‘By de Singin' uh de Song’: The Search for Reciprocal Voice in Cane
1
In The Conjure Woman Charles W. Chesnutt adapted African-American call-and-response to a radically different cultural situation. Uncle Julius performs for a white audience, and his stories challenge his listeners' values and in small, important ways exert a salutary, subversive influence on their lives. Chesnutt's critical distance allows Uncle Julius to manipulate the color line between black dialect and standard English. Nevertheless, neither Chesnutt's black storyteller nor his white narrator crosses over into the other's verbal territory. It remained for later writers to take down the imaginary fence between the spoken and the written word, between the act of storytelling and the act of narrative. Writers like Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston sought lyrical voices composed of many strains; like Herman Melville and Mark Twain they embraced the American vernacular as a bridge between folk speech and literary language.
Listening to the soul of black American experience expressed in song, Jean Toomer discovered how to conjure a world more vivid and compelling than the moment by moment passage of ordinary reality. He adapted call-and-response to the inner dialogue between his voice and the folk voices he heard in rural Georgia. “The visit to Georgia last fall,” he wrote Waldo Frank in 1922, “was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk songs come from the lips of Negro peasants. I saw the rich dusk beauty that I had heard many false accents about, and of which, till then, I was somewhat skeptical. And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly into life and responded to them.”1 In the South Toomer felt kinship between slavery's ancestral past and his struggle to be an artist. His reaction to the slave songs recalls Frederick Douglass's pre-Civil War belief that “the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress truly spiritual-minded men and women with the soul-crushing and death-dealing character of slavery than the reading of whole volumes of its mere physical cruelties.”2 For Toomer the songs mediate between him and his audience, and his voice is resonant with the spirituals and the old blues, waning but still nourished and nourishing in the back country of Georgia.
Throughout Cane Toomer relies on a voice and frame more musical than rhetorical. As he told Claude Barnett a few months before Cane's publication, while in Georgia he “peeped behind the veil” of his family's Washington, D.C., lace-curtain Negro gentility at the earthy, dusky souls of southern black folk. “And my deepest impulse to literature (on the side of the material) is the direct result of what I saw. Insofar as the old folk songs, syncopated rhythms, the rich sweet taste of dark-skinned life, insofar as these are Negro, I am, body and soul, Negroid.”3 For a time Toomer's individuality flowed from his participation in the life of the community, expressed most distinctly in music. Toomer imbued Cane with his intimate, individual being and what Barbara Bowen calls “the drama of finding authority through communal voice.”4 In story after story folk songs surge out of the landscape as companions to Toomer's passionate solo voice. Sometimes a song calls forth his voice. The songs also contribute to Cane's form as a collage, which receives its grieving, rejuvenating, lyrical energy from the call-and-response pattern prominent in oral culture. “Caroling softly souls of slavery,”5 Toomer writes in “Song of the Son,” and his refrain, arising from the people's song, confirms his newfound ability to speak as one of them.
The old folk songs inspired Toomer to identify with the ancestral past of slavery. Like many writers of African-American descent, Toomer's reconsideration of slavery was essential to his pursuit of individual identity and a distinct voice. “Slavery,” observed Eugene Holmes, “once a shame and a stigma, became for [Toomer] a spiritual process of growth and transfiguration and the tortuous underground groping of one generation, the maturing and high blossoming of the next. He found in the life of these Georgians and their forbears a sense of mystical recognition.”6 During the writing of Cane, Toomer's affirmation of an African-American continuum shored up his complex sense of heritage. In the words of Invisible Man's apparitional old slave woman, he discovered that freedom “ain't nothing but knowing how to say what [you] got up in [your] head.”7 In Georgia he saw black people who, though no longer slaves, were still in bondage. He heard them express their desire for freedom through songs sometimes veiled, sometimes open. And although a stranger, Toomer was encouraged by the people he met to participate in their life.
Inspired by folk songs and spirituals, Toomer nonetheless feared he might be witnessing their waning, and he made Cane a dwelling place for music. “A family of back-country Negroes,” he writes, “had only recently moved into a shack not too far away. They sang. And this was the first time I'd ever heard the folk songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful.” But he felt the noose of conformity tighten around the uninhibited performance of these songs. “I learned that the Negroes of the town objected to them. They called them ‘shouting.’ They had victrolas and player pianos. So, I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out.” For Toomer the spirituals constituted the most authentic and moving expression of folk culture, but he saw their spirit doomed “to die on the modern desert.” “That spirit” he calls “beautiful.” “Its death was so tragic,” he says. “And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan song. It was a song of an end.”8
Cane is a promise-song, too, for Toomer breathes the spirit of the ancestral black South into his fiction. He seeks sensuous and spiritual nourishment from an unfamiliar yet familiar landscape animate with his history and the history of the race. Responding to the powerful voices he hears, Toomer realizes the orphic potential of his artistic voice. In Cane Toomer bears witness to what W. B. Yeats called “heart mysteries”—experiences that illuminate one's “two eternities / That of race and that of soul.”9Soul is the fusion of sensuous and spiritual energy during moments of historical transcendence in the life of an individual and a people. In Cane Toomer's voice becomes whole, but his characters do not overcome the division of their lives and the fragmentation of their culture. These men and women lead unrealized lives, but sometimes experience wholeness, usually in the act of song.
In the world of Cane, there are songs for every occasion, even “supper-getting-ready songs” (C, p. 2). Music informs and is informed by the daily activities of social life; its reality belongs to the community. Toomer observes a lingering African presence in black Georgia, and this is especially true of the role music plays in the culture. “In Africa,” writes John Chernoff, “music helps people to work, to enjoy themselves, to control a bad person or to praise a good one, to recite history, poetry, and proverbs, to celebrate a funeral or a festival, to compete with each other, to encounter their gods, to grow up, and, fundamentally, to be sociable in everything they do.” Thus, Chernoff concludes, “we may readily understand the reciprocity inherent in rhythmic call-and-response.”10 But in the black American world of Cane the bond of reciprocity is often broken, and the flow of call-and-response, of participation between performer and audience, interrupted. As a writer, Toomer attempts to restore that bond through symbolic, literary variations of call-and-response.
Songs are touchstones for the call-and-response pattern informing the sketches, stories, and poems of Cane. Throughout the opening section Toomer grounds tales of unfulfilled or tragic lives (mostly black women's) with antiphonal songs performed by solo and choral voices. In the middle section, the scene shifts to Washington and Chicago. Although Georgia folk songs stir in the soul's underground, Toomer distills the community voice into syncopated jazz songs, mocking and satiric. Lacking a consoling common voice, individuals wither and fall into silence and isolation. In “Kabnis,” Toomer reinhabits his Georgia landscape. But, tragically, hearing folk songs utter the people's spirit and history, Ralph Kabnis answers with a corrosive soul and race hatred. He mocks the very reciprocity of call-and-response that might free him from his demons. His voice does not mediate between the almost dead, almost silent but still faintly oracular voice of Father John, the former slave preacher, and the lovely, nourishing but little nourished, sensuously stifled Carrie Kate. But at Cane's end, Toomer, acting as a medium, proclaims that the rising sun pours a birth-song over the fallow land. Responding to the songs he has heard from both individual and communal voices, he summons those in the valley of Cane (and other places, too) into sensuous and spiritual, soulful wakefulness.
2
Toomer's first words in Cane invoke the remembered beauty of a place he is about to conjure into existence.
Oracular.
Redolent of fermenting syrup,
Purple of the dusk,
Deep-rooted cane.
In the act of writing he animates the world. He pays homage to voices he hears and imagines, and through them comes into possession of the word. The call to voice depends on silence, too, and Toomer uses blank pages to represent intervals of uninhabited verbal space. He chooses arcs as a spatial signature through which to announce each section of Cane. Anticipating “Karintha” and the sketches and stories of southern black women (and one white woman), the first arc curves up the page as if to trace the coming of women's voices along the path of the crescent moon.11 In the opening section of Cane women's voices summon Toomer. Because they sing more readily than they speak, black women express their lives in song, and, sometimes desperately, a refrain marks the cessation of voice after a woman's dream of relationship fails.
A song, soulfully blues, opens and closes “Karintha”; along the way its verses mark Karintha's passage from girl to woman. Like Karintha, Toomer carries but does not possess the music. He calls readers to apprehend her beauty in relation to the beauty of the world.
Her 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.
(C, p. 1)
We do not know who, besides Toomer, sings. Karintha's lovers, if they participate, betray the wonder of the song with their possessive appetites. But as he exposes “this interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon,” Toomer infuses his narrative voice with rhythms and phrases from the praise-song.
Playing off the song, Toomer's prose presents men's failure to understand that Karintha's beauty is a gift and a mystery they cannot seize. But male desire is dangerous and seductive to a young girl like Karintha because of her urge to autonomy and power. Paradoxically, Karintha's defiant, emerging individuality alienates her from the tradition of womanly expression that briefly counteracts possessive male sensibility in the story. “At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one's ears to itching” (C, p. 2, my italics). Not yet a participant in the work or the songs of the women, Karintha disturbs the interval of silence in a voice antithetical to the beauty she carries in her person. “But no one ever thought to make her stop because of it”—not the women for unrevealed reasons, and not the men who indulge her out of sexual self-interest. Self-deceptively, men deny the bond between beauty and autonomy. Even the preacher denies Karintha's soul, acting as though “she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower” (C, p. 2):
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.
(C, p. 7)
But unlike the wild presence celebrated in “November Cotton Flower,” Karintha does not love. “She played ‘home’ with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding” (C, p. 3).
Her curiosity only inflames the men, and Toomer counterpoints their delirium with an abbreviated, uptempo version of the song:
Her skin is like dusk,
O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk,
When the sun goes down.
(C, p. 3)
The immensity of scale provided by the horizon is missing, but Karintha's essential relation to the universe is the same. “Karintha is a woman. She who carries beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.” Sexually, she goes the way of many marriages, many lovers. Men take her briefly, desolately. They touch her superficially but the person and the essential woman is absent. “She has contempt for them” (C, p. 3), but she is a woman. She has a child, and the impression persists, thick as smoke, that she leaves her baby on an enormous smouldering “pyramidal sawdust pile” (C, p. 4). Coming home, Karintha now carries smoke from the baby's funeral pyre into the air of “the valley of Cane.” In response, as a prayer for deliverance, “someone made a song”:
Smoke is on the hills. Rise up.
Smoke is on the hills, O rise
And take my soul to Jesus.
(C, p. 4)
The song, spiritual as the other is blues, belongs to the community. Its voice is plural, communal, more than the apostrophic song that seems superficially the men's and profoundly Toomer's.
The song's compassionate wish for transcendence inspires Toomer to write boldly about the tragedy that has happened and is happening to Karintha and the men obsessed by her. As a woman who is a person and a sexual being, Karintha has been hurt—“ripened too soon”—but perhaps not beyond restoration. She continues to exist “carrying beauty” in the midst of the community, but her male pursuers learn nothing. They understand nothing about the freedom and mystery of beauty.
As Karintha's African name lingers in the air, Toomer sounds an ominous note with the last words of his song. He and those who sing with him pause, and after a silence close with the simple repetition
Goes down …
More than the sun, Karintha descends; sexually and spiritually, she is sinking. At twenty, though carrying beauty, she is world-weary, maybe doomed. All that remains is repetition with variations of cadence but no change in the condition that divides her soul from her body and her personality from the beauty that, despite everything, continues to express her connection with the universe. Toomer responds in a voice that makes him a participant with Karintha and the community in a simultaneous act of song and story. But this moment of potential transcendence is symbolic. Aesthetically and socially, “Karintha” foreshadows the melting of speech into song in “Blood-Burning Moon,” when sexual and racial combat lead to violence so terribly final there remains little potential for relationship, only the repetition of words stripped of their former improvisatory, transformational power.
“Becky,” “Carma,” “Fern,” and “Esther”: from these stories of women flares a passion so desolate and detached that Toomer only guesses at the voices. Long suppressed, these women rarely speak, and, when they do, their words are articulate mostly as music—disembodied and indefinite but passionately, palpably real. So Toomer fills his stories with songs and the fragments of song, and joins these women in the search to elude the limits of ordinary time and space.
