it or (as Louis assumes) oppressed by it. He mistakenly sees her caring for her brother and the silent old man as servitude, not realizing that her involvement with them gives her the sort of human interaction that most characters in Cane lack and sorely need. The old man, who they call Father John, might be a Christ figure, but this Christ is blind and deaf, and cannot communicate with people directly. What Carrie says of him—"He's deaf and blind, but I reckon he hears, and sees too, from the things I've heard"—does not make sense, except on a complex spiritual level. Few characters in this book have the spiritual complexity to see beyond the misery of their own lives.

Karintha has a baby and abandons it out among the pines. Stella, one of the prostitutes that Halsey and Kabnis bring down into the Hole where Father John lives, is described thinking: "She'd like to take Kabnis to some distant pine grove and nurse and mother him." It is hardly likely she could, with the bitter way her family has been destroyed according to the story she tells about a white man stealing her mother away. "Boars an kids an fools—that's all I've ever known," she explains. Instead of taking Kabnis and mothering him, she is claimed by Halsey as his sexual prize, and she goes off with him.

Carrie K. does mother him. Like a child, he finds it impossible to walk, and she helps him. She dresses him, or at least shows him when it is time to change out of his bathrobe and to dress to face the world. When he trips on the coal bucket and curses, she answers calmly with the last spoken words of the book: "Jesus, come." Her firm cool hands draw from him the fever of anger and confusion.

Carrie K. is the opposite of Karintha: the antidote to her sickness, the correction to what went wrong at the beginning of the book. The "Kabnis" story is about an educated man sinking to Karintha's level of instinctiveness, but it brings with it another black woman, one who is Karintha's social equal, her moral superior. Carrie K. is Karintha inverted. More than a circle, this book operates like a Mobius strip, a piece of paper that is twisted over before the two ends are attached, so that one can follow it continuously for infinity.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature at several community colleges in Illinois.

Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History is about a literary life and its complicated relationships to the social, political, and economic worlds in which the writer lived and worked. In particular it is about the African-American writer Jean Toomer and his major book, the hybrid short story cycle Cane, first published in 1923. For more than three decades a kind of subterranean text, not forgotten but unavailable, Cane had been a critical success rather than a popular one in 1923, and though its publisher reprinted it in 1927 (no doubt to capitalize on the rise of the Harlem Renaissance), it would not be reprinted again until 1969, two years after Toomer's death. In 1969, in the midst of a revival of interest in black writing, Robert Bone's review of the first paperback edition appeared in the New York Times Book Review with the headline "The Black Classic That Discovered 'Soul' Is Rediscovered after 45 Years," and Cane's revival was securely launched. The New York literary world's approval was something Toomer the author would have appreciated.

Cane became a canonic text rather late, but it was never quite a lost text; despite the Times's headline, Cane was "rediscovered" only in the sense that the mass-market edition made it available, as Bone remarked, "to the general reader." The importance of reprinting for a book's long-term survival should not be underestimated, but in this case the critical effort to remember Cane, which can be traced in Therman B. O'Daniel's excellent bibliography of Toomer, was equally important. Though excluded from "mainstream" anthologies of American literature, selections from Cane, a few poems and stories, were more or less continuously in print between 1927 and 1969—this despite the fact that Toomer himself sometimes declined to appear in "Negro" anthologies. Some critics of African-American writing also made sure Toomer's work was not forgotten: Alain Locke, Sterling Brown, J. Saunders Redding, Hugh M. Gloster, and particularly Bone and Arna Bontemps.

Since 1970 Cane has become an important text, and Jean Toomer has become the subject of biographies and book-length literary studies. After 1923 Toomer continued writing almost until the year of his death, accumulating a huge archive of unpublished work, most of it now collected at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Understandably, much of the recent interest in Toomer has focused on this unpublished writing, particularly parts of his multiple autobiographies and the record of his "spiritualist" work after 1923; there has also been a tendency to read backward and interpret Cane in light of selected bits of this material. However, in part because of this concentration on the later writing, the now considerable body of scholarship about Toomer leaves important areas of his life and work untouched, especially the historical contexts within which Toomer began to write: the social and political milieus of the post-World War I period. Neglected in most previous commentaries, these matters are central to understanding Cane and cast light as well on Toomer's other works.

Two words in our title, "terrors" and "history," describe what we have found to be lacking from studies of Toomer and what we have tried to begin recovering. A significant project for recent critics of American literature has been the rediscovery of books and authors excluded from the New Critical canon, and a part of this work has also been to investigate the dimensions of literature which the New Critics were little interested in studying. Not coincidentally, the literary circles of Jean Toomer worked on a similar project; as Waldo Frank observed in Our America, criticizing the canon established by the "Genteel Tradition" and the "New Humanists": "Whatever consciousness we have had so far has been the result of vast and deliberate exclusions." Cary Nelson's critique of literary history as it has been written since the 1950s summarizes one kind of exclusion:

The New Critics were at pains to point out that "literary history" generally omitted and obscured what was specifically literary about poetry and fiction, the textual qualities that distinguish literary language from other discourses. It may now, however, be more crucial to argue that literary history is typically (and improperly) detached from history as it may be more broadly construed—not only the familiar history of nations but also the still less familiar history of everyday life.

The background to Cane and the story of how Toomer came to write the book involve both "everyday" and national histories that had been "detached" from the text even as the complete text itself virtually disappeared for thirty years. Contexts have been there to be uncovered, but for various reasons they have remained hidden.

