SOURCE: “An Incomplete Circle: Repeated Images in Part Two of Cane,” in College Language Association Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4, June, 1986, pp. 442-61.

The broad connections between Parts One and Two of Cane have been noted by several critics. Arna Bontemps points to the contrasting settings: Part One is set in the South, while Part Two is set in the North.¹ On a more specific level, Donald Ackley notes the contrast between the roads in the two sections: most of Part One is set on or around the rural Dixie Pike, while Part Two begins on the urban Seventh Street.² As Lucinda Mackethan states, “Footpaths are now busy streets.”³ Catherine Innes points out that “Rhobert” is a structural parallel to “Karintha” in the sense that it opens Part Two with images of suffocation just as “Karintha” opens Part One with images of fading life.⁴ Todd Lieber enlarges the possibilities of Innes' point by noting that both “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert” set up controlling themes and symbols for Part Two.⁵ Thus, the repressed blood of Seventh Street functions just as Rhobert's helmet or Karintha's dusklike skin: it begins a pattern of imagery.

In addition to these general similarities and patterns of contrast, there are specific connections between the images in the two parts. The poem which opens “Seventh Street” involves money and a big car, the two very symbols of white status which Barlo—the black convert to a “white-faced … god”—returns with in “Esther.”⁶ The narrator calls Seventh Street a “bastard,” recalling the miscegenation which eventually produced Esther's white skin. Moreover, the “unconscious rhythms” which Seventh Street is “thrusting” into Washington are described as “black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington” (p. 71). Black blood recalls the blood that is burned at the end of Part One. But the rhythms of the blood are now “unconscious.” The narrator asks over and over again, “Who set you flowing?” (p. 71), as if the African source is now unidentifiable. In addition to these connections, there is a vague echo in “Seventh Street” of the process of making cane syrup which begins and ends Part One. The “black reddish blood” (p. 71) recalls the brown cane syrup which David Georgia makes, while the drying “ribbons of wet wood” (p. 71) recall the “white pulp of stalks” (p. 54) which the men in “Blood-Burning Moon” chew around David Georgia's fire. Toomer's word choice is even similar: the wet wood in “Seventh Street” is in “ribbons,” and the stalks in “Blood-Burning Moon” “lay like ribboned shadows on the ground” (p. 54).

If “Seventh Street” shows what is left of the spirit of Part One in Washington, then “Rhobert” presents the spirit that will characterize Part Two. Appropriately, Toomer connects “Rhobert” to what has gone before. The stuffing of Rhobert's house, “the shredded life pulp” (p. 73), echoes the “ribboned” wood drying on Seventh Street and the chewed pulp of cane stalks in Part One. Also, “Rhobert” ends with a song, another reminder of Part One. But here both of these images have been transformed. Mackethan states, “The central images of Part One carry over into the second section with significant alteration.”⁷ Essentially, he is correct; however, the alternation is a growth rather than a sudden shift. The images reflecting the beauty fading in Part One now show the ugliness of the decaying world which is left. A good example of this transformation is the pulp image. In “Blood-Burning Moon,” live pulp is ground and chewed for the rich juices it contains. In “Seventh Street,” wood pulp dries and blows down the street. In “Rhobert,” the pulp is enclosed; it is what would be left in the water if Rhobert's “dead house” were to “cave in.” In short, the pulp is life enclosed in a box that is dead, a coffin of sorts. Instead of sustaining healthy life, the air Rhobert “gulps” is “air floating shredded life pulp” (p. 74). Life is as split apart as the white wood on Seventh Street; enclosed, it floats on “water that is being drawn off” (p. 73). In commenting on “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert,” Lieber says that Part Two centers on two themes: “the divorce of mind from body and body from soul … and the result of this divorce which is conveyed through images of burial and spiritual death.”⁸ As Lieber suggests, separation, enclosure, suffocation, and death are the major elements of these opening images.

In a similar way, the song image is also changed. Songs in Part One are ways of expressing pain, the sound of the dying black spirit, the hope of deliverance. In contrast, the song “Deep River” in “Rhobert” is bitterly sarcastic. Not only does it present the ridiculous spectacle of a rickety figure who wears a house on his head and sinks in “ooze”; by its very title, it also ridicules the fate of him for whom it is sung. In short, the pain of the picture of Rhobert produces not a song calling for deliverance but a song evoking scorn. Innes calls Part Two “much more sardonic” than Part One.⁹ The transformation of this image supports her view. Dying beauty calls for the hushed song of a swan; rotting ugliness calls for sarcasm.