In “Becky” Toomer speaks in both white and black voices. “Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger said the white folks' mouths … Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks' mouths.” The white folks are more virulent, but “white folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who'd put His cross upon her and cast her out” (C, p. 8). Though white folks and black folks “joined hands to cast her out,” they do not. A snatch of song intervenes: “The pines whispered to Jesus” (C, p. 9). Rich and poor, white and black, male and female seize the refrain as a prayer for Becky and themselves: “O pines, whisper to Jesus” (C, p. 11). As a participant in the story, Toomer takes personal possession of the refrain before he witnesses the crumbling of Becky's cabin. “Pines shout to Jesus!” (C, p. 12), he thinks. The variation prepares him to intensify his participation in the community, and he breaks into the first person as he tells of his new role as storyteller. “I remember nothing after that,” he writes, “until I reached town and folks crowded round to get the word of it” (C, pp. 12-13). The people's belief that he carries the word confirms and quickens his reciprocal narrative voice. In “Karintha,” Toomer speaks directly to us—“you”—and leads readers into the witnessing community, but in “Becky,” he addresses the community directly, telling a story that, because of song and witnessing, is his as well as theirs. By ending the written text with the identical reportage with which he began, Toomer teases his readers and challenges them to imagine him performing for those who gather around him in the streets of the town.
After pausing in “Face” and “Cotton Song,” a lyric and a work song, which, like many of the poems in Cane, respond to the predicament of the previous story and prepare for the next, Toomer calls readers to join him.
Wind is in the cane. Come along.
Cane leaves swaying, rustly with talk,
Scratching choruses above the guinea's squawk,
Wind is in the cane. Come along.
(C, p. 16).
He and the wind are the lead voices in the song that frames “Carma.” His eyes “leave the men around the stove” to follow Carma. When she disappears, he gradually becomes aware of the entire transitional landscape of dusk. A girl's “sad story song” awakens him to his ancient heritage of beauty and culture. “She does not sing,” Toomer tells us; “her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out. … The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa” (C, pp. 17-18). As Toomer listens to the woman's dance, her body transports him beyond the South to Africa. His vision and Carma's spell in the cane-brake convince him that “time and space have no meaning in a canefield” (C, p. 19). And they don't unless you are open to voices and images beyond ordinary rational ideas of “time and space and cause and effect. If you are open to vision, like Toomer's of Africa, then ‘come along’.” Repeated four times, these words are a refrain that opens and closes “Carma” with Toomer in pursuit of the truth beyond his narrative. “Now he's in the gang. Who was her husband?” he writes and then overcomes sexual and storytelling conventions. “Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I have told it is the crudest melodrama?” (C, p. 20, my italics). In an open voice he calls us to heed the limits of his tale and to respect the story Carma acts out in a time and space beyond his voice.
If we do “come along,” we cross the threshold of Cane and hear Toomer's apostrophic poems, “Song of the Son” and “Georgia Dusk.” “Pour O pour that parting soul in song,” he calls, and that soul belongs alike to black folks and the soil. He names the people “dark purple ripened plums,” and his metaphor changes plums and seed into a tree of song:
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.
(C, p. 21)
But in “Georgia Dusk,” Toomer confronts the world of night and nightmare that casts its spell over the landscape.
A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised while making folk-songs from soul sounds.
(C, p. 22)
Toomer absorbs the nightmare of violence that interrupts and joins his song of the South. He realizes that to sustain his voice, he will have to rely on the continuing songs of the people.
O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.
(C, p. 23)
His apostrophe calls for black voices to combine the conjuring of African juju-men with the miraculous promise of Christianity. And the dream of Christ is not simply solace but a dream of deliverance. As always, songs are the bread and wine of transformation.
“Fern” picks up the theme of “Karintha.” Now Toomer is a participant—a catalyst as well as a witness to Fern's inarticulate pain. “You,” he repeats, intensifying his call to readers, seeking intimacy with them partly because in the story he was not able to respond to the otherness of Fern. What is visible about her is beautiful. But her soul is mute, waiting to speak. Her beauty, like Karintha's, calls men to speak, but men, including Toomer, are slow to understand how desperately women long to use their voices reciprocally. Looking at Fern, Toomer hears the voice of a Jewish cantor. “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 feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta” (C, p. 24, my italics). Toomer's pronouns move in fluid mediation; like the curves of Fern's profile, they flow toward what is felt and seen but not understood. Toomer does not draw conclusions; he embodies relationship. Telling the story in the form of a half-imagined conversation, he anticipates a relationship with his audience built on his suspended contact with Fern. He implicates us in his predicament. “Your thoughts can help me, and I would like to know. Something I would do for her” (C, p. 17), he writes before he tells of their climactic encounter. His vague wish to do something is realized only in the story's ambiguous response to his and Fern's experience. He knows that the story, more his than hers as he writes it, does not reach her. For his soul's sake, he tells how Fern's presence opened him to the place so intensely that the ancestral past fuses with the present moment.
The act of writing enables Toomer's first-person voice to overlay the emotion of the present upon his memory of Fern. “I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had vision. People have them in Georgia more often than you would suppose. A black woman once saw the mother of Christ and drew her in charcoal on the courthouse wall. … When one is on the soil of one's ancestors, most anything can happen to one” (C, p. 31, my italics). In danger of being overcome by his vision, Toomer shifts stiffly from you and I to a more hypothetical, impersonal one. As time flows forward again, he reenters the Georgia landscape where he and the countryside are held in Fern's eyes. In slow, antiphonal, bodily rhythm, he and she exist together in silent knowledge. But some reflex of possession intervenes: “I must have done something—what I don't know, in the confusion of my emotion” (C, p. 32). Does he make an abrupt move, which she associates with the empty sexual gestures of previous men? Toomer cannot remember, but he knows that his action broke the spell of companionship, and that he became a mere witness to Fern's struggle to release her long-dormant, long-denied soul. “Her body was tortured with something it would not let out. … Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her.” Her voice is bottled up until the volcano of her body forces up urgent orgiastic sounds more painful than pleasurable. “It found her throat, and sputtered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing, with a broken voice” (C, p. 32). As Fern's voice becomes uncontainable and bursts into the world, Toomer returns to the safety of his metaphor. He uses the writer's artifice to become audience to the naked, quivering, frightening voice of Fern's being.
Before her eruption, Fern has gazed toward folk songs sung in the distance. Now that her voice emerges, like Celie at the beginning of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, she has no one to sing to except Jesus, a recurring, sympathetic masculine presence that Cane's women imagine listens to their stories. For his part, as the narrator, Toomer withdraws further from Fern's actual voice. He hears not a cantor's but “a child's voice, uncertain, or an old man's.” Nevertheless, her voice persists. “Dusk hid her; I could hear only her song” (C, p. 32). Toomer, who constructs the story around Fern's eyes and the power of vision, is now compelled by the presence of her song. His metaphors fall away as her voice expresses her soul's womanly condition. Fittingly, as soon as he takes her in his arms, she faints, passing back into silence. Moreover, Toomer concludes the story as if Fern has not spoken, as if he again sees all there is of her as he rides north on the train. “Saw her face flow into [her eyes], the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them. … Nothing ever really happened. Nothing ever came to Fern, not even I” (C, p. 33). But what happened was a coming into song, a matter of voice, not sight; once again Toomer's controlling metaphor obscures Fern's act of self-expression and his ambiguous role in that act.
At the close of “Fern,” Toomer retreats from his self-justifying finality as if he fears his readers may balk. He challenges us: “And, friend, you? She is still living, I have reason to know. Her name, against the chance that you might happen down that way, is Fernie May Rosen” (C, p. 33). Though mocking, his tone invites us to share his failure of intimacy with Fern. His song of sorrow more than hers resembles the voice of a Jewish cantor. Boiling like cane, Fern's voice burns the page. She sings “brokenly,” and what eludes her is not a connection with the countryside or God, what Walker's Celie calls stars, trees, sky, peoples, everything. What shatters is her dream of a full, sensuous, spiritual relationship with a man. But in her pain she finds a fragment of her voice. Toomer, however, once again betrays Fern's trust, this time with a deeply ambivalent fictional gesture. He ends by giving readers her full name as if to mock our capacity for intimacy and to signify Fern's absence from his life by affirming her presence in a now remote world. Here, by choice, Toomer approaches the condition of many of his women characters. He divides the word from the world and exposes the hypocrisy of his (and perhaps our) sentimental wish to do something for Fern. Implicitly, it is clear that he and we must allow her her voice, and listen responsively to her song.
3
After “Fern,” Toomer pauses, and in reverie dreams of a harmonious relationship with nature and women. In “Nullo” an intense sunset is not an ending but a prologue to the sexual tenderness that in “Evening Song” allows a man and his lover to mingle in harmony with the rhythms of the moon. Then Toomer resumes his prose voice, and in “Esther” the failure of a woman's voice and her subsequent renunciation of the world reach an extreme. From the first, Esther requires an infusion of energy. At nine, she is almost at the point of budding. Her “hair would be beautiful if there were more gloss to it”; “if her face were not prematurely serious, one would call it pretty.” Toomer finishes the portrait provocatively: “Esther looks like a little white child” (C, p. 36). As the “near white” daughter of “the richest colored man in town,” Esther appears doomed to exist apart from both black and white groups in the community. Like Toomer during his months in Sparta, Georgia, Esther is “pulled deeper and deeper into the Negro group,”12 in her case because she witnesses an extraordinary public performance by “a clean-muscled, magnificent, black-skinned Negro, whom she had heard her father mention as King Barlo” (C, p. 36).
Nine-year-old Esther experiences Barlo's “prophet's voice,” and for almost twenty years the legends woven from his blues sermon dominate her inarticulate soul. Barlo boldly reverses the pattern of call-and-response between Jesus and the individual. Unlike Cane's other characters who offer apostrophes to Jesus, Barlo claims Jesus has spoken to him in words that are simultaneously a call and a response. “Jesus has been awhisperin strange words deep down,” he chants in words and cadences recalling the spirituals. “O way down deep, deep in my ears.” Jesus commands Barlo to preach and become a leader of his people: “An He said, ‘Tell em till you feel your throat on fire’” (C, p. 38). As they did with Fern, words become tongues of flame; unlike Fern's words, Barlo's burn and purge the ears of an audience.
With his vision of ancestral African power, Barlo turns his audience into a congregation. His sermon does not simply celebrate the African past. Addressing his racially mixed audience, Barlo relies on a subversive rhetoric of double consciousness. Offering white listeners the preacher's face, he invokes a remote, intimidating, bumbling African figure. Long ago a “big an black an powerful” African had “his head caught up in the clouds.” Unvigilant, the ancestor grew oblivious to his and his people's safety. “An while he was agazin at the heavens, heart filled up with the Lord, some little white-ant biddies came an tied his feet to chains” (C, p. 38). Barlo then incorporates into his sermon the form as well as the substance of the African-American secular tradition. Specifically, as Barbara Bowen recognizes, Barlo telescopes the middle passage “into a perfect blues stanza”:13
They led him t the coast,
They led him t the sea,
They led him across the ocean,
An they didn't set him free.
The old coast didn't miss him,
An the new coast wasn't free,
He left the old-coast brothers,
T give birth t you an me.
O Lord, great God Almighty,
T give birth t you an me.
(C, pp. 38-39)
As Barlo pauses, “white and black preachers,” now alarmed, “confer as to how best to rid themselves of the vagrant usurping fellow” (C, p. 39). They are right to worry because, carefully listened to, Barlo's sermon renounces a passive Christianity and calls black Christians to acts of social change.
The blues tucked away in the sermon establishes a context for Barlo's eloquence. “To the people he assumes the outlines of his visioned African,” but his voice is filled with the bitter consequences of the African's fall into captivity. He summons his people to a historical and spiritual awareness of the contemporary situation in a way that deflects the suspicions of unsympathetic white (and black) listeners. “Brothers an sisters, turn your faces t the sweet face of the Lord, an fill your hearts with glory. Open your eyes and see the dawnin' of th mornin light. Open your ears—” (C, p. 39). If his people understand the vision in his voice, they see a future condition of freedom, equality, and love growing out of spiritual experience. In this sense Barlo supersedes the African as a presence and a performer able to overcome the disabling passivity and silence of the past through improvisational mastery of the word.
