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How does it feel to be a problem? Revisiting Cane and the life of Jean Toomer

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How does it feel to be a problem? Revisiting Cane and the life of Jean Toomer

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Content How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?
Revisiting Cane and the Life of Jean Toomer
by
Douglas Manuel
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Literature and Creative Writing)
August 2021
Copyright 2021 Douglas Manuel

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………….

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Chapter 1: Death Set the Beginning in Motion: Descending South to Start the Circle……

1
Chapter 2: The Negro in Vogue and Toomer’s Connection to Greenwich Village and
the Lost Generation in the Early 20th Century…………..…………………………

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Chapter 3: Building a Circle towards “Kabnis”…………………………………………...

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Chapter 4: The Beginning is also the End: “Kabnis” Cane’s Final Song…………………

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Chapter 5: Testify………………………………………………………………………….

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Works Cited…………………………………………………………………….………….

129

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Abstract
In his revolutionary 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois famously posed
an unasked question that he felt swirling all around him because of his Black but able-to-pass-
white-body: “How does it feel to be a problem” (Du Bois 43)? Today the answer to this question
for Black folks is very much the same as it was in 1903, as we still see Black bodies destroyed
daily before our eyes on the news, on TV, and on our social media timelines and news feeds.
And in 1923, Jean Toomer, another Black but able-to-pass-white-body, published Cane, a genre-
defying work that directly answers Du Bois’ question and embodies another one Du Bois’
famous adages from The Souls of Black Folk, double-consciousness, the idea that Black folks are
always both “an America [and] a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body” (43). By providing a brief biographical sketch of Jean
Toomer, a close-reading of the first two parts of Cane, and deep analysis of “Kabnis,” Cane’s
final section, this project argues that Toomer himself and the characters of Cane enact the
twoness Du Bois articulated in The Souls of Black Folk and fall victim to the precarity that
comes with it, which oftentimes leads to manic panic attacks, severe moments of anxiety, and
seemingly irrational actions.
The first chapter of this project depends mainly on biography and details the events that
led Toomer to write Cane and situates my arguments within current Toomer scholarship. The
second chapter then provides historical context to the era in which Cane was published, paying
special attention to the ways the Cane was birthed from both the Black and white literary scenes
of the time. Chapter three delivers a close-reading on the first two sections of Cane, zooming in
on the text’s empathetic eye for female characters and the way Toomer creates unity in Cane by
utilizing liminal images (cane, purple, dusk, smoke, etc.) that embody his multiracial body and

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Cane’s hybridity when it comes to genre. And then with this project’s final chapter, I attempt
something that many scholars avoid: an exegesis of “Kabnis,” Cane’s arresting and oblique final
section. With this part of my project, I display how “Kabnis” catches many of the imagistic balls
that Cane has thrown in the air while also showing how the story’s titular character, Kabnis, is
the manifestation of a Black man nearly driven mad by the weight of racial and gender ideology
in America. And in this way Kabnis is Jean Toomer, and Kabnis is me, Douglas Manuel II, as I,
too, have almost lost myself because of the suffocating forces of race and gender binaries.
This project then ends with Testify, a collection of poems that explores the issues of Cane
but through a contemporary lens.

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1. Death Set the Beginning in Motion: Descending South to Start the Circle
In December of 1922, looking out the chilled window as the train sliced through the chest
of the south, leaving a wake of gray-black billowy engine breath overhead, Jean Toomer saw
cane reapers working the land and harvesting crops. Toomer and his uncle, Walter, were on their
way to bury Toomer’s grandfather Pinchney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the first African
American to become a governor of a U.S. state. All in the air, thick and musty and sweet, was the
smell of cane (Dorris 21). The green, fecund south saturated with its humidity, cool this time of
year but still warmer than Washington D.C. and the cold, icy world of the Pinchbacks that
Toomer had been inhabiting.
Toomer had caught a whiff of this odor before, had smelled the way the cane made the
world sweetly scented brown, brown as the earth, brown as the color of his skin in summer. It
was when he was stationed in Sparta, Georgia as a teacher, indirectly looking for his father,
directly looking for work, and an escape from the controlling clutches of PBS Pinchback, who
always acted as if he was Toomer’s father, but he wasn’t Toomer’s father. Nathan Toomer was,
but Nathan wasn’t a father either, as Nathan left Toomer’s mother and never returned. Jean
Toomer always seems to be looking for his father. I know something about looking for my
father. I know something about having a father who left and didn’t return.
Heading South, heading to the Crescent City, on a train carrying the remains of his dead
grandfather, Toomer looked out the window and saw the title of the manuscript he’d been
working on. He saw the end of something. He saw the beginning of something else. His
grandfather was dead. The great Pinchback was no longer alive, but something else was being
born. A new negro. A new man. A new way of thinking. As the train descended deeper into the
south, Toomer saw Cane. He saw his book incarnate. The flesh of the Black men working the

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fields, the sweat dripping from their brows, the sweet, sweet sweat that beget all this cane, all
this sweet and odorous cane. He had begun the first touch of the manuscript while on a train back
to Washington D.C. from Sparta, Georgia in 1922. His time there had convinced him that he
needed to document the old, dying-out South before its candle was flushed out.
Pinchback died, and as he was dying those years in Washington, D.C., Toomer was
bathing him, nursing him, and writing the material that would become “Kabnis,” that enigmatic
and dynamic final short story of Cane. As Toomer watched Pinchback stare dark death in the
face, he limned the nascent images that he would later use for “Kabnis,” images of that old Black
man in Halsey’s basement, the man Lewis calls John the Baptist, the old blind black man who
sees into Kabnis’s soul and mumbles the words “sin” and “death” all night. I see Pinchback
stammering similar abstractions at Toomer, telling the young man how he needs to get his life
together--by this time Toomer had already dropped out of many colleges and had taken on
various careers and abandoned them--talking about respectability, talking about Toomer
maintaining the family name. Indeed, it is easy to see Toomer thinking of Pinchback as an old
blind Black man yelling platitudes into the humid D.C. evenings, an old Black man talking,
talking, talking, and no one listening.
I once saw my father speak for a full hour without a pause, without even looking outside
of himself to grab someone else’s eyes.
On a train carrying the cold corpse of Pinchback, Toomer arrived in New Orleans in
December 1922. The season was Advent, and New Orleans was clad in all the royal purples that
ring in the birth of the Lord (Dorris 21). Besides the sweet taste of cane, renewal was on the
breath of the city. A savior would soon be born, a savior who would wash away the scent of sin
and death. A savior who was saying that all of our sins are paid for. A savior who could have