With “Avey,” Toomer returns to a more traditional story reminiscent of the stories which make up the main body of Part One. However, his imagery functions basically as the imagery in the two earlier sketches functions: imagery from Part One continues to change, reflecting the decay of the world of Part Two. As Mackethan suggests, the trees enclosed in boxes remind us of Part One.¹⁰ There trees “whisper to Jesus” and are strummed like guitars. In Part Two, they are like the “life-pulp” of Rhobert; they are stuffed into boxes—vaguely like coffins—which confine and stifle them. Dusk imagery dominates Part One. Appropriately, the first scene of “Avey” and most of the narrator's subsequent encounters with Avey occur during the night. The ominous moon is even present in one scene. Songs also continue to reflect the ugliness. The echoes of the trains in the valley are like “crude music from the soul of Avey” (p. 81). The narrator compares them to “gasps and sobs” (p. 81), but ultimately they are sounds from a dead machine. In the anticlimactic final scene in Soldier's Home, the narrator wishes that “Deep River”—the song to be sung over Rhobert's ooze-covered grave—would replace the park band. In contrast to “Deep River,” the folk song the narrator sings recalls Part One, setting the scene for passion. But as his speech climaxes with a “promise song” sung “with a strange quiver” (p. 87), we realize that once again Toomer is using songs in an ironic, sarcastic way. The narrator's song only sends Avey into a trance. The imagery which Toomer uses connects Avey's trance to the death and night of Part Two. As the story ends, the narrator unsuccessfully attempts to wake her; the images point toward death. Her face is “pale,” and her eyes are “heavy.” As Seventh Street is a “bastard,” so she is an “Orphan-woman” (p. 88).

The irony of the narrator singing a “promise song” and finding his lover in a deep sleep points to a larger irony in the story and another contrast between Parts One and Two. At first, the narrator's desire is “to break through her [Avey's] tenderness to passion” (p. 80). In the early scenes of the story, she responds to him by completely avoiding passion as if she were a child. To his grand, mature attempt, her response is a deathlike sleep. The ironic thrust of the story is made clear by the pale, white color of Avey's face as the story closes: there is no passion beneath her tenderness; she is as dead as the face of the white man who puts the gun in Tom Burwell's ribs in “Blood-Burning Moon.”

Sexuality produces pain and frustration in Part One, but at least people communicate sexually. Every story but Esther's centers on some sort of reaction to sexual communion. In Part Two sexual contact ceases as characters like the narrator in “Avey,” Dorris in “Theater,” Dan Moore in “Box Seat,” and Bona in “Bona and Paul” struggle with their dreaming companions, trying impotently to awake passion in them. Beneath Esther's “chalk-white face” (p. 36), there are at least the “dull flames” of her contorted dream of conceiving Barlo's child. Beneath Avey's “pale” face, there is only lifelessness. There remains only the narrator's memory: “And when the wind is from the South, soil of my homeland falls like a fertile shower upon the lean streets of the city” (p. 85).

As “Avey” begins with tree boxes, an enclosure image, so “Beehive” begins with a “black hive,” another enclosure image. The bees are black and numerous within the enclosure, but ultimately all of their actions are dominated by the moon, an image of white oppression at the end of Part One. Like the “Song of the Son” in Part One, the black bees in the hive move “to-night,” Honey is “silver” in the moonlight, vaguely recalling the money with which Part Two begins and the money with which Barlo returns in Part One. As money precedes Barlo's conversion to whiteness, so “silver honey” deprives the black bees of their sobriety. But again, as in “Avey,” there is the memory of Part One; the wish for the fertile insides of a rural flower carries us back to the primitivism which fades there. It is inevitably only a wish, like the “unconscious rhythms” of Seventh Street.

But the storm in “Storm Ending” grows directly from this wish because it is described through flower images—“Thunder blossoms …, / Great, hollow, bell-like flowers, / Rumbling in the wind,” (p. 90). And the wind echoes the wind which brings “soil of my homeland … like a fertile shower” (p. 85) to the narrator in “Avey.” The flowers are “Full-lipped” like the women singing in Part One; they are bitten by the sun instead of the moon. They bleed rain, echoing the blood flowing down Seventh Street. And the rain is “like golden honey” (p. 90) instead of “silver honey.” This shift of imagery is subtle but important. It allows us to associate the rain with the fading sunlight of Part One, which is described as a “band of gold” (p. 17) in “Carma.” This image contrasts sharply with the silver moonlight which appears in the night of Part Two. “Silver honey” makes black bees drunk. In contrast, “golden honey” is rain. It comes from flowers associated with Part One, just as the “fertile showers” imagined by the narrator in “Avey.”