Afterward, the people prefigure in legend the transformations called for by Barlo's blues sermon. His powerful voice releases images of love and liberation sexual and racial, private and public in nature. In Esther's case what she sees and hears and is told “years afterward” of Barlo and his performance “became the starting point of the only living patterns that her mind was to know” (C, p. 40, my italics). For eighteen years Barlo's image feeds Esther's subterranean desires for sexual and racial identity. To her, he becomes “best cotten picker,” “best man with his fists, … with dice, with a razor. … Lover of all the women for miles and miles around” (C, pp. 42-43). These centrifugal images of Barlo as hero and bad man keep her heart beating, her silent lips poised for five more years, until he swaggers back to town, now rich and changed by wartime cotton money.
Desperate to become the “black madonna” drawn “in charcoal on the court-house wall” eighteen years before by a woman inspired by Barlo's sermon, Esther pursues Barlo at midnight. Like the spiritually and sexually starved women of Winesburg, Ohio,14 Esther goes, and going goes bravely against the grain of her sheltered, hothouse environment. She finds Barlo upstairs in a sporting house dive—“Blackness rushed to her eyes”—and cajoles her voice to call him. “This aint the place fer y,” Barlo responds. “I know,” Esther answers. “But I've come for you” (C, p. 47). The call-and-response form is intimately present, but the context turns it into parody. Here, as with Barlo's sermon, there is an audience present, but it is an ironic congregation that mocks Esther as a grotesque “dictie nigger.” Her call is private and sexual, woman to man, but she utters it in an arena hostile to her newly emergent voice. Besides, as her veils of illusion burn off shamefully, Barlo's heroic image recedes before his actual “smile, ugly and repulsive to her” and a bodily and spiritual presence equally “hideous.” Silenced, Esther metamorphoses into a “somnambulist,” and the jeers of the audience banish her. Worse, she descends into an oblivion bereft of form and voice, hers and the world's. In a terrible reversal, space and place for Esther turn into a void. Without voice, something melts into nothing, and Toomer ends in minimal voice, denying even what Joyce called the “ineluctable modality of the visible.”15 “There is no air,” he testifies for Esther, “no street, and the town has completely disappeared” (C, p. 48). All vanishes, particularly the younger Barlo's eloquently voiced vision fusing self and race through love. Despite the reality and legend of an enabling presence, in the present Esther loses hope of a nourishing, intimate experience. Her voice, when it flutters into speech, expresses private urgency in a public forum. She does not grasp that Barlo's former eloquence, though ahead of the crowd and short-lived, proceeded from a reciprocal relationship with his audience/congregation. Set apart from black and white experience, Esther nurtures the fantasy of Barlo as an unchanging image, and outside her mind she finds no community to nourish her too delicate voice and self.
After “Esther” Toomer enters a more dangerous and chaotic space: the ungovernable southern landscape of racial violence. He prepares for the blood and fire of “Blood-Burning Moon” with two companion poems. “Conversion” counterpoints Barlo's improvisatory, momentarily enabling blues sermon with an unflattering religious portrait. A former “African Guardian of Souls,” now “Drunk with rum,” yields to “new words. … Of a white-faced sardonic god”; bought off, he becomes an entertainer:
Grins, cries
Amen,
Shouts hosanna.
(C, p. 49)
Unlike Barlo, who converts Christianity to African-American ends, this anonymous conversion means surrender to white captivity. And if religion failed to keep blacks in subservience, there were other means. “Portrait in Georgia,” the sequel to “Conversion,” uses the figure-ground pattern to expose the white southern obsession behind the blood sacrifice of lynching. Through Toomer's newly made eyes, the image of a southern belle dissolves into a black man tortured and burned alive at the stake. One by one, the woman's features yield to the paraphernalia of lynching, until in a final chilling montage her white body becomes a simile for the black victim:
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.
(C, p. 50)
The poem's silent imagery summons the black folk voices of “Blood-Burning Moon” that improvise desperately against the spell of violence hovering over the land as pregnantly as the full “red nigger moon.”
In “Blood-Burning Moon” Toomer's metaphor recognizes a historical pattern of violence as common to this landscape as the waxing and waning of the lunar cycle. And he achieves a tour de force through the speech and song of both individual and communal voices. Toomer's vision of the moon gathers shape from the articulate feelings of black folks who see it “like a fired pine knot,” an “omen” indistinguishable from the landscape. Seeing is believing, but silence leads to capitulation, so from the start “Negro women improvised songs against its spell” (C, p. 51). Louisa, whose autumnal, oak-leaf color suggests the “red nigger moon” of the refrain, sings apart from the chorus of women. First, as if unaware of the evil tradition of racial violence evoked by this moon, “she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon.” But soon she feels the opposing presences of her two men—Bob Stone, her white lover and “younger son of the people she worked for,” and black Tom Burwell, “whom the whole town called Big Boy,”16 a man of prowess determined to woo and marry her. Under this fearful moon, “the slow rhythm of her song grew agitant and restless” (C, p. 53). The barnyard animals “caught its tremor”; they yelp and howl so unnervingly that the songs of the other women become “cotton-wads” to stop their ears against a sudden rush of evil.
Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon. Sinner!
Come out that fact'ry door.
(C, p. 53)
The women's song conjures the moon away from the old cotton factory, which they know as a spot unhallowed by acts of racial violence.
Meanwhile, in the complementary space of a nearby canefield, old David Georgia's tales “about the white folks, about moonshining and cotton picking, and about sweet nigger gals” (C, p. 54) create an equilibrium until one of the black men listening breaks the spell with gossip about Louisa. Ominously, Tom Burwell's violent, verbal, and physical response calls in question the healing power of the women's song. Pumped up, Burwell heads toward Louisa's place, but hearing from a distance the animals' noises, even he, “who didn't give a godam for the fears of old women,” shudders at the sight of the moon (C, p. 55). In Louisa's presence, he is inarticulate; “he wanted to say something to her, and then found that he didn't know what he had to say, or if he did, that he couldn't say it” (C, p. 56). Louisa, with the same articulate, intuitive knowledge she and the other women have about the moon, arouses Tom to an act of voice and love. “Youall want me, Tom?” she asks, and he responds suddenly able to improvise an eloquent metaphor for the risky, unpredictable, mysterious nature of the spoken word. “But words is like the spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come.” He is right and his vernacular denial of his power over words is proof of his capacity for eloquence. Moved by the moment, Tom affirms Louisa's kinship with the blues grain of the countryside. He did not really see her, he confesses, until he heard her sing “‘Sometimes in a way that like t broke m heart.’” Her blues voice intensifies his will to perform the strenuous day-to-day tasks of his life. “Yassur,” he brags about cotton picking: “Come near beatin Barlo yesterday” (C, p. 57). Yet Burwell does not associate the blues feeling of Louisa's voice with her experience. To uphold his masculine convention of female virginity, he assumes wrongly that Louisa has not known men. He does not treat her as a human sexual equal.
Perhaps fatally, they evade rumors about Louisa and Bob Stone. Burwell's threat to “cut hm jis like I cut a nigger” belongs, he thinks, to his male world; he's “been on the gang three times fo cuttin men” (C, p. 61). Tragically, Burwell separates that potential for violence from Louisa and her singing. “But that ain't th talk f now. Sing, honey, Louisa, an while I'm listening t y I'll be making love” (C, pp. 57-58) For a time, their intimacy dissolves all consciousness of conflict. Liberated from the ominous moon, Louisa and Tom are joined by an old Negress who sings as she draws water from the well. Soon black folks inside the shanties “joined the old woman in song.” They all flow together in one voice: “Louisa and Tom, the whole street singing”:
Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon. Sinner!
Come out that fact'ry door.
(C, p. 58)
Individual voices become communal, singing the identical refrain sung earlier as a warning and a spell by which the women attempt to charm the loaded dice of fate and circumstances. Now for an interval, the song banishes the moon and exorcises its augury of violent evil. And something else happens as these many voices gather in a single act of song. The song no longer belongs exclusively to the women. Men and women sing together and create a space for love. The collective voice is so strong that no one thinks its power may be overthrown by the racially charged passion of Louisa's white lover—Bob Stone.
Nevertheless, Toomer adapts his voice to include Sempter's white folks—first Bob Stone and then the mob that Toomer, recalling King Barlo's vision of African captivity, imagines as so many ants. Until his climactic, deadly encounter with Tom Burwell, Bob Stone's voice remains an interior monologue—the arrogant, half-cracker idiom of a northern-educated southerner who longs for slavery's apparently uncomplicated days of droit de seigneur. Contemptuous of black men, Stone recognizes paradoxically that “it was because Louisa was nigger that he went to her. Sweet … the scent of boiling cane came to him” (C, p. 61). Moving through space, he comes face to face with the landscape's sweet yield—black men grinding and boiling the freshly cut cane. As he overhears talk of him and Tom Burwell, his ears and blood figuratively burn and boil as Burwell's literally do before the night is over. Thrashing around in a canebrake on the way to his rendezvous with Louisa, he cuts his lips. When he finds her absent, he tastes blood, his blood, but in his inflamed mind, it becomes Tom Burwell's blood. Meanwhile, Toomer registers changes in mood and action through arresting, alternating images of sound and silence. As they have earlier this night, before the Negro women fought off the moon's spell, barnyard animals raise insensate cries “heralding,” in the tale's prophetic words, “the bloodshot eyes of southern awakening.” In a single, brilliant, succinct stroke reminiscent of Chesnutt's conjurations, Toomer calculates the limits of Negro voices, songs, and charms against Bob Stone and the collective presence and power of white folks. Even before Stone enters the Negro street of factory town, his presence, signaled by the animals, breaks the spell cast by Tom and Louisa and all the men and women of shantytown when they exorcised the evil possibilities of the night with one voice, one jagged blues incantation.
Suddenly, all changes fatally. The “singers in the town were silenced,” and “palpitant between the rooster crows, a chill hush settled upon the huddled forms of Tom and Louisa” (C, p. 63). The consequent bitter dialogue between Burwell and Stone displaces the life-giving, community-building call-and-response pattern into a dead-end ritual. Although Stone and Burwell ostensibly fight over Louisa, her presence recedes utterly while they contend. Though physically present, she is silent. Moreover, the absence of her voice and energy recalls that women's songs have mediated between the community and the violent possibilities of the night. Left out and ignored as a person, Louisa fails to try to bring her female improvising power to bear on this male battleground.
“Whats y want?”
“I'm Bob Stone.”
“Yassur—an I'm Tom Burwell. Whats y want?”
Bob lunged at him. Tom side-stepped, caught him by the shoulder, and flung him to the ground. Straddled him.
(C, p. 63)
In both verbal and physical, individual combat, Tom Burwell bests Bob Stone at every turn. Burwell, having found a metaphor for voice with Louisa, rolls the verbal dice like a gambling man. He counters Stone's announcement of his identity with an obligatory “Yassur” but undercuts the formula with the assertion of his own name and the repetition of his terse question: “Whats y want?” Unable to take even this challenge from a black man, Stone escalates the conflict. Burwell responds easily, almost playfully to Stone's lunges until the white man ups the ante with a racial insult. “Get off me, you godam nigger you,” he calls in a last retort, and in response Burwell “began hammering at him” (C, p. 64).
The denouement occurs on a more dangerous male ritual ground. Again, Stone raises the stakes, arbitrarily, unilaterally. He draws his knife and is amazed when Burwell responds by flashing the black ace of death from his own hand. Words, fists, knives, the outcome is the same. Man to man, Burwell proves Stone's better. But the sequel overrides Burwell's individual voice and prowess:
They don't come by ones,
they don't come by twos,
But they come by tens.(17)
Tragically, the contest extends to an arena of power beyond two individuals. Stone speaks the last word to a group of white men who accost his staggering body on Broad Street. “Tom Burwell …,” he tells them, falls, and dies. No further word passes among them as, antlike, they swarm into a lynch mob. Against the grain of African-American oral culture, “the moving body of their silence … flattened the Negroes beneath it” (C, p. 65). While they drag Burwell to the factory, sink a stake, pour kerosene, they utter “no words.” Whereas voice enables black Americans in Cane, the calculated absence of human speech propels the white mob as if a single spoken word might unnumb it and blunt its murderous purpose, as if the spoken word might recall some of these people to human individuality and morality.
Only when “Tom's eyes popped,” only then “the mob yelled.” Like the moon's enlarged visual presence over this landscape, the yell magnifies into the sound of “a hundred mobs yelling.” The mob empties the countryside of logic, symmetry, and proportion. There is no living voice. Only the “ghost of a yell … fluttered like a dying thing down the single street of factory town.” The only Negro about, the stunned and devastated, moonstruck Louisa on “the step before her home, did not hear it, but her eyes opened slowly.” She sees but cannot hear because there is no voice, speaking or singing. No one is present. Worse, “the full moon, an evil thing, an omen,” now propitiated by human sacrifice, becomes a thing “soft showering the homes of folks she knew” (C, p. 67).