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been the king of the Jews, but instead chose to dwell with the downtrodden, with the sinners, the
infidels, the harlots. Pinchback was buried at the historic Metairie Cemetery, and a few days
later, Jean Toomer on the 26th of December, the day after the birth of the Lord, turned 27 years
old.
When I was 27 years old, I returned home to Indiana.
The first time I read Cane I was in undergrad at Arizona State University. The first time I
read Cane I hated it. I was so lost. I hated Cane because I didn’t understand why I should care
about the sliced field rat in “Reapers,” because Becky died poor and alone for sleeping with a
Black man and birthing Black babies. I hated Cane because Barlo shouldn’t have coldly
dismissed Esther like that, because I just knew Tom Burwell was going to burn, he then did, just
as I thought he would but in a worse fashion than I could have ever imagined. “Stench of burning
flesh soaked the air. Tom’s eyes popped,” Toomer revealed (Cane 37). I hated Cane because I
didn’t know what to make of “Seventh Street,” “Rhobart,” and “Calling Jesus.” I didn’t have the
critical teeth back then to comprehend the urban waste land Toomer was making of the north’s
cities, and the way he was depicting the state of anxiety these cities produced in Black folks. I
hated Cane because Bona and Paul couldn’t make it work, couldn’t see over the tall walls of
white supremacy in order to be together, just as been the case in so many of my own interracial
relationships. I hated Cane because even though I couldn’t fully unpackage and access all of the
themes and messages of “Kabnis,” I still saw myself in Kabnis and that scared me. Just as
Toomer said of himself, I, too, was Kabnis, the broken Black man screaming mangled poems in
the cane-air of a Georgia night. I didn’t want to be the drunken poet in the robe everyone was
laughing at.

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I loved Cane in pieces and bits but not the whole of it. I’ve never loved my father or
myself completely either. As I glanced at the racially ambiguous person on the back cover of
Cane, I immediately thought to myself, How much Black blood he got in him? The one drop rule
coloring all my thoughts, shackling me to notions of purity and race. Jean Toomer spent most of
his life after the publication of Cane trying to deshackle himself from notions of purity and race,
of limiting binaries. He longed to be outside of labels, outside of race, neither white nor Black,
just a person, an “American,” a member of the “blue race” as he would later write in his poem
“Blue Meridian.” Toomer, of course, also carried this outsider position, this neither this nor that
aesthetic when it came to craft and the making of Cane, a hybrid work that declared itself as
neither poetry nor prose, as neither fiction nor drama, but all of it all at once, just as Toomer was
all the races in his blood at once. In 1922, in a letter to the editors of the Liberator, Toomer
wrote, “Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood mixtures: French, Dutch,
Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian” (Cane 155). And at its best, Cane holds all these
genres together and swoons them into a cohesive work, but at its worse, Cane is dense,
directionless, and oblique. These are the moments that lost me. And I’m not alone. Of Cane’s
indirection and at times inaccessibility, W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “I cannot, for the life of me,
for instance see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could
understand instead of vaguely guess at; ‘Box Seat’ muddles me to the last degree and I am not
sure that I know what ‘Kabnis’ is about'' (Cane 185). But actually, it is this very obliqueness, this
very obfuscation that makes Cane so compelling and ahead of its time. It’s the way Toomer’s
life demonstrates the shortcomings of essentialist notions of race, of gender, and the way that
Cane is a tornado of meaning spinning poetry, short stories, and drama into one autonomous
body that makes Cane so singular and extraordinary in its execution. Cane doesn’t read like any

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of the other texts of its era, and that’s because no other author of this era lived the hybridized,
doubled life Toomer lived.
This exploration will begin by contextualizing Jean Toomer’s dual and straddled
positions in both the Harlem Renaissance and white modernist communities, more specifically
the Greenwich Village and Lost Generation scene. During this part of the text, I will detail the
origins and tenets of the Harlem Renaissance and how Toomer’s Cane became a shining
exemplar for what progenitors of the renaissance wanted out of Black literature, explaining why
many scholars feel as though Cane is one of the inaugural works of the movement. After this
discussion, I will then examine Toomer’s connections and affinities to white modernist writers
from the Lost Generation like Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, and most importantly Waldo
Frank, who wrote the original introduction for Cane and helped Toomer secure Cane’s
publication with Boni & Liveright in 1923.
Next, I reveal Cane as a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman mirroring the identity
formation of Toomer as he wrestled with coming to terms with his multiracial background and
finding his place in the essentialist and racist America of the early 20th century that forced him
to choose between being Black or white instead of letting him embrace both identities equally as
he wanted. This forced pigeonholing by readers, thinkers, and critics alike combined with
Toomer’s disappointment in the literary world and his longing for a more spiritual fusion of his
disparate selves eventually leads him to abandon the literary circles of both the Harlem
Renaissance and the Greenwich Village communities in order to become a devout mystic
follower of George Gurdjieff and to declare that he is neither Black nor white but instead a
member a new race that he called “American” or more simply but just as illusive, a member “of
a united human race” (Turner 121). Mirroring the Great Migration and his own personal travels

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south and then back north, Cane’s geographic structure of southern life in part one, the
unexpected chilling aspects of northern life in part two, and Kabnis’ lostness in both spaces
exhibit Toomer’s image systems in Cane, and how his personal signifiers of cane, dusk, and the
color purple enact and embody his personal desire to debunk the racial dichotomies of white and
Black in America. Moreover, here I also explore Cane’s obsession with masculine and feminine
miscommunication, polarized as the racial split, establishing and troubling another linked binary,
the result of horrors of white supremacy and gender expectations. I reveal Toomer’s immense
empathy, tenderness and even identifications with Black female characters. In fact, his mother
and grandmother, although not as prominent figures in his life as Pinchback, influenced him
greatly, and he channeled their influence into the multiple women in Cane. Of this affinity and
empathy for Black women characters because of his mother and grandmother, reviewing The
Wayward and the Seeking, an compliation of Toomer’s prose, Alice Walker writes,
Feminist will be intrigued by what Toomer writes about his mother and grandmother. His
was an intelligent woman, utterly dominated by her father [Pinchback], who she
spent her whole, relatively short life trying to defy. She died when Toomer was fifteen,
after the second of two mysterious at-home operations that, as describe here [in the book
The Wayward and the Seeking], read like abortions. His grandmother was also dominated
by her husband, until his health began to decline in old age (Cane 262).
My mother died when I was eight years old. I know something about finding more empathy for
the Black female experience by considering the plight of one’s mother. I never knew my
maternal grandfather, but I know my mother and my grandmother both never spoke of him.
Scrutinizing Cane in sequential order, this discussion will then end by doing a more
detailed close reading of arguably Cane’s most difficult and inaccessible pieces, that final short

