Cane

Summary

Cane, published in 1923, is Jean Toomer's experimental book of sketches, poems and drama about African American life in the rural South and the urban North, and it is regarded as one of the founding works of the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer, raised mainly in Washington, D.C., spent two months in 1921 as a substitute principal at a school in Sparta, Georgia, where he heard the folk songs and spirituals of the black peasantry and felt that this culture was passing away. The book is in three parts. The first is set in Georgia and consists of portraits of women, mostly told by an observing narrator, interspersed with lyric poems such as 'Reapers', 'November Cotton Flower', 'Song of the Son' and 'Georgia Dusk'. Karintha, whose skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, is desired by men from childhood; Becky, a white woman with two black sons, is shunned by both races; Carma, Fern and Esther each embody a different form of beauty, longing and frustration. The section ends with 'Blood-Burning Moon', the story of a rivalry between a black man and a white man over a woman, which ends in a lynching. The second part moves to Washington and Chicago, where city life confines people in houses and theaters and boxes; in pieces such as 'Seventh Street', 'Rhobert', 'Avey', 'Box Seat' and 'Bona and Paul', characters struggle to connect across barriers of class, race and convention. The third part is 'Kabnis', a drama-like story of Ralph Kabnis, an educated Northern black teacher who comes to Georgia and is tormented by fear, by the memory of violence and by his uncertain relationship to the Southern past. Toomer's lyrical, impressionistic style influenced later writers. The book includes a lynching, racial slurs of the period and sexual themes, and it is suitable only for mature upper-level students.

Top Lessons

• A mixed form

  Cane combines poems, stories and drama. Students can ask why Toomer chose this form.

• The South and memory

  Toomer saw Southern folk culture as passing away. The book is partly an elegy.

• Barriers

  In the North, walls and boxes separate people.

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