Dazed out of her mind by the lynching and the silence, by the absence of human voice and presence that follows, Louisa seeks somehow to restore the condition of love and song that she remembers from before Stone's intrusion:
Where were they, these people? She'd sing, and perhaps they'd come out and join her. Perhaps Tom Burwell would come. At any rate, the full moon in the great door was an omen she must sing to:
Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon. Sinner!
Come out that fact'ry door.
(C, p. 67)
For the third and last time the words of the song float toward the moon. But the song sounds solitary and desolate, Louisa's voice more formulaic than improvisational. Now its repetition merely reinforces the dissolution of the spell conjured briefly when she and Tom sang in unison with all the other black folks in shanty town. That moment of voice harks back to The Conjure Woman. The power of African-American speech and song, like Aunt Peggy's (and Uncle Julius's) conjuring, sustains the community's culture but stands only briefly against the sudden storm of racial violence. For Louisa, the worst has happened. Necessarily aware that in this racial context, she bears an indelible responsibility, she sings a solace song to keep her devastated life in touch with human feeling and expression. To her call, however, there is not yet a response. But unlike the privately devastated Esther, she persists in singing, now with inflections of grief. Her only chance to overcome her pariah's role and compel an answer from “folks she knew” is to repeat the self-same words and acknowledge a reality neither she nor the community can control. In this way Louisa tries to exorcise some of the night's terror and sing a healing song for her and the still silent, appalled black citizens of Sempter. Voice and song return on a reduced scale in this tragic landscape as the only comfort once the mob's fury of racial hate and violence runs wild, wrecks havoc and murder on both individual lives and the black community, and subsides. Her refrain seeks to disengage the moon's cosmic force from the irrational tidal pull of white folks toward the orgy of lynching. But Louisa cannot have Tom back, and she cannot bring back the choice between her two lovers, one white and transitory, the other black and willing to affirm her in a commitment to lifelong, strong-voiced love. So Toomer leaves this song and story of passion and racial madness to reverberate testamentally through the air breathed by Louisa and everyone else on this blood-red soil of Georgia, where the stench of burning flesh sometimes overpowers the sweet smell of boiling cane.
4
Toomer wrote the northern section of Cane last. Then he placed it in the middle between the stories of southern women and “Kabnis,” his tale of a northern Negro's encounter with his bitter, static self in the beautiful and terrifying, richly fluid ancestral landscape of Georgia. This section links black experience in Washington, D.C., and Chicago with the rural exodus and the sexual and artistic awakening taking place all over America in the 1920s. Yet everywhere in these stories strong southern roots, images of cane and cotton, push up their stalks through cracks in the street or the floorboards of northern cabarets.18 In the first two pieces, call-and-response serves as a figure for sensuous energy. But soon a shadow falls over Cane because of the loss of communal voice and, worse, the absence of any response to the urgent calls by Dorris in “Theater” and by the men in “Box Seat” and “Bona and Paul” as they awaken to the sexual, spiritual, and aesthetic potential of African-American identity.
Toomer prepares for these stories by calling Washington's Seventh Street to awaken. In response, this bastard street of Prohibition and World War I bawls an irreverent, syncopated, fast jazz refrain. Toomer's defiant metaphor of “black reddish blood … flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street” emancipates “a crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life” and celebrates the improvisational energy of jazz. The metaphor recalls Tom Burwell's blood boiling and flowing over southern ground, and also the Great Migration to the North undertaken to escape southern poverty and violence and seize the prosperity offered by the postwar boom. In “Seventh Street,” Toomer observes the transition to a more skeptical and secular, less spiritual experience. “A Nigger God!” he exclaims in response to doubts about the conventional white God's presence on this turf. But a “Nigger God,” too, “would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgment Day,” so, in a sassy jazz voice Toomer frees Seventh Street from even that image of authority and restraint. “Who set you flowing?” he asks again and answers with a brash refrain.
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the streetcar tracks.
(C, p. 73)
On this illegitimate urban street money excites the blood toward clothes and Cadillacs and other possessions of the fast life. Fluid and unstoppable, this intense energy writes a jazz signature appropriate to the newly evolving landscape.
In counterpoint to Karintha, Toomer first portrays Rhobert, a man who forces his soul to tote a “dead thing, stuffed.” Possessed by the stolid, dead-weight of his bourgeois house, Rhobert's soul is deaf and dumb, like a diver sinking into mud. “Brother, life is water that is being drawn off,” rescuing voices call, but Rhobert does not respond. Toomer addresses his fellow singers, and together they mock Rhobert's passing with a playful version of “Deep River.”
Brother, Rhobert is sinking.
Lets open our throats, brother,
Lets sing Deep River when he goes down.
(C, p. 75)
Instead of the great spiritual's celebration of crossing over to Camp Ground, Toomer and his chorus sign off on a deadened man of property.19 So far Toomer follows the pattern of the southern stories; his images supply leading choral lines but the community's rescuing voice fades out, and even individual voices become more and more interior. The words actually spoken by Toomer's northern characters often sound like counterfeit imitations of the impressions and thoughts seething in underground deep rivers of self.
Toomer follows the withering of voice to its root in “Avey,” a transitional piece, and perhaps the most personal tale in Cane. In “Fern” voice follows vision; and though it strikes the narrator's ears as inarticulate and inaccessible, Fern's voice is powerfully present. Avey, though, falls silent when the aspiring young artist walks with her to a hill in Soldier's Home and lectures her on the future. “One evening,” the narrator says of his recent encounter, “in early June, just at the time when dusk is most lovely on the eastern horizon, I saw Avey, indolent as ever, leaning on the arm of a man; strolling under the recently lit arclights of U. Street” (C, p. 84, my italics). Toomer's quest remains the pursuit of passion and tenderness. The evocation of dusk recalls the song in “Karintha” and perhaps recapitulates what might have become of Karintha or Fern if either had migrated to northern streets and cabarets. Like Fern's eyes, Avey's testify to an ebbing soulful beauty within. When the narrator hums a folk tune to drown out some harsh band music, she slips her hand in his. But in response, he tells her his story or, rather, in Toomer's deliberately stuffy words, “traced my development from the early days up to the present time, the phase in which I could understand her” (C, p. 86). Encouraged by Avey's polite silence, he discusses her need to develop “an inner life against the coming of that day” when there would “be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her” (C, p. 87). Though he comes to know it, if he does, only as he writes the story, the narrator is in love with his artistic vision, not Avey's elusive, stubbornly particular, womanly reality.
“I recited some of my own things to her,” he recalls, and strangely, speaking written words quickens his voice into song. “I sang,” he continues, “with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise-song.” Oblivious to Avey, he “begins to wonder why her hand had not once returned a single pressure.” His words lull her to sleep, and perhaps like some of the black men Toomer has written of fleetingly in the southern stories, his anger and hurt yield to a lonely, desolate desire. But when he looks at Avey, her face—now she reminds him of a child—drives away his hostile passion. But it does not seem to occur to him that his speeches may have reminded her of how interminably she listens to men during her daily assignations. Sadly, his last words estrange her. “Orphan woman …,” he writes and pauses, short of an ending. In that he is right, but Avey's response to him when he hummed the folk song should have told him that she is open to the beauty of African-American culture but deaf to his obscure, self-centered, self-serving imaginings of some vague, disembodied art.
In “Avey” Toomer depicts the marginal relationship between men and women in his northern landscape. Without speech or song, at the end both Avey and the narrator are orphans lacking the nourishment of love and culture. Between “Avey” and “Theater,” in the poems, “Beehive” and “Storm Ending,” Toomer pauses, and wishes for a quiet corner of nature sheltered from the urgency of work and love. “Theater” follows, and there Toomer's jazz syncopations build on southern folk songs. His voice turns the black walls of the Howard Theater into “throbbing jazz songs.” Breathed from street life and performed by road shows, at night these songs penetrate “the mass heart of black people” and “seep out to the nigger life of alleys and near-beer saloons, of the Poodle Dog and Black Bear cabarets” (C, p. 91). You'd think such a wild landscape would wake the characters' walled-in souls. This is true for Dorris but not for John, the manager's “dictie” brother whom she tries to love, and sees, deep down, desires to love her. She dances a love song for him, for her, for the two of them. In a creative moment of improvisation, “she forgets her tricks.” Suddenly free, she sings, too, and “her singing is of canebrake loves and mangrove feastings”—of the earthy, passionate South. Joining her, “the walls press in, singing,” and compel John to dream of her and feel transported to a “southern canefield.” Called by these fragments, John's eyes do duty for his voice. “‘Glorious Dorris.’ So his eyes speak.” But like the narrator of “Fern,” at the climactic moment John swerves away from Dorris in favor of making her image a living presence in his writing. He cannot fuse the dancer with the dance, while Dorris, her intimate public performance over, quivers, vulnerably alive to the risk of the moment. “His whole face is in shadow. She seeks for her dance in it. She finds it a dead thing in the shadow which is his dream” (C, p. 99). Inhibited by her passionate aesthetic enactment of love and desire, he crawls back into the silent space of overinsulated private walls. The dangerous “center of physical ecstasy” (C, p. 93), embodied by Dorris in her dance, scares John off. He retreats into an abstract dream, which denies Dorris and seems fated to shrivel his body as well as his mind.
Toomer follows Dorris's unanswered call to sexual love with a poem equal to her dance in sexual intensity. In “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” he asks a lover to touch him with words and breath, and completes his electric metaphor by calling on her to strip the insulation from her white-hot lips:
then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent.
(C, p. 101)
“Her Lips Are Copper Wire” reinstates the experience of reciprocal passion, and answers the will to property and abstract passion of “Rhobert” and “Theater” before, in “Calling Jesus,” Toomer imagines a woman's soul reduced to “a little thrust-tailed dog that follows her, whimpering.” She leaves the dog her soul in the vestibule of her large house till morning, and in the daytime when the woman is oblivious to her surroundings, “you hear a low scared voice, lonely, calling, and you know that a cool something nozzles moisture in your palms.” In these moments Toomer feels her breath as “sweet as honeysuckle whose pistils bear the life of coming song” (C, p. 102, my italics). But in this landscape, divided apparently between vitality and respectability, you hear songs only “up alleys where niggers sat on low door-steps before tumbled shanties and sang and loved.” Looking to close the fissure between Negro and nigger Washington, Toomer ends with a lullaby that carries the woman South for the interval of her dreams. “Someone … eoho Jesus … soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane” (C, p. 103). Unlike “Rhobert,” where a male chorus sings in mockery, Toomer turns a potentially insulting, derisive fable into a song affirming some small remaining possibility of wholeness. Unlike the first version of the song where the woman slept upon “clean hay cut in her dreams,” she rests now “cradled in dream-fluted cane”—a song realized in her dreams and also in the shanties by recent migrants from the South.
“Calling Jesus” anticipates Toomer's quest for sexual love through acts of song and speech in “Box Seat” and “Bona and Paul.” In “Box Seat” the estrangement of public from private voice and speech from thought signifies the estrangement of man from woman. The landscape, too, is partitioned, for Toomer locates “Box Seat” in a lace-curtain Negro neighborhood deaf to and distant from Seventh Street's earthy jazz songs. On these affluent streets, “houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street. Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger.” And Toomer calls on the male street to “stir the life-root of a withered people” (C, p. 104). He calls Dan Moore—born in a canefield—to become one of those “street songs that woo virginal houses.” But Dan Moore feels like a displaced person on this neat, locked-in Negro residential street.
“Come on, Dan Moore, come on,” Toomer calls. But Dan's “voice is a little hoarse. It cracks. He strains to produce tones in keeping with the houses' loveliness. Can't be done. He whistles. His notes are shrill. They hurt him” (C, pp. 104-5). Intimidated, inhibited, Dan Moore fumbles silently at the iron gate. His fantasies fluctuate between paranoia—“baboon from the zoo”—and messianic self-confidence—“come to a sick world to heal it” (C, pp. 105-6). He knocks so hard on the door of the respectable boardinghouse that the owner, Mrs. Pribby, his girl Muriel's benefactor and keeper, thinks the thick glass may break. To Dan, Mrs. Pribby is the spirit of this “sharp-edged, massed, metallic house.” She is both jailed and jailer. More than a woman or a person, Mrs. Pribby is a repressive condition. “Bolted. About Mrs. Pribby. Bolted to the endless rows of metal houses. No wonder he couldn't sing to them” (C, p. 107). Although mute, Dan intensifies his resolve to rescue Muriel from her environment. Waiting for her, he chooses hearing over the prying and prurience he associates with seeing. Suddenly, shuddering under the vibrations of a passing streetcar, he hears “the mutter of powerful underground races,” and imagines “all the people rushing” to hear the word of “the next world savior” (C, p. 108).