There is one obvious reason for the loss of historical—especially political—contexts for Cane: Toomer's life after 1923 turned away from the social circumstances and urgencies that led him to begin writing, and this move toward religious and personal concerns undoubtedly encouraged critics and biographers to regard him as a mystic and spiritualist rather than as a political writer. After 1923 Toomer formed a series of attachments to spiritualists like George Gurdjieff and religious groups like the Quakers which continued virtually until the end of his life. It seems clear that Toomer's commitment to a "spiritual quest" was serious and deeply felt, but our study is not concerned with that part of his career, except to point out that the political Toomer who wrote Cane resurfaced in later years. We have tried to outline the historical context from which Cane emerged, examining ignored or neglected evidence about the specific background within which Toomer wrote his book, and to show how that background helps explain the political meanings of Cane.

The politics of Jean Toomer the writer and of Cane have been obscured by intentional disregard (even by Toomer himself) and by scholarly neglect. Although we did not begin our work with the idea of revising Toomer's biography, in the process of writing we came up against serious errors and omissions in the scholarship dealing with Toomer's life through 1923; correcting this record has made us, in effect, involuntary biographers. The most complete biography of Toomer is Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge's The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness—the subtitle of which indicates its concern with the "spiritual" Toomer. In fact, Kerman and Eldridge devote only two short chapters to Cane, whereas almost three-quarters of their book is given over to the religious quests of Toomer's later life. More important in our view, Lives contains factual errors and questionable interpretations and overlooks crucial biographical materials, particularly in its discussion of the writing of Cane and the social, political, and intellectual milieus that influenced it. We address specific errors in the notes to our main text, but the major problem is what has been omitted from the discussion of Toomer's life.

These omissions include a lack of attention to Toomer's earliest published writings, which are specifically political and which illuminate the crucial literary relationship between Toomer and his mentor, Waldo Frank. In Lives as, indeed, in all the published biographical writings on Toomer, there is no mention of the three articles he published between 1919 and 1920 in the New York Call, a prominent socialist newspaper. Although Toomer avoided any mention of the Call essays in his autobiographies, references to these articles appear three times in Toomer's unpublished writings, twice in the correspondence between Waldo Frank and Toomer and again in the biographical sketch that Toomer wrote for Horace Liveright on the eve of Cane's publication.

Most of the writing about Toomer has understated, or even ignored, the essential contribution Waldo Frank made to Cane, and this problem becomes more troublesome when combined with critical misunderstandings about the meaning of Frank's own books, particularly his key work, Our America. Kerman and Eldridge, for instance, largely reduce Frank's significance for Toomer to the "spiritual" and the "religious," viewing Our America as a work focused on the idea of the nation's "organic mystical Whole." This phrase, however, offers little help in coming to terms with a book whose real foundation is political and social, as Toomer's defense of Frank in his final Call article, "Americans and Mary Austin," shows he well understood. Austin had attacked Frank as a Jew, condemning Our America because it presumptuously challenged the cultural hierarchy that Austin, as an Anglo-American, was determined to uphold, and Toomer defended Frank on precisely those issues of "race," culture, and politics that were at the heart of Our America.

In 1919, when Our America was published, Frank and others of his generation faced a repressive government. Bolshevik paranoia and war hysteria defined the national temper; anti-Semitism was at its zenith; civil liberties remained under "wartime" suspension; members of the liberal and radical Left were being harassed, jailed, or deported; major race riots (attacks by whites on black communities) erupted throughout the year. Randolph Bourne, Frank's friend and fellow contributor to the brilliant little magazine The Seven Arts (1916-17), wrote a brutal but unfinished satire on the tenor of the times called "The State." Published posthumously in the same year as Our America, it conceived of America's future as a totalitarian nightmare. Some of Bourne's politics found their way into Our America as part of an extended socialist critique of American history, but Frank's book placed hope for resistance more in the cultural arena than in the political one. This choice was not a retreat in his view: he believed the artist rather than the revolutionary could radically remake American society, just as marginalized groups (Jews, Hispanics, Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants from southern Italy and eastern Europe) might redefine an America as "ours" and not "theirs." Frank thought "culture" was a political force that might change society rather than simply reflect it, and his use of religion was tied to the social: art is "religious" (from religare: "to bind") because it serves in the creation of the Beloved Community.

Although by the end of 1923 Toomer was on his way to embracing Gurdjieffism, this future choice is largely irrelevant to Cane's meaning. The "spiritual" always appears in Cane within a political context, that is, within a context concerned with issues involving the American polis. Toomer's politics in the period from 1918 to 1923—roughly the time during which he was learning the craft of writing and then completing Cane—were centered on socialism and on the "New Negro"; his first published essays drew ideas from both movements, which were contemporary currents in postwar New York City and which coincided in radical African-American magazines like Cyril Briggs's Crusader and the Messenger of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen.

Toomer criticism has largely dismissed socialism as a significant influence on his thought at the time he was writing Cane. Critics paraphrase Toomer's remarks in the 1931-32 version of his autobiography, that ten days of working in the shipyards of New Jersey in 1919 "finished socialism for me." But the shipyard experience did not finish socialism for Toomer. He continued to move in the world of the New York Left after 1919, and in 1936 he wrote another version of his autobiography which completely revised his understanding of those days in the shipyard. Where the 1931-32 autobiography is satirical, even cynical—the shipyard workers "had only two main interests: playing craps and sleeping with women"—in the 1936 autobiography this satiric perspective shifts to the Gothic: Toomer admits his own fear of working-class life, that he did not want "to be confined in the death-house with doomed men."