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story drama closing Cane, “Kabnis.” “Kabnis” is one of the first pieces of Cane that Toomer
began drafting. The short story drama came to life in him as he was on the train returning to
Washington D.C. after teaching in Sparta, Georgia. He completed the first draft of “Kabnis” in
December of 1921 and considered beginning Cane with it but decided instead to leave it for last
(Cane lii). Even more so than many of the other pieces in Cane, “Kabnis” especially intrigues me
because of the way it troubles genre by utilizing literary techniques from the world of short
fiction, poetry, and drama. I am also very interested in this part of Cane because Toomer told his
then mentor and dear friend Waldo Frank that Toomer himself was the short story drama’s titular
character Ralph Kabnis. In a letter written sometime in mid-January, 1923, Toomer says it quite
plainly and writes, “And Kabnis is me” (Cane 167). “Kabnis” also seems extremely worthy of
scholarly attention because Toomer’s grandfather, who helped raise him and was a key mentor,
who Toomer both admired and resented, Pincheny Benton Stewart Pinchback, “died the day after
[Toomer] finished the first draft of “Kabnis” (Turner 124). Yet as I have said, Toomer was
drawn to the south because of his mother and grandmother. He loved to hear their folktales and
traditions and would follow a former slave, Old Willis, that the Pinchbacks had hired to do
chores around property just to hear the old man’s stories about Black life in the south (Cane l).
Moreover, I am enthralled by this section of Cane and would like to perform a closer reading of
it because I feel as though many scholarly readings of the text do not pay enough attention to all
of the ways “Kabnis” catches and resolves many of the recurring images and obsessions of the
Cane, nearly ignoring Toomer’s use of lyric-meaning-making through remix, repetition, and
refrain. And even worse, some readings of Cane only expediently cover this part of the text and
nearly avoid it because of its oblique, fragmented construction and its seemingly ambiguous
ending. Besides dissatisfaction with the work’s ending, some, like stage director and producer,

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Kenneth Macgowan, also yearned for more narrative movement and arc in the story. Toomer
originally tried to get “Kabnis” produced for the stage, but Macgowan rejected it and said, “it
lacked a strong plot” (Cane 81). “Kabnis,” like Cane as a whole, eschews notions of linear plot
and logic in favor of circular logic and the exploration and explosion of binaries.
To ground and orient my critical perspective of Cane, I will primarily rely on W.E.B. Du
Bois’s question at the beginning of The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a
problem?”--as I feel as though Kabnis and so many of the characters in Cane are living
embodiments of the answer to this question (Du Bois 43). In addition to this key idea from Du
Bois, I will also be utilizing his concept of double-consciousness in which he states that Black
folks always sense their “twoness--an America, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, who dogged strength alone keeps it
from being torn asunder” (43). In this essay, I will argue that Toomer himself and the characters
of Cane enact this twoness and fall victim to the precarity that comes with it, which oftentimes
leads to manic panic attacks, severe moments of anxiety, and seemingly irrational actions.
Another pairing of diverging notions I will make use of is the rift in the New Negro
Movement and the Harlem Renaissance that can be seen in Du Bois’s emphasis on education and
Booker T. Washington’s call for more labor-oriented strategies for Black amelioration. This
perspective is especially witnessed in the second section of Cane when the text moves from the
rural south to the urban north. Cane complicates the struggles of these metanarratives while also
interrogating and troubling the era’s Uplift School, which centered around Du Bois’s and
Washington’s ideas of Black folks gaining their humanity in the eyes of white folks through
spiritual piety and respectability politics, and the era’s Cabaret School, which found freedom and
humanity in the jazz and blues music, queerness, and the bootlegging nightclub scene. All of

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these ideas surrounding doubling and doubles will be crucial to my reading of Cane as the text is
full of opposing doubles that Toomer rubs up against one another in order to make meaning,
deepen characterization, move the plot, and to call for a liminal existence, a third way not caught
in stream of binaries. Additionally, I will make use of Toomer’s own writings and feelings about
himself and Cane in order to demonstrate the autobiographical nature of Cane as a whole and
especially “Kabnis.”
My intervention in conversations and scholarship surrounding Toomer and Cane will be
my close attention to the ways that the book eschews essentialist views of race (and gender) and
anticipates contemporary understandings of the arbitrary and non-biological but very powerful
social construction of race in American. I will also be interceding into studies on Toomer and
Cane by closely examining the numerous doubles and pairings that the text offers, showing that
the text refutes these dualities in favor of more liminal and hybridized formations for thought.
Furthermore, my reading of Cane will display how the text is not only a critique of the binary
Black and white race constructions permeating the era, but also an indictment of the examples of
Black masculinity made available to Toomer and other Black men at the beginning of the 20th
century, which one can see in male characters who can only see female characters as possessions
or a thing to be fixed or understood instead of as human beings with agency. Despite Toomer’s
best efforts at sensitivity with these issues, his attempts fall short under the scrutiny of our
contemporary gaze.

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2. The Negro in Vogue and Toomer’s Connection to Greenwich Village and the Lost
Generation in the Early 20th Century
Exactly 20 years before the publication of Cane, in 1903, in his crucial and seminal work,
The Souls of Black Folk (A book that interestingly enough, like Cane, is also hybridized when it
comes to genre, containing “essays, sketches, and stories on African American politics, history,
education, music, and culture.”), W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared that “the problem of the
Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” (The Norton Anthology of Theory &
Criticism 867). And in the early years of the turn of the 20th century, the Great Migration began,
which saw hundreds of thousands of Black people migrating from the rural South, with its brutal
lynchings, rigid color line, and larcenous sharecropping, to the crowded, expensive, and urban
north for more economic opportunity, more freedom, and more autonomy. Although many cities
received these migrants, like Chicago and Detroit, Harlem, New York became the “Negro capital
of the world” and was a cultural mecca where Black artists and thinkers of all disciplines and
types flourished. According to the Poetry Foundation, more than 175,000 African American
settled in Harlem (An introduction). Further demonstrating the scope and importance of the
Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson, writes “Over the course of six decades, some six million
black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an
uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become
a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political
order of every city it touched” (Wilkerson 9). In the foreword to his era-defining text, The New
Negro, Alain Locke described this transformative time as follows, “There is ample evidence of a
New Negro in the latest phases of social change and progress, but still more in the internal world
of the Negro mind and spirit” (Locke xxv). Yet, this interest in Blackness was not just limited to

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Black folks. As Langston Hughes would later explain, the Negro was in vogue, and publishers
like Benjamin Huebsch, Alfred Knopf, and Horace Liveright were looking for Black pieces of
literature to sell to the newly interested white audiences (Fabre 163). This is the world in which
Jean Toomer’s Cane came into being in September of 1923. The book was originally accepted
by Liveright on January 8, 1923.
But how could a man who had only lived in New York in brief and temporary fits
produce a text that was deemed one of the inaugural works of the Harlem Renaissance? And
more importantly, how can a man whose relationship to Blackness can best be described as
tenuous be responsible for a book that started one of the most important Black literary
movements in the history of America? As Genevieve Fabre writes, “Cane eludes description and
categories and can be seen as both a part of, and apart from, the renaissance” (Fabre 110). In all
actuality, Cane was “Published before the guidelines for New Negro writings were set in
Locke’s seminal anthology” and is really “more of a forerunner than a direct emanation of the
movement” (110). Cane and Toomer’s ill-fit for the Harlem Renaissance was a blow that
illuminated Toomer’s own need to accept his hybridity, even multiplicity. Like its racially
ambiguous author, Cane is a work that was really born of two worlds, his experiences in Sparta,
Georgia with its Black rural, spiritual tradition and the urban modernist literary circles of
Greenwich Village, which Toomer was granted access by Waldo Frank. Without Toomer’s
temporary stay in Georgia as substitute principal for Georgia Normal and Industrial Institution in
1921 and his chance meeting of Waldo Frank in 1919 at a literary party for Lola Ridge (Ridge
later published “Kabnis” in Broom.), Cane may very well have not ever existed at all (Larson 9-
10). Cane came to the world from this strategic interaction as well as from Toomer’s travel to the
south that made his hybridity both physically and geographically visceral.