Once Muriel comes downstairs, she keeps their talk superficial, their voices safely proper and public. “Let's talk about something else,” she interrupts when Dan speaks about their volatile, painfully unresolved relationship. She keeps hidden the intimate thoughts that boil away in her silent, subterranean self. “Dan, I could love you if I tried. I don't have to try. I do. O Dan, don't you know I do? Timid lover, brave talker that you are. … She [Mrs. Pribby] is me, somehow. No, she's not. Yes she is. She is the town, and the town won't let me love you, Dan. Don't you know? You could make it let me if you would” (C, p. 110). Sensing Muriel's underground deep river of vitality, Dan sees her lips as “flesh notes” and his thoughts become spoken challenges to the platitudes uttered by her genteel voice. For a minute they speak honestly and touch. But the voice of the community speaks repressively through Mrs. Pribby's rustling newspaper in the next room. Muriel withdraws toward conformity, but Dan declares his love in defiant anger: “Muriel, I love you, whatever the world of Pribby says. Damn you, Pribby” (C, p. 114). Meanwhile the newspaper answers with loud rapping sounds and sends into hiding the passionate words Dan has dared to speak. They “gaze fearfully at one another,” and when the clock strikes eight, “Muriel fastens on her image” (C, p. 115); as planned, she leaves for the Lincoln Theater with her friend, Bernice.
Like Mrs. Pribby's confined and confining house, the interior of the Lincoln intensifies the theme of captivity. In sight of each other, Dan and Muriel sink into separate, subterranean selves. “Prop me in your brass seat,” Dan thinks as he sees Muriel. “He-slave. Slave of a woman who is a slave. I'm a damned sight worse than you are. … A slave, thou art greater than all Freedom because I love thee” (C, p. 121). Dan's archaic, apostrophic diction belongs to the dramatic tradition of soliloquy, but, unspoken, his words command no audience. Still, his passionate energy disturbs those who want to surrender their minds to the vaudeville entertainment. In this context the reciprocity of performance is missing; locked into identical box seats the members of the audience seem surreal fragments of the disjointed theatrical action. A “portly Negress,” whose “strong roots” Dan imagines “sink down and spread under the river and disappear in blood-lines that waver south,” has eyes that “don't belong to her” (C, p. 119). The world and Dan's metaphors distort each other. Hurt still and distracted by the dwarfs on stage, Dan wishes he had responded to “those silly women arguing feminism” (C, p. 123) with wild prophecies of a bloodless sexuality driven by technology and ideology. At last, when he yields to the balm of inner silence, the image of a former slave he has seen and spoken to on the streets of Washington struggles into his reverie. Snatches from spirituals flow through Dan's mind and enable him to reexperience his encounter with the old man and seek ancestral wisdom against the desolation of the present.
Hearing applause, Dan turns to the stage where the dwarf, who outlasts the others in a mock heavyweight prizefight, returns to sing a sentimental love song. With an effort Dan stifles fantasies of destroying the theater and rising with two signs of triumph—a dynamo in his right hand and an ebony god's face in his left. Drifting from his psychological mooring, he focuses on the dwarf's attempt to present a white rose to a woman in the audience. In characteristic revulsion from the unsightly, the unseemly, the grotesque, Muriel flinches at the dwarf's approach. She sees only ugliness, but Dan, illuminated by his memory of the slave, sees the dwarf's enormous brow undergo transformation. “It grows profound. It is a thing of wisdom and tenderness: of suffering and beauty. Dan looks down. The eyes are calm and luminous. Words come from them” (C, p. 128). Like other Toomer characters who struggle to discover a voice, Dan has a vision first. He sees words form in the dwarf's eyes, hears sounds and an accent. In Toomer's South the women see visions, sing, and sometimes speak in tongues; but here Muriel bolts her heart against the images and words of the dwarf's oracular figure. But Dan hears a call issue from the man's eloquent eyes and reciprocates with silent words of response:
Do not shrink. Do not be afraid of me.
Jesus
See how my eyes look at you.
the son of God
I too was made in His image
was once
I give you the rose.
(C, p. 128)
Though attenuated, call-and-response survives in this mute dialogue between two outsiders. Now, watching Muriel deny all connection to the dwarf as she “daintily reaches for the offering,” Dan uncorks his bottled up words. “JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER,” he shouts. His line explodes, and Dan does not amplify or explain. He strides outside, a free man.
Dan's solitary illumination and utterance testify to the desolation of this landscape. His words defy but do not call because these people have shut their ears against the voices of challengers or pariahs, whether Dan, the dwarf, or Jesus the leper. Dan's isolation recalls and rivals “Fern”; though he utters a brief forceful public expression, he changes nothing, reaches no accommodation with this slavishly overrefined environment.20 In his mind, he nurtures a connection between the dwarf and the old ex-slave who saw Grant and Lincoln and heard Walt Whitman's lonely nineteenth-century American voice call for individuality and community, and for sexual liberation. What he sees in the dwarf's eyes he hears, too, and he forms words of spiritual connection in response to the dwarf's call. In “Box Seat” there is communing but no community, only the huddling together of the puny, whimpering tag-along souls Toomer pities and shelters in “Calling Jesus.” Dan keeps going at the end—no more but no less. No one—not Muriel, not Toomer, not the reader—follows because no one, not even Dan, knows where he is going. Unlike Toomer's women who, receiving no response, stay put, condemned to be oracular presences in the same static place, Dan Moore takes off, lights out toward some unknown territory. But even in silence, rejected by respectable society, he keeps a measure of freedom and mobility. And from his box seat he spoke sufficiently to break out of captivity, whereas Muriel remains behind in her genteel, gilded bourgeois cage.
Between “Box Seat” and “Bona and Paul” Toomer places two poems about the need for intimacy and the danger of isolation for the person and the writer. “Prayer” celebrates the presence of spirit in earthly spaces. Here, too, the primary act of relation is speech and song grounded in bodily reality:
My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,
O spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger …
(C, p. 131)
In “Harvest Song” Toomer is a reaper whose harvest of oats corresponds to his writing. After doing his work, he seeks fraternity with “other harvesters but fear[s] to call.” He fears he would not be a responsive listener yet “strains to hear the calls of other harvesters.” Toomer calls for a community, of writers, yes, and also a society in which we are brothers (“O my brothers”) and citizens and, on that basis, audience to each other's work and lives. Toomer cautions against the artist's tendency to self-indulgence or self-pity. “My pain is sweet,” he confesses but closes by writing that “it will not bring me knowledge of my hunger” (C, p. 133). “Harvest Song” is a pause in the unfolding of Cane. From it, Toomer confronts the continuing conflict between intimacy and the assertion of African-American male identity in “Bona and Paul.”
Like differences in social status in “Box Seat,” racial differences lead Bona and Paul to express their passion in unspoken, interior voices. Bona, a young southern white woman, senses that Paul, a mystery man, has African blood. “He is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf,” she thinks, recalling Toomer's description of Louisa in “Blood-Burning Moon.” And she goes on, as Bob Stone did, to add elements of hostility and the forbidden to her fantasy. “He is a nigger” (C, p. 136). Though he passes for white in Chicago, Paul's secret images bear him south. In the midst of thoughts of Bona, he imagines a scene in rural Georgia where “a Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern planter. Her breasts are ample for the suckling of a song. She weans it, and sends it, curiously weaving, among lush melodies of cane and corn” (C, pp. 137-38). Taken sexually but not possessed by the southern planter, the black woman sings and sends her story beyond his “mate-eyes” into the valley of Cane. Her song distances Paul from a stereotypical context in which his white acquaintances, male and female, look to his African-American blood for confirmation of their own sexual identity.
On his way to the Crimson Gardens with Bona, Paul feels the presence of black people in “clapboard homes which now resemble Negro shanties in some southern alley.” In this scene Bona and Paul speak intimately to each other. “Paul, I love you” (C, p. 143), she suddenly declares. In response, he tells her, “I cannot talk love. Love is a dry grain in my mouth unless it is wet with kisses” (C, p. 144, my italics). Bona starts to respond, remembers they are in the street, asks for reassurance in the form of a declaration of love, and when Paul cannot give it “yet,” she catches up with the other couple. Their private drama becomes public as soon as they enter Crimson Gardens and feel the stares and whispered questions. Paul realizes that friends and strangers alike “saw not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference” (C, p. 145). When an entertainer, “a girl dressed like a bare-back rider in flaming pink” (C, p. 147), sings “Liza, Little Liza Jane,” Paul's interior voice probes Bona's southern ambivalence. For the sentimental, unnourishing commercial song, his inner ear substitutes the healing song of the Negro woman in Georgia. “O song!” he thinks, and then, imagining that Bona hears the same song on her earthy, southern lower frequencies, he names her as a participant in the dialogue of his thought.
“And you know it too, don't you Bona?
“What, Paul?”
“The truth of what I was thinking.”
(C, p. 148)
Without hesitation, she answers that she'd “like to know I know—something of you.” Her response answers his earlier sexual challenge with a call of her own focused on his personality, not merely his body or his racial identity.
The frantic gaiety of the Crimson Gardens interrupts the flow of intimacy between Bona and Paul. Out of rhythm they dance, and their attraction dissipates into the bickering, contentious words of shallow conversation. But the act of dancing rescues their desire. Suddenly, words yield to spontaneous movement, and “they are a dizzy blood clot on a gyrating floor” (C, p. 151). When it appears that they will leave Crimson Gardens and go off to make love, the need to articulate the vision behind his desire comes over Paul. For him, the “knowing eyes” of the huge Negro doorman are a sudden catalyst. “Too many couples have passed out, flushed and fidgety,” Paul realizes, “for [the doorman] not to know.” He cannot bear for another black man to imagine his and Bona's sexual encounter as anything other than an act of beauty and vision. Earlier, Paul sensed the doorman's likely awareness of his African-American blood. For this reason, too, he now drops his disguise, and, with a word of salutation, expresses racial kinship with the man:
“Youre wrong.”
“Yassur.”
“Brother, youre wrong.”
(C, p. 152)
For sir, Paul returns brother—an assertion of fraternity that opens the way for his intimate revelation.
Painfully for Paul, the doorman's leer responds accurately to what is happening. On one level he is using the complexity of race to hustle a white girl to bed. With Bona, he has been strategically cagey, implying that he will reveal his racial identity as a complement to their love-making. But now, at the risk of forfeiting his night with Bona, Paul bursts into a lyrical speech intended to transform the black doorman's impression. “I came back to tell you, to shake your hand, and tell you that you are wrong. That something beautiful is going to happen” (C, p. 152). Apparently, Paul needs to declare his racial identity and sexual integrity to another black man before consummating his passion for Bona. His rhetoric, in part a response to the prurience of onlookers, points to his confusion of motives. His sudden euphoria seems too self-conscious, his language too contrived to engender a spontaneous dialogue with the doorman. That man, accustomed to the nightly, urgent comings and goings of many couples, listens silently to Paul's bizarre, literary speech.21 As a Negro who is no longer passing, Paul pursues metamorphosis into a lover and an artist. The “petals of roses” (white faces) and “petals of dusk” (dark faces) he would gather are metaphors for the sexual, racial, aesthetic wholeness he seeks to experience. But, like other Toomer men, he seems more in love with words and images than with an actual woman.22
Perhaps Paul tests Bona when he leaves her outside, beyond the reach of his voice. Perhaps he knows she may disappear. Surely he is aware that her ambivalence raises the possibility that she requires the fantasy of his blackness to arouse her and the reassurance that it is only an illusion to consummate their passion. Nevertheless, leaving her behind, Paul jeopardizes the fragile beginnings of their intimacy. Moreover, without Bona and the possibility of their sexual love, he would not have a story to tell the doorman. Paradoxically, he ends the story before it has a chance to unfold. Bona sees but cannot hear, and who knows but that she imagines Paul bragging about his approaching conquest?