The lot of these workers represented a brutal actuality that underlay society; working as a common laborer had shown Toomer "that the underlying conditions of human existence were ruthless and terrible beyond anything written in books or glimpsed in those forms of society wherein men, their behavior and manners, are veneered by the amenities of civilization. This is what the shipyard experience had done to me—and done for me." He was also convinced that socialism was a necessary solution to the soul-deadening, exhausting work of the shipyards: "I realized as never before the need of socialism, the need of a radical change of the conditions of human society." Like George Orwell—and indeed this part of the 1936 autobiography reads like Down and Out in Paris and London—Toomer would escape back to "normal" middle-class life, but the world of the shipyards would be present in Cane, in its keen social analysis of class and caste and in its Gothic portrayal of the terrors of American history.

Also missing from the biographical record are essential facts about Toomer's engagement with African-American politics and civil rights. The second Call essay Toomer wrote, "Reflections on the Race Riots," published in August 1919, raises important questions: Where was Toomer during the Washington, D.C., race riots of July 1919, and what was his reaction to them? Some of the worst fighting of July 21-22 took place in the streets virtually fronting the apartment Toomer occupied with his elderly grandparents, yet there is no mention of this in Darwin T. Turner's The Wayward and the Seeking or in Toomer's other autobiographical writings. Toomer's contemporary reaction, a militant leftist one, is evident from his Call essay, but his later decision to "forget" that public history points up how difficult it is to determine exactly what can be trusted in the autobiographies.

One of the problems in Toomer criticism has been the use of Turner's autobiographical collage in The Wayward and the Seeking as an accurate record of Toomer's life. Turner's book has been valuable as a source for long-unavailable portions of Toomer's published and unpublished work, and Turner himself was clear in his introduction about the selective nature of the autobiographical fragments he joined together to produce a narrative of Toomer's life through 1923. But inevitably the largest portion of the autobiographical writings were excluded from this anthology, and some of those excluded pages are of crucial significance for understanding Toomer's political life. It is absurd that the half-dozen lines about working in the shipyards from the 1931-32 "Outline of an Autobiography" should be quoted repeatedly even as Toomer's many pages of reflection on the same experience written in 1936 remain unmentioned.

To a considerable degree the difficulty in establishing the basic facts of Toomer's life has been due to his own evasiveness. The problem with Toomer's discussions of Cane and its composition presented in The Wayward and the Seeking is a matter not primarily of which documents were selected, but of Toomer's own deliberate misrepresentation of those circumstances. After comparing Toomer's extensive 1922-23 correspondence with Waldo Frank, Gorham Munson, and others against the record of the same period in "On Being an American," one becomes very cautious of Toomer's selective memory, especially in any matter involving his racial identity. Similarly, the exclusion of the Call articles from Toomer's autobiography was his own choice, a choice that successfully "buried" them for a surprisingly long time. Such was also the case with the events of his life during the summer of 1919, though it is now possible—with the Call article and various hints in Toomer's unpublished autobiographies—to piece together a probable narrative for those months.

Beyond mistaking specific facts of Toomer's life, scholarship about Cane has never adequately treated the intellectual and historical settings of that work, though there are important exceptions in the criticism of Vera M. Kutzinski, George B. Hutchinson, Michael North, and Barbara Foley, who have made valuable contributions to the recovery of Cane's background. That background, the political circumstances behind Cane, was varied, and included Toomer's activist engagement in polemics ("Reflections on the Race Riots" and "Americans and Mary Austin"), the traumatic circumstances of his stay in Sparta, his attempt to understand the mulatto-elite milieu of his hometown, Washington, D.C., and its ideology of racial uplift, and his ongoing effort to define himself as an "American." Although he wrote about these experiences before he renewed his acquaintance with Waldo Frank in 1922 it was Frank's influence that led him to think of developing this diverse material into a book. The euphoria Toomer felt over being associated with Waldo Frank and the group of intellectuals known during the Great War as "Young America" cannot be overestimated. The members of that group were to move in different directions after the war, but the ideas emanating from their vortex would give Toomer an intellectual context for Cane.

The brief mention of "Young America" in The Lives of Jean Toomer is the best available discussion of Toomer's relationship to this group, but it is sketchy and incomplete. Nor is it useful to characterize these people as part of the "Lost Generation." Whatever that phrase meant when Gertrude Stein dropped it to Ernest Hemingway in Paris, it has a very limited relevance to Toomer's circle of New York intellectuals. Lewis Mumford, a member of "Young America," put the difference directly:

In contrast to the disillusioned expatriates of the "lost generation" who were travelling in the opposite direction, we [Mumford and Van Wyck Brooks] felt—as did Randolph Bourne, Waldo Frank, and Paul Rosenfeld—that this [task of reclaiming our American literary heritage] was an essential preparation for America's cultural "Coming of Age." For Brooks this remained a lifelong mission; and between 1921 and 1931, partly under his influence, I made it my concern too.