These two poems demonstrate a second important feature of the imagery in Part Two. Lieber calls Part Two “counterpoint,”¹¹ and this term accurately describes what Toomer is doing through the imagery in these two poems. The growth from evening to night, from dying to decay, from seriousness to sarcasm is the movement of the imagery in the first stories in Part Two. As the second part continues to develop, Toomer increasingly counterpoints images of enclosure and decay with images which recall Part One.

The rain image connects “Storm Ending” to “Theater,” for as one ends with an image of rain, so the other begins with the same. The rain in “Storm Ending” returns us to the black spirit of Part One; the spirit which “soaks into the walls of the Howard Theater” (p. 91) is clearly a product of the enclosed, decaying life of Part Two: “Life of nigger alleys; of pool rooms and restaurants and near beer saloons” (p. 91). Songs are the product of this soaked-in life, for they are what the theater walls throb with when they are soaked. But songs are also the source of the life which soaks into the walls, for they leak out into the alleys and saloons at night. The entire process is a grim reminder of the rain of the previous poem: songs are like a liquid spirit falling from the sky only to be soaked back up again as it evaporates. The entire process counterpoints the fertile showers of the previous poem with stale, decaying life fitted neatly into enclosures, all a product of stage shows.

The other images in “Theater” are similar to this opening image; they present distorted versions of the images in Part One. Typical of the night of Part Two, the house is “dark” and the walls are “sleeping” until John enters or rehearsal begins: “Then … the space-dark air grows softly luminous” (p. 91). Appropriately, whatever light John's mind or the rehearsal in the theater produces is limited to the space that was dark. It is enclosed. Like the pulp of Seventh Street, John's face is split apart by the light; half of it is dominated by the light from the window, half of it by the shadow of the enclosure. His “mind coincides with the shaft of light” (p. 92); “[l]ife of the house … swirls to the body” (p. 92). In short, John is split apart. His thoughts and the glow of the theater “compact” about the light shaft. The light image recalls the fading light of Part One in contrast to the darkness of Part Two, but the light here is distorted, reflecting decay. It is filtered through a window or confined to a “shaft” which things “compact” about; it is quite different from the gold band covering the eastern horizon in Part One. The stage lights are similar: “soft, as if they shine through clear pink fingers” (p. 92).

Like the light images associated with John, images associated with the girls on stage also present distorted images from Part One. The girls' legs “jab the air and clog the floor” (p. 92) vaguely like blood, but “their tight street skirts” (p. 92) must be lifted in order to set them free. The girls are “full-lipped” with “dusk faces,” but their beauty is “distant,” and before they can be called “beautiful,” the audience must “paint” them “white.” They sing, but their songs are “discordant snatches,” ultimately unsustained. All of these distortions are enclosed by the walls of the theater, which “press inward.” John's “feet,” “torso,” and “blood” also press in. Everyone is compacted, just as Rhobert is within his house.

The girl whom John focuses on is described in images which fit into the same pattern as the other images in the story; they are enclosed or distorted images from Part One. Dorris's lips are “full” but “curiously” so. Her face is the lemon color of Carma's face in Part One, but her “bushy,” “black” hair is “bobbed.” The purple which is associated with dusk in Part One is Dorris's dance. It threatens to break all enclosures. It causes the girls around her to forget their patterned steps and “find their own” (p. 97); it causes Dorris to forget her “tricks.” It transposes the reader from the stale, enclosed theater, back to the “canebrake loves” of Part One, to the “Mangrove feastings” of Africa. It is a song that is “glorious” instead of sardonic. Her dance is like the fertile shower in “Storm Ending.”