Sex and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming.(23)
Bona gone, Paul's sexual condition contradicts the lavish, lyrical possibilities he has expressed to the doorman. Racially, too, for the moment, he resides in an isolated, painfully private space. Because sexuality and race remain an unfulfilled polarity, Paul's words are hypothetical. They do not yet blossom in a consummate healing version of the folk song his inner ear heard a black woman sing in Georgia. For that, he will have to go South more nakedly and profoundly, as Toomer does in “Kabnis,” the last and most ambitious tale in Cane.
5
“Kabnis” doubles as a swan-song and a birth-song. “Begun shortly after Toomer's return from Sparta in November 1921, ‘Kabnis,’ the synoptic piece of Cane,” as Onida Estes-Hicks observes, “was the most difficult for Toomer and the last to be revised for publication.”24 By chronicling the folk past, Toomer anticipates a new awakening for the black South. His oracular voice mediates among several individual voices and an occasional community voice. His collaborative impulse bears witness to the unfolding of African-American oral forms in everyday experience. But when his characters respond with cynicism, madness, flight, or, worse, betray his vision through an alien silence, Toomer as the returning (and departing) son of the soil, sings a birth-song. Acknowledging the intimate creative power of silence, he calls us to listen for other voices as they awaken to life, song, and story in the future.
In a storytelling voice of call-and-response intimate with and detached from Ralph Kabnis, Toomer turns the elemental energy of the countryside into song. Alone in his cabin, unable to sleep, Kabnis reads. But the winds call him away from the mute words of his book toward the personal and artistic awakening he seeks in the South. “Night winds in Georgia,” Toomer writes, conjuring breath into the written word, “are vagrant poets, whispering.” Against his will, Kabnis lets his book fall and listens to “the weird chill of their song”:
White-man's land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground.
(C, p. 157)
The song moves Kabnis to a vivid response. To an imaginary sweetheart he muses that to be an articulate presence in this land requires a “bull-neck and a heaving body.” He dreams of eloquence as “a soft face that fits uncertainly upon” the “body of the world.” Buoyed by the promise of language, he finds words to express passionately his emerging mission. “God, if I could develop that in words,” he thinks. “If I, the dream (not what is weak and afraid in me) could become the face of the South. How my lips would sing for it, my songs being the lips of its soul” (C, p. 158). Kabnis longs to sing, and knows that his song depends on the character of his participation in the community whose life he would express. He dreams of voice as a collaborative, enabling force. Issuing from such a voice he imagines a new body and soul strong enough to transcend and maybe transform the historical condition alluded to in the song he has absorbed from the southern night winds. But Kabnis is divided, and his other unbelieving voice denies the potentiality of self. “Soul. Soul hell. There ain't no such thing” (C, p. 158).
Toomer mediates between Kabnis and the South. He challenges Kabnis to conjure the swan-song he hears into a birth-song announcing a human presence far more powerful and loving than anything in his experience. Toomer's call is disturbingly intimate as well. He asks Kabnis to respond to the southern countryside, its voices and conditions, in a voice simultaneously private and public, individual and collaborative. He urges Kabnis to forget his psychological self-preoccupation long enough to absorb his and the region's terrors into a beauty both painful and uplifting. As Kabnis steps outside, clutching an intruding chicken by the neck, Toomer reenters and again collaborates with the voices in the landscape. He utters the spirit of place in a medley. “The half-moon is a white child that sleeps upon the tree-tops of the forest. White winds croon its sleep-song”:
rock a-by baby …
Black mother sways, holding a white child in her bosom.
when the bough bends …
Her breath hums through pine-cones.
cradle will fall …
Teat moon-children at your breasts,
down will come baby …
Black mother.”
(C, p. 160)
Between the lines of the traditional lullaby, Toomer's antiphonal form identifies the contending forces and feelings in the South. He hints at stories waiting to be told if Kabnis would listen and shape his formless feelings. And because Kabnis is in but not of the place, Toomer challenges him to discover and love his own soul sufficiently to join the South and the people he finds there. With croon Toomer identifies the danger tucked away in the lullaby. If the wind blows hard, down will come baby, cradle and all. The original lyric expresses every woman's ambivalence toward caring for her babies; Toomer's new lines observe a black mother as she sings to a white baby instead of her own. His improvisation acknowledges the subversive power of black women even in roles considered safely subservient by whites.
In the meantime, Kabnis yanks the head off the squawking chicken. He calls himself a “bastard son” and implicitly joins his fate to the black mother in the song. Suddenly, moved by the night, he prays for “an ugly world.” His bitter prayer testifies to his inability to respond openly, resiliently, to the beauty and misery around him, the love and hate within him. Spontaneously, he calls: “Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys, heaving with folk songs, so close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches … and tortures me” (C, pp. 161-62). His prayer for deliverance from the pain and beauty of black song ironically confirms his capacity for burning, purging eloquence. Speech liberates him briefly from the frozen time and space of his worst self and allows him to absorb the fluidity of the countryside, its presences and voices. Nevertheless, fearful of a lynch mob of white minds, he travels north in reverie until “impotent nostalgia grips him” and “becomes intolerable.” In an act of will he strains to imagine the Negroes in “a cabin silhouetted on a knoll about a mile away. … They sing. They love. They sleep. Kabnis wonders if perhaps they can feel him. If perhaps he gives them bad dreams. Things are so immediate in Georgia” (C, p. 164, my italics). But this inner reciprocity with the people does not banish the ghosts of racial violence. After another interval of anxious sleeplessness for Kabnis, Toomer repeats the song and reinforces the continuing presence of black folk voices and hovering spirits of place. Perhaps now the song will strengthen Kabnis's desire to encounter the palpable, painfully beautiful environment of Negro Georgia. Comparing the night winds to “soft-voiced vagrant poets,” Toomer implies that, sleeping, Kabnis prepares to participate in the singing of the song.
Toomer elaborates the song's perspective on the South with stories told by Layman, “by turns teacher and preacher, who has traveled in almost every nook and corner of the state and hence knows more than would be good for anyone other than a silent man” (C, p. 169). Unsure of himself with Layman, Kabnis flatters what he thinks are the other man's expectations. “Things are not half bad,” he tells him and Layman responds by dropping his mask and telling him the truth. To Kabnis's pathetic fantasy that whites “wouldn't touch a gentleman—fellows, men like us three here—” Layman responds laconically, “Nigger's a nigger down this away, Professor. And only two dividins: good an bad. An even they aint permanent categories. They sometimes mixes um up when it comes t lynchin. I've seen um do it” (C, pp. 171-72). Kabnis's response to Layman's first account of sadistic racial violence is categorical and hostile. Negroes are a “preacher-ridden race,” he says, echoing James Joyce's view of the Irish as a “priest-ridden race.”25 But Kabnis misunderstands the complex role of the black church and makes matters worse by excepting Layman from his denunciation. “Preacher's a preacher anywheres you turn” (C, p. 174), Layman answers, and his stress on the shared consequences of African-American identity exposes Kabnis's tendency to follow nullifying, dead-end generalizations with convenient, superficial distinctions. As a storyteller rooted in lore and experience, Layman offers Kabnis rescue from his shallow, abstract preconceptions.
The stories Layman tells show black people falling back on the wit of the animal tales as a recourse against mob violence. On one occasion Layman drawls, the white folks “had jis knocked two others like you kill a cow—brained um with an ax, when they caught Sam Raymon by a stream.” But Sam recalls Br'er Rabbit's trick in “Tar Baby.” “They was about t do fer him when he up and says, ‘White folks, I gotter, die, I knows that. But wont y let me die in my own way?’” Grudgingly, they agree, and as if to fulfill the night winds' refrain about crossing over into Camp Ground, Sam Raymon “fell down ont his knees and prayed, ‘O Lord, Ise comin t y,’ and he up and jumps int the stream” (C, pp. 174-75). Sam's prayer enables him to survive, and Layman's tale reinforces the worldly uses of black Christian tradition in the South. As Layman finishes the story, his listeners hear the swelling moans of a shout from the black church next door. In a sudden reflex Kabnis's “face gives way to an expression of mingled fear, contempt, and pity” (C, p. 175). Like a man ignorant of the participatory nature of black oral culture, Kabnis scorns the call-and-response of the spirituals. He would prefer to abstract the songs' beauty from the cares, feelings, and problems of everyday lives. Likewise, Kabnis resists Layman's storyteller's office, rejects the possibility that Layman's tales might have meaning for his life.
Kabnis keeps his distance from the passionate witness of African-American culture even as he pesters Layman to break his disciplined silence and tell the story of a particularly hideous lynching. Meanwhile, in church the preacher's sermon yields to an old spiritual that, because it is sung by the choir and the entire congregation, gives rest to a distraught, shouting sister. But Layman agitates Kabnis, because he counterpoints his tale of Sam Raymon's trickster's escape with the story of Mame Lamkins in which even her unborn child falls victim to the murderous wrath of a lynch mob. When Kabnis asks what Mame Lamkins had done, Layman replies with calculated understatement. “Tried to hide her husband when they was after him” (C, p. 179). Like Chesnutt's Uncle Julius, Layman does not cheat; he testifies to annihilation and escape as conditions of African-American experience. Along with Layman's tale, the continuing, complex flow of experience feeds Kabnis's apprehension of the existing world. As the men in Halsey's parlor hear the sister's individual voice interrupt the congregation to tell that she has found Jesus, a stone with a message wrapped around it crashes through the window. Kabnis, startled, then terrified when the words are read out loud—“You northern nigger, its time fer y t leave” (C, p. 174)—runs away without a word. He does not sort out his feelings of fear and complicity. Inside and out, he believes he is about to be annihilated.
The other men follow him knowing that down here whites would not bother with such a warning. While they move silently through space, Toomer fills the air with a song now sung by the church choir
My Lord, what a mourning
When the stars begin to fall.
(C, p. 91)26
At that moment dusk is falling and stars are beginning to appear, but inside the black church, a choir sings of the end of the world. The song faces the terror Kabnis flees—and worse, for this is a community randomly and savagely marauded when white folks have the urge. Some of their stars—their heroic rebel angels—have already fallen; doubtless more will in coming struggles. Toomer thus frames Kabnis's purely individual response to this landscape's dangers with the continuing, solacing call of spirituals that people sing with one and many voices to sustain their souls and history. The variations sung in response to the spiritual's refrain testify to the black community's will to overcome the conditions of its existence. “You'll hear de trumpet sound,” and “you'll hear de sinner moan,” and “you'll hear de Christians shout.” All the verses have the same refrain, one reminiscent of Dan Moore's mission in “Box Seat”: “To wake de nations under ground.” Like many spirituals, this one fuses spiritual and historical reality and in the meantime holds the people together through the participatory form of call-and-response.
After they track Kabnis back to his cabin, Halsey and Layman educate him explicitly about contemporary southern violence. “These aint th days of hounds an Uncle Tom's Cabin, feller. White folks aint in fer all them theatrics these days” (C, p. 183), Halsey tells him, and then uses moonshine as a metaphor for the discipline required in any craft. “Th boys what made this stuff—are y listenin t me, Kabnis? Th boys what made this stuff have got th art down like I heard you say youd like t be with words” (C, p. 184, my italics). He challenges Kabnis to distill his words into a substance equally textured and quickening. Later in a fierce manly voice, Halsey holds at bay the pompous black headmaster, Hanby, who comes to fire and evict Kabnis. As another example to Kabnis of the power of the spoken word, Halsey, who has had literary interests of his own, bests Hanby by mimicking and manipulating his bullying, impotent voice and empty, oratorical style.