Mumford would say elsewhere that "what united me in comradeship" to this group was the idea of "re-discovery." Although he probably took that word from the title of Waldo Frank's The Rediscovery of America (1929), the sequel to Our America, he may have been thinking of Van Wyck Brooks's seminal article in the Dial (1918), "On Creating a Usable Past," in which Brooks saw American history, and especially American literary history, an "inexhaustable storehouse" of multiple pasts. Mumford, Frank, Hart Crane, and eventually Kenneth Burke came to see that America's usable pasts might be reclaimed in order to express a utopian future. The renewal of American life was also Toomer's concern, but Toomer's racial perspective on American society, past and present, complicated this theme in Cane. As much as he wanted to embrace the optimism of Frank and others, he came face to face in Cane not with a usable past but with the terrors of American history.

As Kerman and Eldridge's plural Lives suggests, and as most readers looking at Cane and the post-Cane work are likely to feel, Jean Toomer's life changed dramatically after 1923. Since we have read Toomer primarily because of Cane, we will look at only a few of his later writings, and those in light of the vexed question of what became of the author whom Waldo Frank at one time regarded as the most promising writer in America. Our sense of Cane's importance has led us to try to uncover the background for the book and to clarify its political meanings; we find little point in the current anachronistic tendency that attempts to link Cane with Toomer's New Age thinking after he came under the influence of George Gurdjieff and to read the book via Gurdjieffism or some other "spiritual" system. Fixing on the illusory search for "spiritual wholeness" in the text reduces, intentionally or not, its social and political dimensions, and ignores the historical background of the times and Toomer's intricate and evolving connection to them. To insist that Cane be a "spiritual autobiography" is to disregard his text's most important enactment: the transformation of the isolated spectator into the witness of history.

Source: Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr, "Introduction: The Witness of History," in Jean Toomer and the Terrors of American History, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, pp. 1-7.

William Stanley Braithwaite's "The Negro in American Literature," concludes with the rhapsodic assertion that "Cane is a book of gold and bronze, of dusk and flame, of ecstasy and pain, and Jean Toomer is a bright morning star of a new day of the race in literature." Written in 1924, Braithwaite's statement reflects the energy and excess, the vibrancy and hope of a generation of young black authors who set out in the 1920s to express their "individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame." They were wooed by white patrons; they had their work modified beyond recognition by theatrical producers, and they were told time and again precisely what type of black American writing the public would accept. Some, like Wallace Thurman, could not endure the strain. Claude McKay absented himself from Harlem throughout most of the twenties, and Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen gained a degree of notoriety. Ironically, it was Cane (1923), a book written by a very light-complexioned mulatto, that portrayed—without fear of shame—a dark-skinned self that transcended the concerns of a single period and heralded much of value that has followed its publication. Arna Bontemps writes:

Only two small printings were issued, and these vanished quickly. However, among the most affected was practically an entire generation of young Negro writers then just beginning to emerge; their reaction to Toomer's Cane marked an awakening that soon thereafter began to be called a Negro Renaissance.

The 1920s presented a problem for the writer who wished to give a full and honest representation of black American life; for him the traditional images, drawn from the authors of the Plantation Tradition and the works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, were passé. The contemporary images, captured in Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926) and Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928), were not designed to elucidate a complex human existence, for they were reflections of that search for the bizarre and the exotic that was destined to flourish in an age of raccoon coats, bathtub gin, and "wine-flushed, bold-eyed" whites who caught the A-train to Harlem and spent an evening slumming, or seeking some élan vital for a decadent but prosperous age. That only two small printings of Cane appeared during the 1920s is not striking: the miracle is that it was published at all. Toomer did not choose the approbation that a scintillating (if untrue) portrayal of the black man could bring in the twenties, nor did he speak sotto voce about the amazing progress the black man had made in American society and his imminent acceptance by a fond white world. Cane is a symbolically complex work that employs lyrical intensity and stream-of-consciousness narration to portray the journey of an artistic soul toward creative fulfillment; it is unsparing in its criticism of the inimical aspects of the black American heritage and resonant in its praise of the spiritual beauty to be discovered there. An examination of the journey toward genuine, liberating black art presented in Cane reveals Toomer as a writer of genius and the book itself as a protest novel, a portrait of the artist, and a thorough delineation of the black situation. These aspects of the work explain its signal place among the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance and they help to clarify the reaction of a white reading public—a public nurtured on the minstrel tradition, the tracts of the New Negro, and the sensational antics of Carl Van Vechten's blacks—which allowed it to go out of print without a fair hearing.

The first section of Cane opens with evocative description and a lyrical question. The subject is Karintha, whose:

… skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,
O cant you see it, O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
… When the sun goes down.

The repetition and the simile bringing together the human and the nonhuman leave a memorable impression. The reader is directly asked to respond, as were the hearers of such spirituals as "I've Got a Home in Dat Rock": "Rich man Dives he lived so well / Don't you see?" From the outset, the atmosphere is one of participation, as the reader is invited to contemplate a woman who carries "beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down."

"Karintha," however, offers more than rhapsodic description and contemplation. It is a concise, suggestive sketch of the maturation of a southern woman: from sensuous childhood through promiscuous adolescence to wanton adulthood. The quatrain that serves as the epigraph is repeated twice and acts as a sharp counterpoint to Karintha's life, which is anything but beautiful: "She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children.…" In a sense, "Karintha" is a prose "The Four Stages of Cruelty," and its exquisite style forces some of its more telling revelations into a type of Hogarthian background, where they are lost to the casual observer.

There are elements of the humorous black preacher tale in the narrator's comment that "even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower," and grim paradox appears after Karintha has given birth to her illegitimate child near the smoldering sawdust pile of the mill:

Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy

you tasted it in water. Someone made a song:
Smoke is on the hills. Rise up.
Smoke is on the hills, O rise
And take my soul to Jesus.