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Sparta, Georgia was the place that Toomer really first came into contact with Black life.
His life, in Washington D.C., New York, and at his many failed attempts at many colleges across
the country, were mostly integrated, and Toomer, because of his fair skin, could usually pass for
white and live amongst the white world pretty freely, minus the sometime rumblings about him
being East Indian, Native American, Jewish, or of Italian descent (10). So Sparta was the first
time in Toomer’s life where he lived with Black folks and lived as a Black person. And yet
because of all the stories and songs he’d heard of the south while growing up from Old Willis,
his grandmother, and his mother, he linked the south with his mother and a female presence,
after he first heard the “songs of sorrow” that Du Bois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk in
Sparta, Georgia. Those songs that Du Bois called “the greatest gift of the negro people” (Du Bois
265). And just like Du Bois, Toomer found great power, dignity, and expression in these songs.
When thinking about his time in Sparta, he later wrote:
The setting was crude in a way, but strangely rich and beautiful. . . . There was a valley,
the valley of ‘Cane,’ with smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night. A family of
back-country Negroes had only recently moved into a shack not too far away. They sang.
And this was the first time I’d ever heard folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich
and sad and joyous and beautiful (Turner 123).
Toomer was so enthralled and entranced by these sorrow songs that he began writing “Kabnis,”
the final part of Cane, but its hectic pace fitted himself as a poet struggling with multiple
identities, writing it on the train when he left Sparta to return to Washington D.C. Fueled and
vigorously moved by these songs and angered by the rest of the Black Spartan community’s
aversion to them, Toomer later wrote, “I realized with deep regret that the spirituals . . . would be
certain to die out. . .The folk spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so

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beautiful. Its death so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this is the feeling I put into
Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end” (Turner 123). Further describing this
pivotal experience in a letter to Claude Mckay, Toomer wrote, “A visit to Georgia last fall was
the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done. I heard folk-songs come from
the lips of Negro peasants. . . And a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang
suddenly to life and responded to them” (Cane 155). Seeing Black people survive with dignity in
the face of the horrors of the south inspired Toomer to lyrically bring them to life. He used
techniques learned from white modernists, but used them to reveal the unsettling psychological
pressures of modernity, in effect achieving a “deformation of mastery”—Houston Baker’s
famous term for how Black writing could use white forms but torque them for critique, and to
show revolt.
The other pillar of influence for Cane was Toomer’s affinity for the writing of white
modernists and his friendship with Waldo Frank. In 1917 after dropping out of multiple colleges
in the Midwest, Toomer returned to Washington D.C. and then again pursued higher education at
New York University and New York City College. There, while working in the college library,
he came across the works of George Bernard Shaw. According to Nellie McKay, “Shaw had a
powerful influence on Toomer for the next two years” (McKay 25). Toomer first encountered
Shaw’s work while he was in Milwaukee, and the bard’s work “came strongly in [Toomer’s] life
and gave it a radical turn” (Turner 107). So by the time Toomer was in New York, reading Shaw
and Ibsen, as well, had become part of his routine. Recalling this time in later autobiographical
writings, Toomer writes, “So, what a program I had! Breakfast, early. Piano exercises. Study of
harmony and composition. Readings in literature--particularly Shaw and Ibsen. My own attempts
at writing. Lunch” (Turner 109). This influence can be seen in all the gestures of drama present

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in Cane, especially in “Theater,” “Box Seat,” and “Kabnis.” As Toomer continued to move
around and drop out of colleges and jobs, he encountered and devoured the works of Walt
Whitman, and by 1919, Toomer found himself back in New York, in Greenwich Village, right in
the middle of one of the epicenters of the Lost Generation. Around this time while reading
deeply and trying to embed himself in the New York’s local literary community, Toomer
attended a lecture “on Romain Rolland’s Jean Christope, given by Helena Dekay at the Rand
School [which] opened up the literary world for him. Toomer, whose given names were Nathan
Eugene, had admired the book for years and many scholars suspect Toomer even may have
decided to call himself Jean because of the hero’s namesake” (Larson 9). According to this line
of logic, Toomer also liked the fact that the name Jean was androgynous and wouldn’t reveal his
gender to readers, which foretells his identification with female characters, underscoring his
penchant for problematizing gender binaries, thus the need to discuss the myriad stories with key
women, oppressed, but commanding their stages, having their interiority. Again, Toomer’s
strong connection with his mother also led to this focus as well as him watching Nina Pinchback
struggle under the power of abusive men her whole life, beginning with her father, P.B.S.
Pinchback, continuing with Toomer’s father, Nathan Toomer, and with her second husband, Mr.
Combes, to whom she was married to when she died when Jean Toomer was just fifteen years
old (Larson 175). Witnessing all her struggles for agency and power in her own life made
Toomer especially empathetic to the intersectional plight of Black women.
Having now thoroughly ensconced himself in the scene by also meeting Waldo Frank at a
literary party, Toomer was now hanging out with Greenwich’s literary elite like Edwin Arlington
Robinson, Witter Bynner, Scofield Thayer, and Lola Ridge. “He recalled that during this period
he read the works of Waldo Frank, and he read Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Baudelaire,

15
Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and some Freud,” reports scholar Nellie McKay (29). Robert
Frost and Sherwood Anderson also end up being favorites of Toomer, who by 1922 is
corresponding back and forth with Anderson. In a letter dated December 18, 1922, Toomer
praises Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Triumph of the Egg and lets Anderson know that
“The beauty, and the full sense of life that these books contain are natural elements, like the rain
and sunshine, of my own spouting” (Rusch 17). For Toomer, the way that both Frost and
Anderson used the poetics of space and the identity of a locality to bring scope and weight to
their works was very influential. It seems as though Toomer wanted to do something similar with
Cane. As Toomer later writes in that same letter to Anderson, “My seed was planted in the cane-
and cotton-fields, and in the souls of black and white people in the small southern town. . . .
Winesburg, Ohio, and The Triumph of the Egg are elements of my growing. It is hard to think of
myself as maturing without them” (Rusch 18). In his later autobiographical selections, Toomer
also cites “the poems and program of the Imagists” claiming that “Their insistence of fresh
vision and on the perfect clean economical line was just what I had been looking for. I began
feeling that I had in my hands the tools for my own creation” (Turner 120). By reading deeply
and widely Toomer was beginning to develop his writing voice and style.
Yet, it can be argued that no white modernist writer influenced Toomer more than Waldo
Frank. In a letter to Gorham Munson on Halloween in 1922, Toomer wrote, “I cannot will out
Waldo. With the exception of Sherwood Anderson some years ago (and to a less extent, Frost
and Sandburg) Waldo is the only modern writer who has immediately influenced me. He is so
powerful and close, and he has so many elements that I need, that I would be afraid of downright
imitation if I were not so sure of myself” (Rusch 19). This crucial apprenticeship begins with a
chance meeting.