But ultimately, the dance too becomes a stifled and suffocating image, dead and decaying within an enclosure; like all the other images in “Theater,” it is distorted by the forces of Part Two. It becomes a part of John's mind which leaves the theater, like the shaft of light, and seeks an internal enclosure all its own, a dream. John's dream is in single-space type, setting it off from the rest of the text as a separate enclosure. Within it, the imagery suggests death and enclosure. There are no trees. The autumn leaves have been walked on so much that they rustle no more. The air is “sweet,” but it is a sweetness which comes from burning “old leaves” and “roasting chestnuts,” odors which cannot enter the enclosure of John's mind because every sense but sight is sealed. Dorris again reminds us of Part One; she is tinted like autumn, old flowers, and a canefield. But immediately, she is enclosed in the story title which is presumably John's invention: “‘Glorious Dorris’” (p. 99). There are two more enclosures within the dream, the first is the room which is made of Dorris's flesh and blood. It is like the theater; its walls sing, and it contains distorted light. Significantly, “John knows nothing of it” (p. 99), except that it is Dorris. John and Dorris are separated from each other, as are the two main characters in “Avey.” The second enclosure is John's manuscript. Ironically, Dorris's glorious dance becomes enclosed in it, just as the trees are boxed and enclosed in “Avey.” The dance which threatens to break down all enclosures becomes “a dead thing in the shadow of which is his [John's] dream” (p. 99). It is at best a distorted reminder of the songs in Part One.

“Her Lips Are Copper Wire” continues the emphasis on the distorted light image. Artificial light, enclosed and distorted by globes, becomes the words of one lover to another. The breath of the other is like the bead on the globe, insulated from the source of light. Words are confined to “corridors of billboards” (p. 101), artificial and channeled. Passion is reached and enclosures are broken by removing the artificial barriers of insulation and tape. However, even when the insulation is removed and lips are pressed together in a kiss, they become themselves mechanically hot, “incandescent,” like a light globe. The entire poem presents distorted dead sexuality, much like that which exists between John and Dorris.

“Calling Jesus” shifts the perspective from images of enclosures which separate people from people to images of enclosures which separate people from themselves. The character in this story encloses herself at night in a house like Rhobert's. Her soul remains outside. Like John, she is split apart. The force which unifies the sleeping soul with the body is in each case described in images of Part One: “echo Jesus … soft as a cotton ball” (p. 102), or “the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of Southern cotton” (p. 103). When dreaming or sleeping, the character is made one with her soul. She is “cradled in dream-fluted cane” (p. 103). This image suggests rebirth through the “unconscious rhythms” of Seventh Street, the images of Part One. The only other time the soul is a part of her is when streets and alleys and houses, the counterpointing images of Part Two, are forgotten. Here again rebirth is suggested through images of Part One: “Her breath comes sweet as honey-suckle whose pistils bear the life of coming song” (p. 102).

The house image carries over into “Box Seat,” where it stands opposite the street image. Houses, an image of Part Two, are “shy girls.” As in “Seventh Street,” the street is once again associated with the unconscious rhythms of the black spirit, recalling Part One. Streets are “the gleaming limbs and the asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger” (p. 104). Once again, the black spirit functions to revivify the enclosed white world of Part Two, as the “fertile showers” in “Avey” and the “dream-fluted cane” in “Calling Jesus” functioned. The “dreaming nigger” street is to invigorate the “lean, white spring” (p. 104), to “woo virginal houses” (p. 104) with a “street song.” But Toomer distorts these fertility images by counterpointing them. Dan Moore demonstrates the decay of Part Two. He walks down the street as a “dreaming nigger.” He sees the “girl-eyes” of the houses. But he cannot sing to them; “[h]is notes are shrill” (p. 105). His desire is also futile. Instead of being “liver lips” which invigorate, his lips are “flesh-notes of a forgotten song” (p. 105). The blackness inside him is dormant, dreaming.

The same sort of counterpointing occurs in the imagery which permeates Dan Moore's thought. When he cannot find the doorbell at Muriel's residence, he imagines breaking in and doing violence to the house and the people inside. He answers the implied thoughts of the imaginary policeman by saying, “No, I aint a baboon” (p. 105). In so doing, he is denying the distorted image which a white holds of the black man. In place of it, he carries us back to the fertile, invigorating power of the “dreaming” street image: “I am Dan Moore. I was born in a canefield. The hands of Jesus touched me. I am come to a sick world to heal it” (pp. 105-06). However, no sooner is this uttered than we are returned to the distorted baboon image as Dan proposes to “peel” the fingers of the officers like “ripe bananas” (p. 106).