The holy song that accompanies an unholy event is no less incongruous than the pilgrimages and the fierce, materialistic rituals in which men engage to gain access to Karintha. For the heroine is not an enshrined beauty but a victim of the South, where "homes … are most often built on the two room plan. In one, you cook and eat, in the other you sleep, and there love goes on." Karintha has been exposed to an adult world too soon, and the narrator drives home the irony that results when biblical dictates are juxtaposed with a bleak reality: "Karintha had seen or heard, perhaps she had felt her parents loving. One could but imitate one's parents, for to follow them was the way of God." While some men "do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon," the narrator is aware that Karintha has been subjected to conditions that Christianity is powerless to meliorate. Her life has been corrupted, and the mystery is that her beauty remains.

The type of duality instanced by Karintha's sordid life and striking appearance recurs in Part One and lends psychological point to the section. The essential theme of "Karintha" is the debasement of innocence. Men are attracted to the heroine but fail to appreciate what is of value—the spirituality inherent in her dusky beauty. They are awed by the pure yet wish to destroy it; evil becomes their good, and they think only in terms of progressive time and capitalistic abundance—"The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them" and ran stills to make her money. These conditions result, in part, from a southern Manichaeanism; for the land whose heritage appears in "Karintha" stated its superiority and condoned an inhumane slavery, spoke of its aristocracy and traded in human flesh, lauded its natural resources and wantonly destroyed them to acquire wealth. Good and evil waged an equal contest in a South that contained its own natural harmonies but considered blacks as chattels personal, bound by no rights that a white man need respect. In such an instance, love could only be an anomaly, and the narrator of Part One seems fully aware of this. When black women are considered property (the materialism surrounding Karintha and Fern) and white women goddesses (the recrimination that accompanies Becky's sacrilegious acts), deep relationships are impossible; the evil of the encompassing universe and the natural compulsion of man to corrupt the beautiful inform the frustrating encounters of Part One.

The two poems—"Reapers" and "November Cotton Flower"—that follow "Karintha" offer a further treatment of the significant themes found in the story. The expectations raised by the title of the first poem are almost totally defeated by its text. There are sharpened blades, black men, black horses, and an inexorable energy; but wearying customs, indifference, and death are also present. "I see them place the hones / In their hip-pockets as a thing that's done," the speaker says, and goes on to depict the macabre death of a field rat that, "startled, squealing bleeds." This event does not halt the movement of the cutters, however: "I see the blade, / Blood-stained, continue cutting.…" An abundant harvest is not the result of the poem's action, and the black reapers, with scythes in hand, take on the appearance of medieval icons of death—an appropriate image for those who help to corrupt the life of Karintha. "November Cotton Flower" with its images of scarcity, drought, dead birds, and boll weevils continues the portrayal of a grim environment. Against this background, however, stands a beauty like Karintha's. The heroine of the first sketch was compared to a November cotton flower, and here the appearance of the "innocently lovely" flower brings about the speculation of the superstitious. "Beauty so sudden for that time of year," one suspects, is destined to attract its exploiters.

While exploring the nature of Karintha's existence, the author has been constructing the setting that is to appear throughout Part One. The first story's effect is heightened by the presence of the religious, the suggestive, and the feminine, and certain aspects of the landscape linger in the reader's mind: a sawmill, pine trees, red dust, a pyramidal sawdust pile, and rusty cotton stalks. The folk songs convey a feeling of cultural homogeneity; they are all of a religious character, rising spontaneously and pervading the landscape. The finishing details of this setting—the Dixie Pike and the railroad—are added in "Becky," which deals with a mode of interaction characteristic of primitive, homogeneous societies.

"Becky" is the story of a white woman who gives birth to two mulatto sons, thus violating one of the most rigid taboos of southern society. As a consequence, she is ostracized by the community. William Goede (following the lead of Robert Bone) describes her plight as follows:

Becky is, like Hester Prynne, made to pay for the collective sense of guilt of the community: after whites and Negroes exile her, they secretly build her a house which both sustains and finally buries her. The house, on the other hand, built between the road and the railroad, confines the girl until the day when the roof falls through and kills her.

Unlike Karintha, Becky is seldom portrayed in physical terms. The narrator has never seen her, and the community as a whole merely speculates on her actions and her changing appearance. She is primarily a psychological presence to whom the community pays an ironical homage: a spectral representation of the southern miscegenatory impulse that was so alive during the days of American slavery and was responsible for countless lynchings even in Toomer's own day. As early as the seventeenth century, southern legislatures were enacting laws to prevent sexual alliances between blacks and whites; hence, the community in "Becky" reacts in a manner sanctioned by law and custom.

"Becky" presents a further exploration of the duality theme encountered in "Karintha," and here the psychological element seems to predominate. The heroine's exile first calls to mind repression; she is set apart and finally buried. A more accurate description of Becky, however, is that she is a shaman. Among certain Asian groups and American Indian tribes, a person who engages in unsanctioned behavior (homosexuality, for example) is thought to have received a divine summons; he becomes a public figure and devises and leads ritualistic ceremonies that project his abnormal behavior. The function of the shaman is twofold; he enables the community to act out, by proxy, its latent abnormalities, and he reinforces its capacity to resist such tendencies. He is tolerated and revered because of his supernatural power, yet hated as a symbol of moral culpability and as a demanding priest who exacts a penitential toll. The most significant trait of the shaman, however, is that—despite his ascribed powers—he is unable to effect a genuine cure. Georges Devereux explains this paradox:

Aussie ne peut-on considérer que le chaman accomplit une "cure psychiatrique" au sens strict du terme; il procure seulement au malade ce que L'École de psychonalyse de Chicago appelle une "expérience affective corrective" qui l'aide à réorganiser son système de défense mais ne lui permet pas d'attendre à cette réelle prise de conscience de soimême (insight) sans laquelle il n'y a pas de véritable guérison.