16
After Lola Ridge’s party, Toomer propitiously sees Frank in Central Park. The two strike
up another conversation, and “Frank [gives] his address to the younger man, who promised to
write him” (Larson 10). Soon the two of them would be writing letters back and forth. In their
initial letters, Toomer praises Frank’s Our America for its concern with American’s minorities
and immigrants, but lightly chastises Frank for not writing about Black folks in the text. In a
letter written on March 24, 1922, Toomer writes, “In your Our America I missed your not
including the Negro. I have often wondered about it. . . . No picture of a southern person is
complete without its bit of Negro-determined psychology” (Cane 145). By the end of the letter,
Toomer finds a way to slide in a request for Frank to read some of his drafts, which Toomer
describes as “sketches” that “are attempts at an artistic record of Negro and mixed-blood life”
(145). Poignantly, Toomer concludes writing, “I am reaching out. I have to. I wonder if you
wouldn't like to read a few of my things?” (146). And just like that Toomer had the champion
and mentor he needed to establish his literary career.
Toomer biographer, Charles Larson, opines that Frank probably took the time to read
Toomer’s work and to become his friend probably out of self-interest as “Horace Liveright,
Frank’s usual publisher, had declined his most recent novel, City Block, because of possible
obscenity charges” (Larson 19). Therefore, “Frank decided to publish the novel himself, which
meant that there would be problems with distribution. Frank wrote to Toomer, and presumably to
other friends, to ask if he could help distribute the book” (19). So it seems that both men needed
each other in a way. Whatever the real reason, Toomer and Frank were soon avid penpals
exchanging work and ideas. And heeding Toomer’s critique of Our America, Frank decided to
focus his new novel in progress, Holiday, on Black folks and asked for Toomer’s help so that
Frank could realistically limn his Black characters. In September the two men left for

17
Spartanburg, South Carolina with both men passing “themselves off as Negroes, traveling for
two weeks by Jim Crow trains and experiencing other segregated facilities” (19). Almost like
archaeologists, when the two return back to their homes, Frank then asks “for Toomer’s help
with dialogue (for Holiday)--not just the usual proofreading of the galleys that one writer might
ask of another but actual rewriting of those passages which he considered unfaithful to black
life” (19). According to Larson, Toomer agrees because he is already thinking about how Frank
“had the right contacts to get [his] book published” (19). And sure enough on December 12th,
Toomer writes to Frank, “Cane is on its way to you!” (Cane 162). Toomer also endearingly tells
Frank, “You will understand the inscriptions, brother mine: the book to grandma; Kabnis, the
spirit and the soil, to you,” adding “I’m wide open to you for criticism and suggestion” (163). By
December 15th, Frank had already read the book and given it to Horace Liveright. And “with
remarkable speed, Liveright accepted the novel January 8, 1923” (Larson 20). Just like that,
Cane, that uncategorizable, implicit, and allusive work, was brought into the world.

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3. Building a Circle towards “Kabnis”
Cane’s first utterance is the following epigraph: “Oracular. / Redolent of fermenting
syrup, / Purple of dusk, / Deep-rooted cane” (Cane X). In her hallmark text, Jean Toomer, Artist,
Nellie McKay interprets this epigraph as a “metaphor for the experience of a people’s [Black
folks] connection to the land and soil that made them what they are” (McKay 87). Karen Jackson
Ford, instead, zooms in on the epigraph’s first word, “Oracular” and states that the reader should
think of literal cane, the book’s namesake, as being “oracular,” meaning that the word “cane”
itself should be read as something implying “authoritative (even dictatorial) wisdom or
expression” (Ford 29). Yet this sweeping idea, she argues, is complicated by the epigraph’s next
line. She states, “but Cane is also something quite different: it is ‘redolent’[reminiscent] rather
than decisive” (29). She then goes on to argue that “epigraph reveals Cane’s dual mission to be
oracular like a prophet but also to be evocative like a poet,” the prophet and the poet being
another binaries his dismantles, especially in the failed poet figure of Kabnis at the end of the
text (29). Yet by the exultant finish of Cane, Toomer was Kabnis, ready to recover—if not for
Cane’s mixed reviews. For example, Langston Hughes once said the following about the text:
“The colored people did not praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of the colored people
who did read Cane hate it. They are afraid of it” (Carlin 14). This rejection crushed Toomer and
led him to flee his literary circles for the pursuit of spiritual fulfillment later in his life because he
couldn’t find the liminal existence he longed for amongst his writing peers.
Therefore, besides already collapsing dichotomies and situating the text’s concern with
the Black experience in America, this epigraph also is the first place that Toomer introduces
some of his most important recurring images in Cane, syrup, purple, dusk, and of course, cane.
As these images reappear in the text, they take on new meanings and develop into their own

19
systems of figuration about Toomer’s liminal racial existence between the Black and white
worlds. It is almost as if Toomer knew he was giving the reader a difficult text, so he sought
ways to guide us through the text by creating a matrix of images that all signify his marginalized
state of being, the way his writing and life both function as blueprints for debunking racial and
gender binaries in America.
And after all of this set-up Toomer is still not ready for the reader to jump into Cane.
Before “Karintha,” Cane’s first piece begins, the reader is shown an incomplete arc in the left
center on a blank page. Describing this gesture and how he wanted it to guide the reader, in a
letter to Waldo Frank, Toomer writes,
From three angles, CANE’S design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to
complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North,
and back into the South again. Or, From [sic] the North down into the South , and then a
return North. From the point of view of the spiritual entity behind the work, the curve
really starts with Bona and Paul (awakening), plunges into Kabnis, emerges in Karintha
etc. swings upward into Theatre [sic] and Box Seat, and ends (pauses) in Harvest Song.
Whew! (Rusch 26).
Whew is right! Just like Toomer’s thoughts on his own racial makeup, his thoughts on the
organization of Cane obfuscates almost more than it enlightens. Yet, these inventive partial
circles at the beginning of section one and two, which are then placed next to each other yet still
separated in order to create an incomplete circle for section three, “Kabnis” along with Toomer’s
description above does tell us a great deal about Toomer’s factionated self and how one of his
aims in Cane is to find a way to harmonize all those contrasting selves and parts of his life. As
Karen Jackson Ford writes, “Toomer’s inconsistent portrayal of the book as both angular and