Kabnis understands that no one can confer or nullify manhood. He, therefore, “wants to rise and put both Halsey and Hanby in their places. He vaguely knows that he must do this, else the power of direction will completely slip from him to those outside” (C, pp. 188-89). But his gestures are inarticulate and misunderstood until Lewis, a more open and courageous northern Negro, enters. Lewis embodies the possibilities of manhood; “he is what a stronger Kabnis might have been, and in an odd faint way resembles him” (C, p. 189). Although there on his own business, Lewis is not too preoccupied to see the complexity of Kabnis's unrealized voice and soul. “Kabnis,” Lewis thinks, possesses “a promise of soul-soaked beauty; uprooted, thinning out. Suspended a few feet above the soil whose touch would resurrect him.” Silently, Kabnis and Lewis recognize each other in “a swift intuitive interchange of consciousness” (C, p. 191). Perhaps aware of similar divisions in his own being, Toomer mediates the silent communication between these two strangers who seem the nearest of kin. For his part, “Kabnis has a sudden need to rush into the arms of this man. His eyes call, ‘Brother’” but his voice is mute as if to allow his fear of intimacy to recover its strength. “And then a savage, cynical twist-about within him mocks his impulse and strengthens him to repulse Lewis” (C, pp. 191-92). But as Lewis leaves, Toomer breaks the silence with the testimony of a woman who, “miles down the valley, begins to sing.” Oblivious to the drama of opposing male wills inside the cabin, the woman's voice affirms and extends the human bond. “Her song is a spark that travels swiftly to the near-by cabins. Like purple tallow flames, songs jet up” and ride the air until other voices join her song. Toomer's words recall “Blood-Burning Moon” and herald a soulful transformation: “Now the whole countryside is a soft chorus. Lord. O Lord” (C, p. 192).
Moved, Kabnis participates by trying twice to draw Halsey into the song's community of feeling. “Do you hear it?” he asks, “Jesus, do you hear it” (C, p. 193), and his question recalls “Karintha”'s refrain: “O cant you see it?” But Halsey keeps on talking about mobs and danger and Lewis as a manly man; in effect, he belittles Kabnis's wonder at the song and stirs his fears of lynching. Treated like a child, “Kabnis submits, wearily. He has no will to resist him” (C, p. 194, my italics). As they did briefly to Lewis, Kabnis's instincts respond to the song's evocation of the sensuous beckoning landscape; he wants to collaborate with the people in the making and the singing of the song. But Halsey's harsh-toned world of male combat intervenes. Instead of remaining an active witness, willing to testify to his half-articulate voice and its aspiring craft, Kabnis caves in. He yields to Halsey, who in his impatient, too simple, stultifying protection forgets his admonition that Kabnis distill his words from the soil in a voice of his own making. So far, then, the black songs of Georgia touch Kabnis, but his eloquence remains a potentiality seeking a responsive audience and a true occasion.
A month later, the scene is Halsey's wagon shop, which serves as a gathering place for the black men of the town. Here, too, Kabnis is stifled. A white man's pun about Kabnis getting “the hang of it” burns his neck and weighs him down with “the whole white South” (C, p. 201). No songs penetrate this place, but Halsey's sister, Carrie Kate, appears, and like some of the women in earlier stories, “her body is a song” (C, p. 17). Though mostly a silent presence, she is kin to those black women whose songs stir the community into a chorus momentarily at one with the place. As he did with Kabnis, Lewis is the only man to see her in the round, complexly. Outwardly stunted, Carrie Kate carries a light as she performs her chores and serves Father John, an old former slave preacher. She and Lewis call to each other in a “swift sunburst,” and Lewis sees into the interior of life. “His mind flashes images of her life in the southern town. 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.” But the future recedes when he takes her hands, and she responds wholly. “The sun-burst from her eyes floods up and haloes him. Christ-eyes, his eyes look to her. Fearlessly she loves into them” (C, p. 205, my italics). All of “Kabnis,” all of Cane, informs this moment. In her awakening, Carrie Kate recalls other women who yearn for sensuous and spiritual love in the same act of experience, while Lewis revives the image of Christ summoned previously in Cane—an unmartyred messiah who lives in the world as a man—and evoked by later novels like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Meridian.
No song comes to bless the unsought, intense union. Instead, ominous voices enter stealthily. Like other black women in Cane, Carrie Kate hears reproving voices warn her of bodily desire. They dissipate her vision and with it the passionate actuality of the moment. “The sin-bogies of respectable southern colored folks clamor at her: ‘Look out! Be a good girl. A good girl. Look out!’” (C, p. 205). Living in her brother's world, Carrie Kate is remote from womanly voices that fuse human passion with a consciousness of earth and sun and sky. She internalizes the voices of convention and stultification and retreats from a chance to move beyond her life of generous, decent service toward an experience of her own.
Soon Toomer, not any of his characters, especially not Kabnis, moves beyond the voices of denial and revoices the elemental song of place heard earlier in the night winds' song:
Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South. Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories are fecund at her touch. Night's womb-song sets them singing. Night winds are the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing. Hear their song.
White-man's land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground.
(C, pp. 208-9)
The song's words are identical to what the night winds sang to Kabnis in Part 1. But now Toomer calls his readers to become witnessing listeners, hear what they have read earlier, and vary the inflection and rhythm according to their developing interpretation of the tale. The “night winds,” formerly “vagrant poets,” metamorphose into the breathing of an “unborn child.” Again, the song testifies to black folks singing, bearing children, being burned alive in a white man's country, and aspiring to “rest” after toil and to “sweet glory” after a life of pain, humiliation, and often violent death. Again the words acknowledge a continuing unresolved conflict between murder and creation, brutality and tenderness, silence and song. But Toomer's revised metaphor joins the fertility of black women to the life and soul of the South in all of its manifestations. Specifically, the figure breathes life into Mame Lamkins, the murdered Negress whose unborn child was ripped alive from her belly and knifed to a tree. Furthermore, the shift from “vagrant poets” to “unborn child” signifies Toomer's awareness that African-American song and story reside essentially in the people and can never be put in the keeping of a few “vagrant poets.” Presently, the outside night world participates vitally in the cycle of life, whereas the human characters within descend to the underground depths of “the Hole” below Halsey's workshop. There, in homage to past defeats, their aimless party stays remote from the passion heard in the framing voices of a black woman and her unborn child—voices meant to signify Mame Lamkins and her child haunting the land, and the possibility that they will be avenged and the South redeemed by future acts of creation.
Meanwhile underground, Lewis and Kabnis contend. As often happens in Cane, voice is the correlative of personality. Lewis seeks to rekindle the spirit of the word, while Kabnis seeks oblivion or at least forgetfulness; and, if he cannot have either, then annihilation of his own soul. Alert to the presence of a former slave called Father, Lewis prepares responsively but silently to receive the word. He wonders if the old man is merely “a tongue-tied shadow of an old” faith or “a mute John the Baptist of a new religion” (C, p. 211). The old man's silence calls Lewis to speak but speak cryptically. By naming the old man Father John, Lewis answers Kabnis's bitter designation, “Father of hell,” and testifies to the ancestral gift of tradition available to those who would carry on black culture.
Lewis follows this naming with a call to Father John. Like earlier calls to Kabnis and Carrie Kate, this one is interior, as if Lewis requires a private vision to speak to the assembled individuals. As yet there is no community, no congregation, though, if spoken, his thoughts might move the others to participate in the essential continuum of African-American experience:
Slave boy whom some Christian mistress taught to read the Bible. Black man who saw Jesus in the ricefields, and began preaching to his people. Moses- and Christ-words used for songs. Dead blind father of muted folk who feel their way upward to a life that crushes or absorbs them. (Speak, Father!) Suppose your eyes could see, old man.
(The years hold hands, O Sing!) Suppose your lips …
Halsey, does he never talk?
(C, p. 212, my italics).
The others hear Lewis's few spoken words but not his thoughts, though shortly Kabnis, sensing something is up, calls them back to the party. “Drink corn licker, love the girls, and listen t th old man mumblin sin,” he urges as if the old man is part of the entertainment. But his call is flat and false. His pathetic voice restores “no good-time spirit to the party.” “Lewis, seated now so that his eyes rest upon the old man, merges with his source and lets the pain and beauty of the South meet him there” (C, p. 214, my italics). The landscape lives in his bodily imagination as, so far, it does not for any of the others.
Lewis bides his time. After a while, he answers Kabnis's continuing ridicule of Father John with a variation of his previous interior monologue. “The old man as symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past,” he preaches, “what do [you] think he would say if he could see you? You look at him, Kabnis” (C, p. 217). But Kabnis scorns the old man as another preacher whose words, like Layman's, return him to a past he wishes were dead and forgotten. In the exchange that follows, Lewis smokes out Kabnis's fantasy of an aristocratic past and testifies eloquently, out loud this time, to the actual forces pressing in on Kabnis and others who struggle against the South and its legacy of slavery. “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods,” Kabnis crows:
Lewis: And black.
Kabnis: Aint much difference between blue and black.
Lewis: Enough to draw a denial from you. Cant hold them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk: dawn. They fight and bastardize you.
(C, p. 218)
Kabnis chooses silence, but the others begin to tell stories that connect their experience to the painful history of the race. Stella, one of the women enlisted for the night, looks at Father John and hears her father's voice singing and “when he could sing no mo, … aswayin an aleadin every song. A white man, took m mother an it broke th old man's heart” (C, pp. 218-19), she says and testifies about the shallow, bitter nature of her relations with men. In turn, Halsey responds with the story of his failure to pursue truly complex intimate relationships. “Common wench—na she aint, Lewis,” he says of Stella. “I used t love that girl. Yassur. An sometimes when th moon is thick an I hear dogs up th valley barkin an some old woman fetches out her song,” he confesses, “I sometimes get t thinkin that I still do” (C, pp. 220-21, my italics). Again, song communicates the spirit of place, and Lewis's speech turns these stunted individuals into a congregation and Halsey's basement into a queer Amen corner. Listening but not hearing the others' words, Kabnis reenters in the same bragging voice as before. “I was born and bred in a family of orators, that's what I was,” he begins, and denounces preachers, this time denying any connection between sermons and oratory. Drunk, he is more determined than ever to isolate his life from those around him. But suddenly, honest words burn through his pose, and he joins the witnessing.
Kabnis feels his quest for “beautiful an golden” words contradicted by his experience of the world and his self-knowledge. He opens the cage of his soul and sees “some twisted awful thing” branded there that “wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words,” he declares, and not the “beautiful words” he seeks to shape lyrically. To keep the demon quiet, Kabnis paradoxically delivers a heavy load of “misshapen, split-gut, tortured twisted words.” Moreover, in another abdication of responsibility, Kabnis accuses everyone else in Georgia of shoring up his inner monster. “Layman was feedin it back there,” he accuses. “White folks feed it cause their looks are words. Niggers, black niggers feed it cause theyre evil an their looks are words. Yallar niggers feed it. This whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t hell in a holy avalanche of words” (C, p. 224). Looks are words, they nourish Kabnis's malignant spirit and so, he thinks, do the sermons preached in black churches. Kabnis's peroration takes no heed of the songs that suffuse the landscape and express the beauty and pain of the people's soul.
In truth, Kabnis is the keeper of his soul. But he does not feed the nightmare thing terrorizing him the many-voiced songs of Cane. Instead, he feeds his soul a stream of abusive words and abdicates his mission to shape the life around him into a complex, inclusive vision of the South. He refuses to acknowledge the relationship between pain and beauty; foolishly, he believes he can separate the hideous “thing” from his soul. In surrender to terror, he composes a coda to Layman's tale of Mame Lamkins and her murdered unborn child that makes the “twisted awful thing” coextensive with his soul. “I wish to God some lynchin white man ud stick his knife through it [his soul] an pin it to a tree. An pin it to a tree. You hear me?” (C, pp. 224-25). His approach to voice mirrors his approach to personality. He misuses call-and-response so profoundly that he aborts its living, improvisatory soul. His words demand that those who hear him do so in a final, absolute way and make no response lest they contradict him. Here Kabnis acts out the distinction between a closed version of oratory and the open participatory sermons of the black church. For in an uncreative, dead-end way he is an orator. Perhaps most terrible of all, he calls a “lynchin white man” to murder the soul he cannot face and, as he utters this wish, deadens his being. His words, not the looks or words or acts of anyone else, white or black, paralyze him and reduce his voice to a stuttering agent of disintegration.
Kabnis's soul-denying, soul-destroying testimony silences the Amen corner. Because his catalytic voice and presence are now “completely cut out” (C, p. 226), and because he feels so intensely the failing promise of those he meets, Lewis leaves, abruptly and silently—for good. Though he departs without speech, his plunge into the night is not a negative act, not simply an escape. For his soul's sake Lewis ascends and reenters the elemental, passionate reality of a landscape resonant with the soul of the people, the earth, and the universe. The song heard above in the night releases Lewis from the limited, shrinking voices in the hell-hole within. But Toomer does not accompany Lewis. Lewis goes into the night alone to discover its song. As if partly under the influence of Kabnis's nullifying words, Toomer grants Lewis only a symbolic acknowledgment of the desire to seek the people's song and soul in the open.