It is not surprising that analysts consider the shaman a disturbed individual; he is often characterized by hysteria and suicidal tendencies, and he remains in his role because he finds relief from his own disorders by granting a series of culturally sanctioned defenses to his followers.

Becky has engaged in a pattern of behavior that the surrounding community considers taboo, and she is relegated to a physical position outside the group but essentially public. Her house is built (by the townspeople) in a highly visible location, an "eye-shaped piece of sandy ground … Islandized between the road and railroad track." The citizens scorn her and consider her deranged ("poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths"), but at the same time they pray for her, bring her food, and keep her alive. Becky, in turn, continues her activities; she has another mulatto son and remains in the tottering house until it eventually crumbles beneath the weight of its chimney. In essence, we witness the same dichotomy presented in "Karintha"; the South professes racial purity and abhorrence of miscegenation, but the fundamental conditions of the region nourish a subconscious desire for interracial relationships and make a penitential ritual necessary. It seems significant, moreover, that Becky—who is a Catholic and in that respect also one of the South' s traditional aversions—assumes a divine role for the community. Attraction toward and repulsion by the spiritually ordained are as much a part of the landscape in "Becky" as in "Karintha."

The narrator is swayed by the attitudes of the townspeople, but he is by no means a devout shamanist. He duly records the fact that Becky's house was built on "sandy ground" (reflecting the destructive and aggressive feelings that are part of the shamanic experience), and he points out that Becky is a Catholic. Moreover, he sets up a contrapuntal rhythm between the natural pines that "whisper to Jesus" and the ambivalent charity of the community. The most devastating note in this orchestration is that Sunday is the day of Becky's destruction, and the vagrant preacher Barlo is unwilling to do more than toss a Bible on the debris that entraps her. In short, the narrator captures the irony inherent in the miscegenatory under-consciousness of the South. The town's experience with Becky provides a "corrective, affective experience" but not a substantive cure; as the story closes (on notes that remind one of the eerie conjure stories of black folklore), one suspects that the townspeople are no more insightful.

At this point, Toomer has set forth the dominant tone, setting, characters, and point of view of the first section. Women are in the forefront, and in both "Karintha" and "Becky'" they assume symbolic roles that help to illustrate the dualities of a southern heritage. The beauty of Karintha and the beneficent aspects of Becky's existence are positive counterpoints to the aggressiveness, materialism, and moral obtuseness of the community as a whole. The omnipresent folk songs and the refrain in the second story bespeak a commitment to spirituality and beauty, while the animosity of the townspeople in "Becky" and the ineffectiveness of Christianity in "Karintha" display the grimmer side of a lyrically described landscape whose details pervade the whole of Cane. The point of view is largely that of a sensitive narrator, whom Arna Bontemps describes:

Drugged by beauty "perfect as dusk when the sun goes down," lifted and swayed by folk song, arrested by eyes that "desired nothing that you could give," silenced by "corn leaves swaying, rusty with talk," he recognized that "the Dixie Pike has grown from a goal path in Africa." A native richness is here, he concluded, and the poet embraced it with the passion of love.

The narrator speaks in a tone that combines awe and reverence with effective irony and subtle criticism. There are always deeper levels of meaning beneath his highly descriptive surface, and this is not surprising when one considers Toomer's statement that in the South "one finds soil in the sense that the Russians know it—the soil every art and literature that is to live must be embedded in."

The emblematic nature of the soil is reflected in the tone and technique of the narrator and particularly in the book's title. Throughout Part One there is an evocation of a land of sugar cane whose ecstasy and pain are rooted in a communal soil. But the title conveys more than this. Justifications of slavery on scriptural grounds frequently traced the black man's ancestry to the race of Cain, the slayer of Abel, in the book of Genesis. Toomer is concerned not only with the Southern soil but also with the sons of Cain who populate it. In a colloquial sense, "to raise Cain" is to create disorder and cacophony, and in a strictly denotative sense, a cane is an instrument of support. Toomer's narrator is attempting to create an ordered framework that will contain the black American's complex existence, offer supportive values, and act as a guide for the perceptive soul's journey from amorphous experience to a finished work of art.

The third story of Part One, "Carma," is called by the narrator "the crudest melodrama," and so it is—on one level. When Carma's husband, Bane (surely an ironical name to set against karma), discovers that she has been unfaithful, he slashes the man who has told him, and is sentenced to the chain gang. This is melodramatic to be sure, but only (to quote the narrator) "as I have told it." Beneath the sensational surface is a tragedy of black American life. Bane, like Jimboy in Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter, is forced by economic pressures to seek work away from home; thus, his wife is left alone in an environment where (again, according to the narrator) promiscuity is a norm. But Carma is also a woman who flaunts her sensuality, and can hardly be said to possess a strong sense of responsibility.