20
circular, indeed as angles that somehow sketch a circle, captures his urge to form a whole out of
disparate parts--to forge those angles (South, North; rural, urban; simple, complex) into a circle
through the architectonics of the volume” (Ford 5). Perhaps a better description of the work can
be found within the flaps of the dust jacket of the first edition on Cane where Toomer claims that
the book is a “vaudeville out of the South,” to which Nellie McKay adds, “with its acts made up
of sketches, poems, and a single drama.” Talking about his language on the dust jacket, she
writes, “He notes that although no consistent movement or central plot is present, the sensitive
reader can find a beginning, a progression, a complication, and an end” (McKay 83). Cane does
indeed have progressive forward movement: it’s just that the forward momentum always
reverses back on itself, circling, circling, the snake always eating its tail.
After all of this build up, explanation, and contextualization, Cane finally offers its first
story, “Karintha.” Before appearing in Cane, “Karintha” was first published in Broom in January
of 1923, and the reader is prompted with this note of instruction: “To be read, accompanied by
the humming of a Negro folk-song” (Cane 5). Therefore, right from the start, Cane is asking the
reader to step out of the normal expectations of a reading experience and to embrace the
conventions of music and drama. As a matter of fact, before “Karintha” was published in Broom,
it was part of a play Toomer was working on called Natalie Mann. In a footnote for Cane,
Rudolph Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. tell us that “[“Karintha”] was intended to illustrate the
style and the thought of literature writing by Nathan [echoing Jean Toomer’s birth name,
Nathan] Merilh, one of the major characters in the drama” (5). Invoking music and drama right
from the start, Cane then wanders into the world of poetry and sets the scene of the story with the
following poetic refrain:
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon,

21
O cant you see it, O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon
. . . When the sun goes down (Cane 5).
Importantly, Cane begins near the end of day, at dusk or evening twilight, when the sun has
almost left but is still with the world. That is, Cane starts with the end. This point will matter
later in this essay when I talk about the ending of “Kabnis,” the text’s final story, which occurs at
dawn or morning twilight when the sun is almost fully with the world but not yet completely.
Therefore, both the beginning and the end of Cane are initiated in liminal space, reflecting the in-
between state of Toomer’s identity and of Cane as a whole text. With the ambience of the scene
now set, Toomer’s narrator then goes on to tell the story of Karintha, a woman who was always
an object of the male gaze, a woman who “Men had always wanted . . . even as a child” (5). This
always and already sexualized young woman is then said to be “perfect as dusk when the sun
goes down” (5). The word “dusk,” of course, echoes the lyrical refrain at the beginning of the
story and the usage of the word in the book’s epigraph. Other than the word, “cane,” “dusk”
becomes perhaps the most dominating image of the text. As mentioned above, dusk itself is
redolent of a transitional state in its own right and sets the stage for the liminal space in which
Toomer houses his characters and their identities. And this liminal site is a precarious place for a
young Black woman to be, this space where men have always been sexualizing her since she was
a girl. The narrator of “Karintha” tells us that “This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a
growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her” (5). The narrator of the story seems to want
to protect Karintha, to save her, but he just doesn’t know how.
Like Kabnis, Karintha is one of the many of the characters in Cane who are direct
answers to one of Du Bois’s key questions in The Souls of Black Folk, “How does it feel to be a

22
problem?” (Du Bois 43). Contemporary Black feminist scholars have taught us that Karintha
suffers from multiple jeopardies by being both black and a woman, an intersectional plight. And
being this dual “problem” makes her life in the rural south of the early 20th century very
precarious and dangerous, indeed, as the story proceeds to demonstrate.
By the time she is twelve years old, Karintha is an almost carefree young woman who
“was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live” (Cane 5). Yet, of course, just
like the precious November cotton flower Toomer’s speaker compares her to, this innocence will
not last, and soon Karintha is “play[ing] ‘home’ with a small boy who was not afraid to do her
bidding” and “Old men could no longer ride her hobby-horse up their knees” (6). Like so many
Black women in the history of this country, Karintha isn’t allowed to be a child for very long
before the world takes her naivety away and makes an adult out of her. Inventively, the speaker
then breaks the action of the prose of the text and returns to the poetic refrain at the beginning of
the story, but this time the refrain is remixed, stripped down a bit, and employs more repetition:
Her skin is like dusk,
O cant you see it,
Her skin is like dusk,
When the sun goes down (6).
This altered refrain marks the shift in Karintha’s existence and prepares the reader for the trouble
and heartache that is coming Karintha’s way. The prose part of the story then picks up again, and
we learn that Karintha is now a full-grown woman who still “carries beauty, perfect as dusk
when the sun goes down” (6). Already “She has been married many times,” and now she appears
to be making money with her beauty, as the men she encounters “all want to bring her money”
(6). But these financial gains do little for Karintha, who by now knows what men want from her

23
and resents them for wanting it. And then Karintha has a child, which we learn “fell out of her
womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest” (6). The narrator does not tell us why Karintha
had her baby in the woods instead of at home with a doula and/or midwife, but we can assume it
is because Karintha is sex worker and the baby was made out of wedlock. The speaker also does
not tell us what exactly happens to that baby born in the woods. Instead, he tells us how
“smooth” and “sweet” the pine needles on which the baby fell were and then describes sawdust
piles from the sawmill nearby writing that “It is a year before one completely burns” (6). The
narrator, then, takes the time to tell us that “the smoke curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about
the trees, curls up, and spreads itself out over the valley” (6). Still unwilling to tell us directly
what happened to the child, the speaker only offers up this bit of information: “Weeks after
Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy you tasted in water” (6). Now the narrator
breaks the narrative action again and presents us with another repetition and remix driven, poetic
reprieve: “Smoke is on the hills. Rise up. / Smoke is on the hills, O rise / And take my soul to
Jesus (6). What is the source of this smoke though?
From this refrain it seems as though Karintha may have burned her baby woods since the
poetic break declares, “take my soul to Jesus,” but the speaker never directly tells us what
happened to Karintha’s baby (6). Rather, the piece ends by slightly remixing and circling back to
a description the speaker used for Karintha earlier in the story writing, “Men do not know that
the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon” (6). Thus, despite whatever happened in
the forest with the baby, Karintha’s life doesn’t change that much, and the men still bring her
money, but “they will die not having found it out . . . Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect
as dusk with the sun goes down” (6). Characteristic of Cane, Toomer uses ellipsis marks to
designate an illegibility in the reading. Just like the men who will never know about Karintha’s

24
baby, we as readers will never know for sure if Karintha burned her baby alive or if it was
stillborn and then she burned it. Moreover, because of Toomer’s use of ellipsis marks to show
delay and time jumps, we really do not know what happened to Karintha’s baby at all. The story
then ends with the speaker returning to the poetic lyric from the beginning of the story exactly
before leaving the reader with only this fragment, “Goes down. . .” This gesture again draws
attention to the fact that Toomer begins Cane with an ending; that is, the end of the day with the
sun going down.
“Karintha'' is followed by two poems, “Reapers'' and “November Cotton Flower.” This
organizing principle, a piece of prose then two poems, becomes a pattern that is followed
throughout the whole first section of Cane. And “Reapers'' picks up the themes of precarity and
vulnerability established in “Karintha'' by taking the time to highlight a rat who is wounded by
the swinging scythes of Black reapers (harvesters) working the field. Just as the world at large,
minus the speaker of “Karintha,” has little care for Karintha’s plight, the “startled, squealing”
field rat suffers without anyone caring much. The world just goes on despite both of these
characters’ pain. The last sentence of the poem reads as follows, “I see the blade, Blood-stained,
continue cutting weeds and shade” (7). The lack of empathy shown for both Karintha and the
field rat indirectly answers Du Bois’s question, “How does it feel to be a problem:'' replying that
it feels as though no one cares about your suffering or well-being. The image of the rat in the
undergrowth also grotesquely echoes Karintha’s baby bloodied and possibly dead on the forest
floor in “Karintha.” Unlike so many, Toomer’s speaker sees and cares about the beautiful black
woman (possibly a prostitute) many men use for sex, this speaker sees and cares about the lowly
field rat nobody notices. This sight and care demonstrate Cane’s extreme empathy for Black
women, despite still falling victim to the pitfalls of sexist ideology at times in the text. Toomer