Mrs. Pribby is connected to the enclosure images of Part Two. Her eyes are “steel.” Her chair clicks metallically “like a bolt being shot into place” (p. 107). Her house is “metallic” and “[b]olted.” Dan and Muriel become two more Rhoberts within an enclosure, but nonetheless, the counterpointing images continue. Dan's imagination turns to the renewing Christ-like power of underground races, the “rumble … from the earth's deep core” (p. 108), which recalls the invigorating street image. But Toomer immediately contrasts this image of renewal with the enclosed decay of a real black, Muriel. Her rumble from the stairs replaces the imaginary rumble from below. As his potential lover, she makes Dan “doubly heavy” because they both bear the pressure of the enclosure.

As the street songs of the black were to “woo … houses,” so Dan Moore attempts to woo Muriel. The fertility of Part One is once again suggested through images. Muriel's “animalism” is “unconquered” by enclosures. Her lips are “flesh-notes” of “longing”; though “futile,” they are momentarily not forgotten as the “flesh-notes” of the song of Dan's lips. Dan threatens to break the enclosures of Part Two, echoing the power of Dorris' dance. Dan's arms glow with heat and passion which can “melt and … wrench” (p. 113), freeing Muriel. But again we are returned to an image of Part Two as Mrs. Pribby's newspaper becomes a “cool thick glass between them” (p. 115). The rustling paper distorts the natural flow of passion.

Like Mrs. Pribby's house, the Lincoln Theater is another enclosure where each seat is bolted into a slot, and like the house, the theater encloses Muriel and Dan. Again Toomer presents contrasting image groups. Muriel is reminiscent of Rhobert; she feels pressure, as if she were in a “diver's helmet.” On the other hand, once again Dan is momentarily connected to images from Part One. The black woman whom he sits beside emits a “soil-soaked fragrance” (p. 119) and vibrates with the “new-world Christ.” Her eyes present the contrast, they do not seem to be hers. Rather, they are a part of the theater which presses inward. The image suggests that like Muriel and Rhobert, Dan feels the pressure of enclosure.

Toomer's counterpointing rises to a crescendo in the last part of “Box Seat.” What has been mainly a part of the imagery, now becomes a part of the action. Dan's physical struggle to win Muriel over to passion in the first section is counterpointed by the dwarfs' boxing match. This is counterpointed in turn by Dan's internal struggle. The conclusion of both struggles leads directly to Dan's near-fight with the man behind him in the audience. The relationship of the various struggles becomes clear through the imagery. Each paragraph describing the dwarfs' struggle is alternated with a paragraph describing “tail ends” of Dan's experience, his internal struggle. The first “tail end,” Muriel's dance, is reminiscent of the potentially fertile dance of Dorris, but more specifically the image of Dan's eyes “Burning clean” suggests sexuality and returns us to Part One where the black spirit burns white. The second “tail end,” Dan's sarcastic proposition about feminism, is a “mental fiber” made to fill a vacant enclosure, a cavity, a hole in the relations of modern men and women. The imagery as well as the time connects the entire paragraph to Part Two. The third “tail end” centers on Dan's memory of an old black man, a man associated with the slave spirit of Part One as well as the machines and enclosures of Part Two. He was “Born a slave … swing low, sweet chariot” (p. 125), but he “knows everyone who passes the street corners” (p. 125), and he remembers the first cars. Dan implies that his mentioning of the “rumble” from below sends the old man into a stroke. The last “tail end” involves Dan in the posture of the savior whom the “rumble” foreshadows, the savior with whom he has been contrasted since the beginning of the story. As the old man is destroyed by the “rumble,” so the Dan Moore who arises destroys the enclosure, bringing about a storm like the “fertile showers” in “Storm Ending.” This storm, however, does not return us to Part One as that storm does; instead it flashes “white light from ebony” (p. 126).

Through their very incoherence, these “tail ends” suggest Dan's fragmented state of mind. More than that, however, they present the elements of his fragmentation: the primitive sexual world that was, the eyes of the slave spirit existing within a world of street corners, machines, and enclosures, unifying white and ebony—the black of Part One and the white of Part Two. Momentarily the counterpoint moves to resolution.