As in the previous stories, there are positive and redeeming elements in "Carma." The heroine herself is "strong as any man," and, given her name, this at least implies that her spirituality—that which is best and most ineffable in her—is capable of enduring the inimical aspects of her surroundings. This is particularly important when one considers that "Carma" introduces a legendary African background to the first section: "Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out.… The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa." The passage that introduces this reflection reads: "From far away, a sad strong song. Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman. She does not sing; her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing." The folk song is linked to the African past, and a feeling of cultural continuity is established. The atavistic remains of a ceremonial past have the fragrance of earth and the spirituality of song and dance to recommend them, and at the center of this drama is Carma. She is strong (as Karintha is beautiful) despite southern conditions, and she endures in the face of an insensitive Bane, who is enraged because he cannot master his destiny.

"Carma" is also the first story in which the narrator clearly identifies himself as a conscious recounter ("whose tale as I have told it"), and the poems that follow read like invocations to the heritage that he is exploring. "Song of the Son" states his desire to sing the "souls of slavery," and "Georgia Dusk," which makes further use of the legendary background encountered in "Carma," evokes the spirits of the "unknown bards" of the past. It is not surprising, then, that the story of Fern should follow.

Fern is a woman whom men used until they realized there was nothing they could do for her that would modify her nature or bring them peace. She is an abandoned Karintha, and in a sense a more beautiful and alluring Esther, staring at the world with haunting eyes. The narrator seeks out this beautiful exile who is free in her sexuality and unmoved by the all-pervasive cash nexus of her environment. However, when he asks himself the question posed by former suitors—"What could I do for her?"—his answer is that of the artist: "Talk, of course. Push back the fringe of pines upon new horizons". The others answered in solely materialistic terms, coming away from their relationships with Fern oblivious to her fundamental character and vowing to do greater penitence: "candy every week … a magnificent something with no name on it … a house … rescue her from some unworthy fellow who had tricked her into marrying him". The narrator, on the other hand, aspires to project a vision that will release Fern from her stifling existence; she thus becomes for him an inspiration, an artistic ideal. She is a merger of black American physical attractiveness and the unifying myth so important in black American history and in the creation of the spirituals.

"If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my [the narrator's] feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta," and Fern's full name is Fernie May Rosen. The narrator is thus making use of the seminal comparison between the history of the Israelites and that of black America, which frequently appears in the religious lore of black American culture. In effect, the slaves appropriated the myth of the Egyptian captivity and considered themselves favored by God and destined in time to be liberated by His powers; this provided unity for a people who found themselves uprooted and defined by whites—historians and others—as descendants of wild savages on the "dark continent" of Africa. Despite the fact that she dislikes the petty people of the South and apparently needs to express an underlying spirituality, Fern seems to act as a symbolic representation of the black man's adoption of this myth. When the narrator has brought about a hysterical release from her, however, he fails to comprehend what he has evoked. The story ends with an injunction to the reader to seek out Fern when he travels South. The narrator feels that his ideal holds significance, but that his aspirations toward it are unfulfilled. There is some naivety in this assumption; for the teller of Fern's story has explored the ironies inherent in the merger of white religion and black servitude. The religion of the Israelites is out of place in the life of Fern. While she captures—in her mysterious song like that of a Jewish cantor—the beauty of its spirit (and, in this sense, stands outside the narrow-minded community), she is imprisoned by the mores it occasions. Like Becky and Karintha, Fern is a victim, and the narrator skillfully captures her essence. The apparent naivety at the story's conclusion is in reality an act of modesty; for the art the narrator implies is humble actually holds great significance (in its subtle didactic elements) for the culture he is attempting to delineate.

"Esther" is a story of alienation and brings an inquietude that grows into the concluding terror of the book's first section. Apocalyptic images abound as the heroine dreams of King Barlo (a figure who first appeared in "Becky") overcoming her pale frigidity with a flaming passion that will result in a "black, singed, woolly, tobacco-juice baby—ugly as sin". Edward Waldron points out that "beneath this superficial level … lie at least two more intense and, for Toomer, more personal interpretations. One deals with the relationship of a light-skinned American Negro to the black community in which he (she) must try to function, and the other has to do with a common theme of the Harlem Renaissance the relationship between the American Negro and Africa." But one can make excessive claims for King Barlo. While it is true that he falls into a religious trance and sketches, in symbolic oratory, the fate of Africans at the bands of slave traders, it is also true that he is a vagrant preacher, a figure whom Toomer sketches fully (and with less than enthusiasm) in Layman of "Kabnis." And though Barlo is the prophet of a new dawn for the black American, he is also a businessman who makes money during the war, and a lecherous frequenter of the demimonde. It thus seems an overstatement to make a one-to-one correlation between Barlo and Africa, or Afro-America. It is necessary to bear in mind that Esther Crane is not only a "tragic mulatto" repressed by Protestant religion and her father's business ethic ("Esther sells lard and snuff and flour to vague black faces that drift in her store to ask for them"), she is a fantasizer as well. Esther's view of Barlo is the true presented to the reader through most of the story; hence, when she retreats fully from reality at the conclusion, the reader's judgments should be qualified accordingly.