25
clearly cares about this land, its peoples, and its wildlife, which is why he wants to memorialize
it in Cane. Yet problematically he is an outsider—Pinchback on one side of Toomer’s psyche
representing the tenets of racial uplift and his poor mother on the other side representing the
black rural south and sources of empowerment found outside of uplift ideology, like the work
field and the cabaret.
Cane begins at a place of ending because reaping and harvesting occur at the end of the
planting season. So just as “Karintha” begins when the sun is going down, at the end of the day,
“Reapers” orients us to the end of the growing season.
The vestiges of this terminal beginning continue in Cane’s next poem, “November
Cotton Flower,” as November is, of course, the end of the growing season. And besides this
resonance with the poem preceding it, “Reapers,” “November Cotton Flower” also responds to
the early call of the image in “Karintha” when Karintha is described as being “as lovely as a
November cotton flower” (5). Even this early on in Cane, Toomer’s organizing strategy for the
text is making itself known through the use of recurring and redolent images as the text’s
epigraph proscribed. Just as Karintha was born and forced to grow up in a harsh environment
who considers her a problem, the November cotton flower in this poem is born in a not ideal
environment. It is winter, and the “Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take / All water
from the streams; dead birds were found / In wells a hundred feet below the ground” (8). The
November cotton flower’s beauty is surrounded by harsh conditions and an unsympathetic
climate just like Karintha the woman is. The speaker of Cane sees all of these, Karintha, the
bleeding field rat, and the November cotton flower as items that need examined, nurtured, and
protected, as items almost imbued with a supernatural power. The alliterative fourth to last line
in “November Cotton Flower” fortifies this claim: “Significance. Superstition saw.” This line

26
could be said about the whole Black rural south that Toomer is writing about in this first section
of Cane. As Toomer would later write in his autobiographical sketches, “That spirit was so
beautiful. Its death so tragic. Just this seems to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put
into Cane” (Turner 123). Toomer felt the “spirit” even while carefully recording the way race
relations work in the south.
With Cane’s next piece of prose, “Becky,” Toomer continues to illuminate the lives of
people often overlooked and/or misconstrued in the Black rural south. As the short story’s first
sentence tells us, “Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons” (Cane 9). Because of
her transgressive action of having Black children, Becky is isolated from the community at large
and is at the margins of society just as Karintha is. Furthermore, Toomer is able to keep his
starting with the ending motif in this story because “Becky” begins by telling the reader the end
of the story. The same first four sentences that begin the text end it as well. This use of repetition
also mirrors the narrative design of “Karintha,” which begins and ends with the same poetic
lyric, only here the repeated language is in prose: “Becky was the white woman who had two
Negro sons. She’s dead; they’ve gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its
leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound” (9). Likewise, the sentence, “The pines whisper to
Jesus'' is reminiscent of the pine needles that Karintha’s baby fell into in that short story, and the
call to Jesus echoes the last line of the poetic lyric from that story, too: “Smoke is on the hills.
Rise up. / Smoke is on the hills, O rise / And take my soul to Jesus'' (6). Through these recurring
and slightly remixed images and pieces of language we begin to see Toomer’s lyric-meaning-
making strategy that relies on repetition and slight shifts of language to see similarities in things
and situations. By seeing likenesses and by describing different things in similar ways, Toomer is

27
displaying his sympathetic and empathetic gaze, which wants to love and memorialize
everything he sees in the Black rural south.
The same rural Black south that has little care for the well-being of a black sex worker,
Karintha, has little respect and love for Becky, a white woman who slept with a black man and
fathered black children. Becky and her children were marooned to the outskirts of town “on the
narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road” (9). There the family lived their lives out
of the community’s sight. The figurative trope of not being seen that was established in
“Karintha” takes a literal turn here as no one in the text ever literally sees Becky. In fact, in many
ways, “Becky” functions as almost a ghost story, as Becky more so haunts the text rather than
actually being in it. As the speaker of the story details, David Georgia, one of the few town
members who cares to check on Becky and her family by bringing them “some sugar sap,” tells
us, “No one ever saw her” (10). Eventually Becky’s boys grow up and leave town because they
are so shunned by the community. And then the only sign of life coming from Becky’s house is
the “thin wraith of smoke” that comes from her chimney (9). Smoke is another recurring image
in Cane because of its transitory state of being neither liquid nor solid.
The short story then comes to a climax when Barlo and the narrator are riding by Becky’s
home after being out of town for a church service. As they ride by, the narrator says
Goose-flesh came on my skin though there still was neither chill nor wind. Eyes left their
sockets for the cabin. Ears burned and throbbed. Uncanny eclipse! fear closed my mind.
We were just about to pass . . . Pines shout to Jesus! . . . the ground trembled as a ghost
train rumbled by. The chimney fell into the cabin [. . . .] Through the dust we saw the
bricks in a mound upon the floor. Becky, if she was there, lay under them. I thought I
heard a groan. (11).

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Before I talk about the way this passage picks up and utilizes imagery from “Karintha” and
points to the speaker’s caring eye for those at the margins of society, I would like to discuss how
Toomer uses ellipses in this story and in Cane as a whole. Toomer not only utilizes ellipses to
indicate asides and intruding commentary, as in “Pines shout to Jesus” above, but he also uses
them to denote hard, longer sustained pauses and, most importantly, for registering the signal of
a character’s inner speech. This inconsistent, multifaceted, and varying use of this piece of
punctuation is one of the many reasons certain passages of Cane often resist readers. The ellipsis
almost mark the extreme uncertainty that plagued Toomer, as his life lingered between races.
Not only is it a problem to be Black—it is a problem to be multiracial, inhabiting a racial no-
man’s land in a country where notions of racial purity have always hegemonic and ever-
reaching.
The use of ellipses highlight yet another imagistic ball that Toomer catches in this story.
In “Karintha,” when the titular character’s baby is born in the forest, “A sawmill was nearby”
and “Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered” (6). This image of the burning dust pile figuratively
rhymes with the dust pile the narrator and Barlo see after Becky’s house collapses on itself:
“Through the dust we saw the bricks in a mound upon the floor” (11). It’s almost as if both of
these mounds are funeral memorials. In “Karintha'' the funeral memorial is for Karintha’s dead
child, and in “Becky” the funeral memorial is for Becky, of course. The adjective before sawdust
in the “Karintha'' quotation above especially signifies this, as pyramids are where many great
ancient civilizations like the Egyptians and Mayans placed their dead. Moreover, Indigeious
people like the Adena peoples of what is now called the American Midwest also used “mounds''
as burial sites. I have walked on many of these mounds at Mounds State Park in my hometown