But this resolving flash is immediately distorted and called into question by what it becomes, what it is in reality, the dwarf flashing a mirror. It is essentially another image of distorted light, suggesting its delusional qualities. Moreover, it is the same light which soon flashes into Muriel's eyes. At the beginning of the story, Muriel rejects Dan's offering of passion; he fails to woo her. Enclosed in the “steel” fingers of the audience, she accepts the dwarf's offering. In earlier portions of Part Two, flowers have recalled the fading fertility of Part One; blood has suggested the underlying throbbings of the black spirit. Now both images are distorted; the flowers and blood are the products of stage shows, artificial passion offered and accepted in artificial tenderness. The dwarf wins the battle Dan loses, and Dan, the man who envisions himself “a new-world Christ” (p. 119), sees his own diseased reality: “Jesus was once a leper!” (p. 129). The flower image is presented now in a new context. Dan has shed his flower, and all hope of renewal is gone. Appropriately, the next struggle is to take place in the black alley in the scent of decaying garbage and “rancid flowers.” Dan no longer takes part in the struggle; in the midst of decay, he is dormant instead of flowering.

The fragmentation and the desire for wholeness which the imagery of “Box Seat” suggests is the primary focus of “Prayer.” The entire movement of the imagery is put into psychological terms. The various parts of the narrator's being are cut off from one another, just as the “tail-ends” of Dan Moore's experience are separate, just as the images of Part One and Two are counterpointed. Like Dan, the subject seeks to unify. He tries to temper the body “unto the spirit's longing” (p. 131), to “Direct” the spirit to “its flesh eye” (p. 151). Dan Moore's dream of unity was futile. Likewise, the narrator of the poem finds that his voice cannot be heard by the spirits who direct his soul. Like Dan, he is impotent, incapable of renewal.

In this poem, Toomer enables us, through its title, to grasp the movement of his imagery in this part of the book. In “Seventh Street,” “Rhobert,” and “Avey,” imagery connected with the dying world of Part One gives way to imagery which demonstrates the dead world of Part Two. With “Beehive” and “Storm Ending,” images of vitality begin to be interspersed with the imagery of decay of Part Two. Most of these images of vitality recall Part One and the fertile world that dies there. The images are usually associated with a moment charged with spontaneity, such as Dorris' dance, or a dream, such as the “dream-fluted cane” (p. 103) in “Calling Jesus.” They contrast sharply with the images of Part Two, forming a sort of counterpoint. Beginning with the union of body and soul in “Calling Jesus” and growing in emphasis in “Box Seat” and “Prayer,” there appears a vision of revivification and unity. Though in each case futile, the image of the black street wooing the “white house,” the image of “liver lips” giving birth to a “white spring,” the image of “white light” from “ebony” are all, in a sense, “prayers” that body and soul might be one, that black might merge with and renew white, that counterpoint might move to resolution. This latter movement of the imagery supports Catherine Innes' assertion that the struggle for racial and spiritual fusion is a main element in Cane.¹²

In the context of this large framework of imagery, “Harvest Song” presents us with the most unified view of the imagery in the book thus far. The reaper, the harvester, and sundown are all from Part One, but they are described in the context of Part Two. It is night, the harvest is over, and the reaper is enclosed by his senses' failure to function. He cannot taste grain, he is blind from dust, and he is deaf even to the sounds of other reapers. “Dusk” obscures and “dulls” the blade of his scythe, ending the harvest; sundown is when the reaper's “muscles set.” He is like the other characters in Part Two, enclosed, incapable of action, a set sun. But like Dan Moore and the narrator of “Prayer,” he seeks unity. He seeks to break the enclosure of his senses by trying to see and hear other reapers. But interestingly, all his communication with his brothers is parenthetical, suggesting its weakness; it is a thought or a whisper. The contrast between this communication and that of the reapers in “Cotton Song” is clear. They—the reapers of Part One—shout “Echo, echo, roll away!” (p. 15) in the loud unison of a work song; the reaper in Part Two is alone, and at best can mutter. Like the narrator of “Prayer,” his voice does “not carry.” Consequently, his ultimate choice is one which “will not bring me knowledge of my hunger” (p. 133)—communion through shared pain, futile and unfulfilling.

In “Bona and Paul,” Toomer further explores the dilemma of the singer in “Harvest Song,” breaking through enclosures and becoming one with another, the unifying of opposites, the resolution of counterpoint. The story begins with an enclosure image; the precise rows of drilling students in the gym. Like Dan Moore, Paul seems to threaten the composure of the enclosures as his legs “dance” fertilely, as Dorris' do in “Theater.” Like Dan, he is connected to Part One; Bona thinks of him as “an autumn leaf … a nigger” (p. 134). But like Dan's, his blackness is not pure; she also thinks of him as a “harvest moon” (p. 134), an image which combines the rich harvesting of Part One and the oppressive white moonlight of “Blood-Burning Moon” and Part Two. Bona is attracted by the threat which Paul offers to the white enclosures around her: “He is a candle that dances in a grove swung with pale balloons” (p. 134). Despite her attraction, the section ends with their struggling, which again recalls “Box Seat.” Two complete opposites—male and female, black and white—approach one another, but ultimately they burst apart.