Esther's final state is described as follows: "She draws away, frozen. Like a somnambulist she wheels around and walks stiffly to the stairs. Down them … She steps out. There is no air, no street, and the town has completely disappeared". The heroine is enclosed in her own mind; the sentient objects of the world mean nothing to this repressed sleepwalker. Given the complexity of Barlo's character, it is impossible to feel that such an observer could capture it accurately. Just as we refuse to accept the middle-aged and sentimental reflections of Marlowe as the final analysis of Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and exercise a qualifying restraint before the words of Camus' narrator in The Fall, so we must recognize the full nature of Esther's character if we are to grasp her story and the role of King Barlo in it. Barlo does contain within himself the unifying myth of black American culture, and he delivers it to the community, in the manner of the most accomplished black folk preachers. In this character, however, he paradoxically contributes to Esther's stifled sensibility, which continually projects visions of sin. As a feat hero (the best cotton picker) and a skillful craftsman of words (his moving performance on the public street), he contains positive aspects, but the impression that remains—when one has noted his terrified and hypocritical response in "Becky" and his conspicuous materialism and insensitive treatment of Esther—is not as favorable as some critics would tempt us to believe.

The feelings of alienation and foreshadowing generated by "Esther" are heightened by the poems that follow. "Conversion" tells of a degraded "African Guardian of Souls" who has drunkenly yielded place to white religiosity, and seems intended to further enlighten the character of Barlo. "Portrait in Georgia" is a subtle, lyrical protest poem in which a woman is described in terms of the instruments and actions of a lynching. The second poem's vision prefigures the horror of the last story in Part One, "Blood-Burning Moon."

"Blood-Burning Moon" stands well in the company of such Harlem Renaissance works as Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" and Walter White's The Fire in the Flint. It is a work that protests, in unequivocal terms, the senseless, brutal, and sadistic violence perpetrated against the black man by white America. The narrator realized in "Carma" that violence was a part of southern existence, and the shattering demise of Becky, Barlo's religious trance, and Fern's frantic outpouring speak volumes about the terror of such a life. But in "Blood-Burning Moon" the narrator traces southern violence to its source. Tom Burwell—strong, dangerous, black lover of Louisa and second to Barlo in physical prowess—is only one of the black Americans whom the Stone family "practically owns." Louisa—black and alluring—works for the family, and Bob Stone (who during the days of slavery would have been called "the young massa") is having an affair with her. Tom reacts to hints and rumors of this affair in the manner of Bane; he turns violently on the gossipers and refuses to acknowledge what he feels to be true. Wage slavery, illicit alliances across the color line, intraracial violence—the narrator indeed captures the soul of America's "peculiar institution," and the results are inevitable. In a confrontation between Stone and Burwell, the black man's strength triumphs, and the white mob arrives (in "high-powered cars with glaring search-lights" that remind one of the "ghost train" in "Becky") to begin its gruesome work. The lynching of Tom, which drives Louisa insane, more than justifies the story's title. The moon, controller of tides and destinies, and a female symbol, brings blood and fire to the black American.

Part One is a combination of awe-inspiring physical beauty, human hypocrisy, restrictive religious codes, and psychological trauma. In "Fern" the narrator says: "That the sexes were made to mate is the practice of the South". But sexual consummation in the first section often results in dissatisfaction or in a type of perverse motherhood. Men come away from Fern frustrated; Karintha covertly gives birth to her illegitimate child in a pine forest; Esther dreams of the immaculate conception of a tobacco-stained baby, and Becky's sons are illegitimate mulattoes, who first bring violence to the community then depart from it with curses. The women of Part One are symbolic figures, but the lyrical terms in which they are described can be misleading. With the exception of their misdirected sexuality, they are little different from the entrapped and stifled women of the city seen in Part Two. In short, something greater than the pressure of urban life accounts for the black man's frustrated ambitions, violent outbursts, and tragic deaths at the hands of white America. The black American's failure to fully comprehend the beautiful in his own heritage—the Georgia landscape, folk songs, and women of deep loveliness—is part of it. But the narrator places even greater emphasis on the black man's ironical acceptance of the "strange cassava" and "weak palabra" of a white religion. Throughout Part One, he directs pointed thrusts—in the best tradition of David Walker Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown—at Christianity. Although he appreciates the rich beauty of black folk songs that employ Protestant religious imagery ("Georgia Dusk"), he also sees that the religion as it is practiced in the South is often hypocritical and stifling. The narrator, as instanced by "Nullo," the refrain in "Becky" ("The pines whisper to Jesus"), and a number of fine descriptive passages throughout the first section, seems to feel a deeper spirituality in the landscape. Moreover, there seems more significance in the beauty of Karintha or in the eyes of Fern (into which flow "the countryside and something that I call God") than in all the cramped philanthropy, shouted hosannas, vagrant preachers, and religious taboos of Georgia. The narrator, in other words, clearly realizes that the psychological mimicry that led to the adoption of a white religion often directed black Americans away from their own spiritual beauties and resulted in destruction.

But the importance of white America's role cannot be minimized. King Barlo views the prime movers behind the black situation as "little white-ant biddies" who tied the feet of the African, uprooted him from his traditional culture, and made him prey to alien gods. The essential Manichaeanism of a South that thrived on slavery, segregation, the chattel principle, and violence is consummately displayed in the first section of Cane, and Barlo realizes that a new day must come before the black man will be free. The brutality directed against the black American has slowed the approach of such a dawn, but the narrator of Part One has discovered positive elements in the black Southern heritage that may lead to a new day: a sense of song and soil, and the spirit of a people who have their severe limitations but cannot be denied.

Source: Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Journey toward Black Art: Jean Toomer's Cane," in Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature, Howard University Press, 1983, pp. 53-67