Lewis's going signifies Kabnis's failure to use call-and-response truly. No more words are spoken in the reader's presence until morning when Halsey tells the women to leave and Kabnis to get to work. Alone with Father John, Kabnis parodies the reciprocal call-and-response pattern. As if feeding his malignant, hungry soul, “words gush from Kabnis” at Father John. He pretends to ask questions, but his monologue offers the old man no chance to respond. Moreover, his words attack Father John. He would “burn an rip your soul,” like the whites did to Mame Lamkins' baby. “Your soul. Ha. Nigger soul. A gin soul that gets drunk on preachers' words. An screams. An shouts. God Almighty, how I hate that shoutin” (C, p. 232, my italics). Rejecting the old former slave and scorning the shouts, the original spirituals of slavery time, Kabnis turns away from the mission of voice—“Caroling softly souls of slavery”—that Toomer embraced in “Song of the Son.” Meanwhile, Carrie Kate appears, and when the old man's lips begin to move and he responds to Kabnis with the single word, “sin,” Kabnis tries to shut him up. Even in front of Carrie Kate, he abuses Father John. Then, in an apparent attempt to recover her respect, he tells her, ironically in the voice of a preacher, that “th only sin is whats done against th soul.” Forgetting his offenses against his and others' souls, he adds absurdly, self-absolvingly, “Th whole world is a conspiracy t sin, especially in America, an against me. I'm the victim of their sin. I'm what sin is” (C, p. 236). Again, Kabnis trivializes the idea, the word, and the act of oppression by reducing it to the scale of his existence. “Sin,” repeats Father John and responds to Kabnis's repeated calls to “shut up” by slowly speaking his brief text in answer to Carrie Kate. Despite Kabnis, she and Father John create a genuine call-and-reponse, whose intimacy is a long-shared regard and silent communication across a gulf of unspoken words, thoughts, and feelings.
Implicitly, Toomer testifies to the residual power of call-and-response. Slowly, in fragments encouraged patiently and lovingly by Carrie Kate, who also foils Kabnis's attempts to silence the old man, Father John answers: “The sin whats fixed … upon the white folks—… f telling Jesus—lies. O th sin th white folks 'mitted when they made the Bible lie” (C, p. 237). But his words evoke a dual response from his audience. “Carrie Kate is wet-eyed. Kabnis, contemptuous” (C, p. 238). What Carrie Kate calls sarcastically Kabnis's “best Amen” is another insult. Father John's cryptic revelation might become a healing-song if Kabnis absorbed the old man's historical and spiritual experience and understood that the old man's words vindicate his conviction that the only sin is what is done against the soul. Father John experienced sin as a curse upon the sacred words first spoken by the prophets and then written down in the Bible. To justify slavery's terrible injustice, white folks distorted the Bible into a profound spiritual lie. Against the odds, African-Americans held together as a people, partly through their interpretation and revision of the Bible in the oral tradition of their songs and sermons. With his failing strength Father John subtly calls Kabnis to reconsider his categorical distinctions between preaching and oratory. He knows that sermons and speeches are complementary forms of African-American culture. To become a black American artist able to express the people's experience, Ralph Kabnis needs to embrace both secular and spiritual oral traditions, and maybe fuse them in a new voice—as Ralph Ellison was to do a generation or two later.
Father John's text identifies the continuing historical and spiritual significance of the crime of slavery. Because of his ancestral voice and experience, Father John becomes an oracular presence whose words anticipate the fusion of new and old meanings. But who will carry on his oracular role? Lewis is gone; and after Carrie Kate draws “the fever out” of Kabnis's “hot cheeks,” he trudges upstairs in silence. Tragically, Kabnis succumbs to a false myth of deliverance. Neither he nor any single individual can rescue the black South. His work is the artistic work of finding a suitable voice and form through which to express and imagine the world. But he reacts guiltily to the wish of others that they be delivered from evil; mired in ambiguities and ambivalence, he despairs and perversely makes his home in a labyrinth of belittling words. Still, Kabnis's silent pasage upstairs may signify a desire to purge his voice of its egotism.
Now only Carrie Kate remains with Father John, and on her knees she murmurs the last words spoken in Cane: “Jesus, come” (C, p. 239). But there is no one to fulfill the old man's mission and build a new testament on traditions nourished during slavery. Throughout “Kabnis,” and for that matter Cane, Jesus is invoked as an actual historical figure and a potential force for change. Carrie Kate's call quietly, patiently, intimately testifies to her faith in such a person as a force of life and love. Her call is an imperative, too; perhaps one or two or many will come to lead, if not in her time, then after, and perhaps the word will become flesh in acts performed by the people, as prophesied both by the scriptures and the African-American oral tradition. Her prayer is the prayer of Toomer's black madonna, the prayer of his black South, the prayer, too, of his book of the people.
After a silence Toomer responds to Carrie Kate's call; and his “song of an end” carries the rhythm of beginning as well. The human figures left on stage are Father John and Carrie Kate—an old man and a young woman whose vitality wanes with his approaching death. In answer to her call to Jesus, Toomer looks to the world and finds what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “dearest freshness deep down things.”27 “Outside,” Toomer writes, “the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town” (C, p. 239). Through an enabling metaphor Toomer keeps faith with Carrie Kate's call. His response hints at miraculous possibilities: perhaps the unborn child throbbing in the Negress's womb will awaken the black South to the promise of a new day. Meanwhile, as an artist Toomer pours out his song. His voice becomes a nesting place for Kabnis and other missing voices until they are ready to take up the story. As a tale “Kabnis” heightens the success of Toomer's quest for vocation in Cane—all the more so because he allows Ralph Kabnis the freedom to pause in the pursuit of his form and voice. Absorbing Kabnis's pain, Toomer discovers a healing personal voice possessed of but not beholden to the voices of the past.
6
Like Lewis in “Kabnis,” briefly and movingly, Jean Toomer touches the soul, “merges with his source and lets the pain and beauty of the South meet him there” (C, p. 214). Perhaps this is why Cane is so central and why black writers who follow speak of it as a promise-song they answer in their work.28 In a transitional time of artistic experiment and black awakening, Toomer absorbed nuances of call-and-response, especially the inspiration of breath and spirit between speech and silence. Hearing the people's song, he experienced the intimate intervals before interior individual voices dare to join in and improvise variations on the song. In Cane Toomer listened to and collaborated with voices of the dead, the living, and the unborn; in Cane Jean Toomer discovered the possibilities and, for him, the limits of reciprocal voice.
Notes
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Jean Toomer to Waldo Frank, quoted by Brian Benson and Mabel Dillard in Jean Toomer (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), p. 29, and by Nellie Y. McKay in Jean Toomer, Artist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 46-47. McKay's book, which I read after writing this chapter, is an important study of both Toomer's work and life.
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Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; rpt., New York: Dover, 1969), p. 98, my italics.
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Jean Toomer to Claude Barnett, quoted in Benson and Dillard, Jean Toomer, p. 33, and in McKay, Jean Toomer, Artist, p. 180.
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Barbara Bowen, “Untroubled Voice: Call-and-Response in Cane,” Black American Literature Forum 16, no. 1 (Spring 1982), 15. I have one difference with Bowen's indispensable, groundbreaking essay. Call-and-response is a pattern and technique central to the forms of Afro-American oral culture, i.e., the spirituals, the work songs, and often in their testamental quality, the sermons, the blues, sometimes the tales. Certainly, African-American writers use symbolic variations of the call-and-response pattern within literary forms and genres, but I think Bowen overstates the case when she names call-and-response “a distinctively Afro-American literary form.” Call-and-response accounts for the brilliant design of Cane, and this is not exclusively an African-American or an American vernacular quality, though Toomer's particular use of call-and-response is “distinctly Afro-American.”
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Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 21. All references to Cane are to this edition; the volume will be cited hereafter as C.
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Quoted by McKay in Jean Toomer, Artist, p. 47.
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Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; rpt., with author's introduction, New York: Random House, 1982), p. 9.
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Jean Toomer, The Wayward and the Seeking, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), p. 123, my italics.
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W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), pp. 336, 341.
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John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 167.
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For some reason this arc, which appears on the second of two otherwise blank pages preceeding “Karintha” in the first edition, is missing from the 1969 reprint issued by Harper and Row as a Perennial Classic. This is perplexing because this reissue includes Toomer's arcs on the otherwise similarly blank pages that divide the southern from the northern stories and the northern stories from “Kabnis.” The only other difference between the 1923 first edition and the 1969 reissue is that the latter substitutes an introduction by Arna Bontemps for Waldo Frank's original foreword. Incidentally, on the configuration of form, region, and race in Cane there is no better study than Charles T. Davis's “Jean Toomer and the South: Region and Race as Elements within a Literary Imagination,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 7, no. 2 (Fall 1974), 23-37.
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Toomer to Frank, quoted in Benson and Dillard, Jean Toomer, p. 29.
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Bowen, “Untroubled Voice,” p. 12; this blues arrangement of Barlo's words is Bowen's.
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For Toomer's account of the impact of Winesburg, Ohio on his work see The Wayward and the Seeking, p. 120, and a letter to Anderson quoted in Benson and Dillard, Jean Toomer, pp. 23-24.
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James Joyce, Ulysses (rpt., New York: Random House, 1961), p. 37.
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Whether eight or eighty years of age, black men have had to contend with the epithet of boy; African-Americans and their writers have responded to this humiliation with the counter epithet, “Big Boy.” In the poetry of Sterling Brown and the fiction of Toomer and Richard Wright, for example, “Big Boy” connotes sometimes craft and confidence and always power and defiance of white rules and conventions, often to the death. Zora Neale Hurston, however, cites a quite different meaning for “Big Boy” in her “Glossary of Harlem Slang.” “But in the South,” she writes, “it means fool and is a prime insult.” See her Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston (Berkeley: Turtle Island, 1985), p. 91.
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Sterling A. Brown, “Old Lem,” The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 180.
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See Sterling Brown's brilliantly voiced counterpoint between southern and northern racial landscapes in “Cabaret,” a complex poem that in its fragmentation and dislocation of past and present idiom and history recalls and responds to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Brown, Collected Poems, pp. 101-3.
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In “Kabnis” Toomer makes the passage to Camp Ground a folk song at once religious, secular, and ironic, as if to remind us of the urgent, historical roots driving many expressions of black Christianity.
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See Michael S. Harper's recontextualization of this predicament in “Christian's Box Seat: So What,” in Images of Kin: New and Selected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 175-76.
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At times in Cane, Toomer's determination to sing in prose may lead to a strained and overwrought lyricism, a needlessly artificial language.
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See Michael G. Cooke's discussion of intimacy in Cane in Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 177-99, and specifically in “Bona and Paul,” pp. 177-86.
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Michael S. Harper, “Here Where Coltrane Is,” Images of Kin, p.160.
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Onida Estes-Hicks, “Jean Toomer and the Aesthetic Adventure,” manuscript, p. 172. For a suggestive discussion of “Kabnis,” see Maria Isabel Caldeira's “Jean Toomer's Cane: The Anxiety of the Modern Artist,” Callaloo, 8, no. 3 (Fall 1985), 546-50.
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James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (rpt., New York: Viking, 1964), p. 37.
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Toomer uses “mourning” for “morning,” although “morning,” as James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson point out, is the correct word in the song. For the complete text of the song see The Books of American Negro Spirituals (1925-26; rpt., New York: Viking Press, 1969), 1: 162-63. Nevertheless, Toomer heard the song sung “mourning,” and the pun serves his purposes in “Kabnis.”
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Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (London: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 27.
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Alice Walker views Toomer as a person with a “soul surprised by nothing.” “I did not read Cane until 1967, but it has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree,” she writes. “I love it passionately; could not possibly exist without it.” Interviews with Black Writers, ed. John T. O'Brien (New York: Liveright, 1973), p. 200. Also see Walker's comments on Toomer and Cane in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), pp. 60-65, 231-35, 258-59.
Ernest J. Gaines, too, came to Toomer late—the mid-1960s—after he'd set his course as a writer. Still, he has said that “if I had read Jean Toomer earlier, he would have been the greatest influence on me as a writer. His Cane would have influenced me.” Asked why, Gaines answered: “Because of its short chapters, the songs between the stories, the roads, the South” (Ernest Gaines to the author in Baton Rouge, La., May 17, 1985).
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