In section two, the dilemma is presented from Paul's point of view. Again the imagery centers on enclosures; Bona and Paul are described as separate windows. Paul's window again connects him to the fertility of Part One. But again the images are not pure; the whiteness of Part Two distorts them. The setting sun tints things not the purple of dusk in Part One but “lavender,” a white, pale purple. Nonetheless, as Paul looks “into the sun,” across the wheatlands and stockyards, he sees Georgia as well as Chicago. The images associated with Georgia are fertile: the Southern planter has “mate-eyes”; the black woman “suckles” and “weans” a song. Despite this fertile potential, Bona's window is still dark like the night of Part Two. She is obscured and enclosed.

In the second part of section two, the dilemma is presented from a third perspective. Art is white; as Paul is connected to images from Part One, so Art is connected to images from Part Two. He is “like the electric light” (p. 138), an image which recalls “Her Lips Are Copper Wire.” As Paul has sought to break the enclosure surrounding Bona, so Art seeks to break through Paul by speculating about him. As Bona's window is “dark” to Paul, so Paul is “dark” to Art. First of all, he is “dark” because he encloses himself by asking questions instead of trusting. Second, he is dark because of his blood: “Dark blood; nigger?” (p. 139). The fact that Paul is from the black world of Part One cuts him off from the “electric light” world of Art. Thus Art stereotypes him, assuming that his “Dark blood” makes him “moony”—dreamy and elusive. The closing image of Art from Paul's perspective returns us to the image of blackness revivifying a stale white enclosure: “I'm going to kick the living slats out of you. … And your slats will bring forth life … beautiful woman …” [sic] (p. 139). The image again connects Paul to Dan Moore, who dreams of pulling the girders from the Lincoln Theater and unifying white light and ebony.

Section three presents a fuller description of Art from Paul's perspective. As Paul appears to Art in images of Part One, so Art appears to Paul in images of Part Two. The “healthy pink” of his face recalls the distorted pink light in “Theater” (pp. 92, 99). As that light was artificial, so is the color of Art's face; it is the product of a massage, shave, and powdering. But the distortion is twofold, for the night makes his pinkness look purple, the passionate color of cane, dusk, and burned blood. His joy is also artificial, “a purple fluid, carbon-charged, that effervesces” (p. 141). Moreover, as Art finds Paul to be “dark,” so Paul finds Art to be pale. His skin is tinted a “purple pallor” by the evening. His is a “pale purple facsimile of a red-blooded Norwegian” (p. 141). As Art's name implies, he is artificial. As Art sees Paul's “dark blood” as an explanation for his sluggishness, he stereotypes him. Paul does likewise; he sees Art's white skin as an explanation for his artificiality; “Perhaps … white skins are not supposed to live at night” (p. 141). Consequently, the “good looks” that Paul's mirror “gave him,” the color of the night “tints”; the bubbles of joy which the black carbon of night produces in him are all qualities imposed on nothingness, complete artificiality. Ironically, Art's passion is “moony” to Paul just as Paul's blood is to Art. Each finds the other to be enclosed and dreamy; thus each uses the moon, an image of Part Two, to describe the other. Each is enclosed by his own skin color. Beyond it, into the world of another, he cannot see. Thus, though Paul is like the dusk which combines light and dark, he is still enclosed, a “detached … floating shade in evening's shadow” (p. 141), unable to merge.

The imagery in the second part of section three reemphasizes the artificial, decaying setting of Part Two, connecting this story to the rest of Part Two. The two couples are on a Boulevard lighted by “arc-lights” and car lights. Dry leaves soften the ground, recalling John's dream. Once again, Toomer focuses on two people observing each other, and again the imagery is significant. The first images are from Paul's perpective. To Paul, Bona is like Art; she is obscured by paleness and artificiality. Her face is pale, and “Her words have no feel to them.” They are similar to Paul's pink face: “pink petals that fall upon velvet cloth” (p. 143). She is removed from him, enclosed as a jewel beneath the sea. She and Paul are unfulfilled and enclosed; the love that would unite them is “a dry grain” reminiscent of the harvest singer's futile nourishment. Significantly, Bona also sees color as an enclosing circumstance. Paul is to her as he is to Art—“colored; cold.”

Section four is set within another enclosure, the Crimson Gardens. As within the other sections, people once again observe one another. Colors again begin to enclose them: “people saw not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference” (p. 145). From Paul's perspective, however, their stares are “green blades,” for they remind him of his blackness, his potential fertility, his being apart from them. To him, their faces are artificial like Art's. They are “white lights,” distorted by the artificial pink of the garden. As they are cut off from him, so is he from them; he perceives his friends “[d]istantly. … God if he knew them” (p. 146). The images which Paul associates with the entire enclosure suggest that it appears to him as they do—artificial, enclosed, and distorted. Like Art, the Gardens are to Paul “A carbon bubble,” one that he imagines the night distorts into the passionate purple of the dusk and blood of Part One. As he looks through Bona's “dark pane,” his speculation eventually returns to the difference, the separation between himself and those who are around him. “The color and the music and the song” (p. 148) of the Crimson Gardens are counterpointed by the black woman who “chants … beneath the mate eyes of a Southern planter” (p. 148). Two mutually exclusive worlds are once again set before us. The perspective is Paul's, and once again he is enclosed from those around him. The eyes around him are “unawakened”; his own are quite different: “they're awake all right” (p. 148). His eyes see the passionate purple coloring as a distortion. Those eyes around him are merely a part of it.

In the last scene of the story, we are returned to another struggle to unite. As in earlier stories in Part Two, the dance becomes the vehicle of passion: dancing couples are blood clots on the floor of the Gardens. In the midst of red-blooded passion, the Gardens cease to be a “bubble” and become a “body.” The real blood of passion counterpoints the artificial glow of faces transformed and distorted by light. Thus, Bona and Paul—“a dizzy blood clot” (p. 151)—feel something “the pink faced people have no part in” (p. 152). The Gardens still appear to be a purple bubble in the blackness of the night, but Paul does not perceive them as artificial, like the purple bubbles of Art's joy. Instead, they become a symbol of his passion for Bona, of breaking down enclosures which separate black and white: “white faces are petals of roses … dark faces are petals of dusk” (p. 153). But ultimately his vision is like Dan Moore's dream of flashing “white light from ebony” (p. 126), of wooing Muriel, for it is only a vision. As C. W. Scruggs says, “Paul has had a vision of wholeness in the Gardens, but in his excitement to understand it, he loses it.”¹³ Bona departs. Both sexual union and racial union are out of reach. The dusk of Part One and the pink of Part Two only merge momentarily to produce the purple color of the passion which fades in Part One. The counterpoint of the imagery continues. The Gardens are a distortion. They delude Paul just as the distorted light from the dwarf's mirror deludes Dan.

On the page that follows Part One, there is an arc. On the page that follows Part Two, there are two arcs facing each other. Together they form an incomplete circle which visually represents the fragmentation of the two worlds Toomer has described—the dying rural world of Part One and the decaying urban world of Part Two. All of the attempts at unity ultimately fail, and we are left with an incomplete circle, complete fragmentation.

Notes

1. Arna Bontemps, Intro., Cane, by Jean Toomer, A Perennial Classic (1923; rpt. New York: Harper, 1969), p. xii.

2. Donald G. Ackley, “Theme and Vision in Jean Toomer's Cane,” Studies in Black Literature, 1 (Spring 1970), 54.

3. Lucinda H. Mackethan, “Jean Toomer's Cane: A Pastoral Problem,” Mississippi Quarterly, 28 (1975), 428.

4. Catherine L. Innes, “The Unity of Jean Toomer's Cane,” CLA Journal, 15 (1972), 312.

5. Todd Lieber, “Design and Movement in Cane,” CLA Journal, 13 (1967), 41.

6. Jean Toomer, Cane, A Perennial Classic (1923; rpt. New York; Harper, 1969), p. 49. This and all subsequent references are to this edition.

7. Mackethan, p. 428.

8. Lieber, p. 41.

9. Innes, p. 312.

10. Mackethan, p. 428.

11. Lieber, p. 41.

12. Innes, pp. 318–19.

13. Charles W. Scruggs, “The Mark of Cane and the Redemption of Art,” American Literature, 44 (May 1972), 277.