29
of Anderson, Indiana. Therefore, the repeating image of dust mounds obliquely and relentlessly
symbolizes death in both of these stories.
Another very interesting aspect of “Becky” is the way it begins to show how the first part
of Cane occurs all in the same town, which, of course, is based off of Sparta, Georgia where
Toomer worked as a school principal. As Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argue in
their footnote at the beginning of the story, this point becomes apparent as the reader continues
reading Cane and notices that John Stone is the father of Bob Stone from the later story “Blood-
Burning Moon.” And Barlo reappears in “Esther,” and David Georgia is also a character in
“Blood-Burning Moon.” And, “The Dixie Pike” mentioned here in “Becky” is also referenced in
“Carma” and “Fern” (9). This move makes Cane function in a manner very similar to Sherwood
Anderson’s Winesburg, where he sets many short stories in one town.
After the abrupt and creepy ghost-story-like ending of “Becky,” Cane again offers two
pieces of poetry, “Face” and “Cotton Song,” after a piece of prose. And just like how both
“Karintha” and “Becky” focus on women who the community doesn’t necessarily see (both
figuratively and literally), appreciate, and value as much as it should, Cane’s next poem, “Face”
resumes this trope by channeling its attention to the face of a nameless elderly Black woman.
Functioning in the literary tradition of the Blazon, a form historically cataloguing a beloved’s
body parts, this poem turns this form against itself. It lists some of the anonymous women’s body
parts and then provides figurative language that portrays her suffering and hard life: “Brow-- /
recurved canoes / quivered by the ripples blown by pain” (12). The ending of this poem is
especially provocative as the unnamed woman’s eyes are a “mist of tears,” and her strong limbs
are described as “cluster grapes of sorrow purple in the evening sun nearly ripe for worms” (12).
Very similar to the November cotton flower with its fleeting beauty about to die in the cold of

30
the winter, this unidentified woman’s heavy ripeness will soon return her back to the earth in
death. Again, we see Cane’s first section’s obsession with the end of things as this poem ends
with imagery of approaching night and the fall of overripe grapes to ground to be feasted upon
by worms. As stated before, the beginning of Cane is built upon the foundation of many endings.
And this Black woman’s demise could very well signify the end of Black rural southern life,
which the eulogization of is one of Toomer’s pursuits in writing Cane. As Toomer later wrote in
his attempted autobiographies later, “Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end” (Turner
123). The harsh realities of the south gave Black folks sorrow songs and deep culture but also
wounded us deeply. Toomer’s trek there wounded him as well with its beauty existing in spite of
its horror, feeling left out of the sense of belonging that he probably mythologized into being.
“Cotton Song,” the next poem in Cane, returns to the fields and the hard labor of working
the land that was the occupation of many southern Black people, which was shown in “Reapers.”
And like “Reapers,” “Cotton Song” highlights the end of something, but instead of focusing on
the end of the growing season and the black, Thanatos imagery of the reapers and horses, which
are redolent of the grim reaper, this poem illustrates how field workers found strength and solace
in work songs and were not going to wait until Judgement Day for salvation and would,
conversely, find it in their work and camaraderie as brothers in arms and labor. This poem very
much so reads like a worksong and even contains in the poem’s latter half a dialect-driven work
call and response song:
“We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!

Nassur; nassur,
Hump.

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Eoho, eoho, roll away!
We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!” (Cane 13).
Just as Toomer “deforms” the mastery of the blazon, remixing and reimaging the rural Black
south by using the form to draw attention to Black female pain and strife, he also repurposes the
work song as a direct statement, rejecting the usual idea of full freedom and liberty coming only
in death. The speakers in this poem aren’t going to wait for God and the end of the world to save
them. They’re going to work their hardest and find their salvation on their own.
Staying loyal to his counterpointing pattern he’s created, Toomer again offers a short
story after two poems. “Carma,” however, actually moves more like a character sketch
punctuated by poetic lyric interludes just as “Karintha” is. Before we learn about Carma who
wears “overalls” and is “as strong as any man,” the poetic refrain at the beginning of the text tells
us of the wind in the cane fields carrying the workers’ gossip and talk:
Wind is in the cane. Come along.
Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,
Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,
Wind is in the cane. Come along (14).
By beginning this story in the canefield, Toomer threads this tale to the poem that preceded it,
which also took place in the field, showing his penchant for meaning-making through repetition
by having the first and last lines of the poem mirror each other.
In addition to echoing “Karintha” in its use of poetic chorus alongside prose, “Carma”
also concerns itself with a Black woman who is marginalized and pushed to the periphery of
society. By emphasizing her size, strength, and ability to work as much as man, so often in the
story, Toomer yokes Carma to the long tradition of strong Black women like Sojourner Truth

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who once famously asked, “Ar’n’t I a Woman” after declaring, “I have plowed, and planted, and
gathered into barns, and no man could head me” (The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature 180). The speaker of “Carma” sees her strength and innate power as she drives her
wagon home, and it leads him to a vision of Africa where “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” (Cane 14). The speaker’s reverie is then broken as night arrives, and
Toomer injects the poetic chorus in again, but as is often the case in Cane, he slightly alters it.
Now, we are in a cornfield:
Wind is in the corn. Come along.
Corn leaves swaying, rusty with talk,
Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,
Wind is in the corn. Come along (15).
With this change in locality established, the speaker now tells us more of Carma’s life. And in a
way very similar to how “Becky” began with the speaker telling the reader the whole story and
its ending in a few sentences, the narrator of “Carma” reveals the story’s plot in totality:
“Carma’s tale is the crudest of melodrama. Her husband’s in the gang. And it's her fault he got
there. Working with a contractor, he was away most of the time. She had others. No one blames
her for that” (15). No one, of course, except for her husband, Bane, who wants to beat her when
he finds out from the gossip of the fields, hence the poetic refrain’s emphasis on the “Scratching
choruses above the guinea’s squawk” (15). Even in a prose short story, Toomer still lifts Cane to
song. Even in the horrors of the south there is still music in the air.
After being confronted by Bane for her infidelities, Carma runs off to the fields and fires
a shot, which makes Bane and townsfolk think she’s killed herself. However, when they look in

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the field for her body, they find her passed out but alive and well. This angers Bane so much that
he kills one of the men who helped find Carma in the field because he was “Twice deceived, and
one deception proved the other,” and he is, therefore, sent to the chain-gang for murder (15). The
story then ends with the narrator again remarking how Carma’s tale is the “crudest melodrama”
before giving us the poetic chorus from the beginning of the narrative again.
To make sense of this “crudest melodrama,” we can return to the story’s title, the titular
character’s name, Carma, which Robert P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates Jr. point out in their
footnote as being a play off of the word karma. Karma is the “Sanskrit word for fate” and “is the
force generated by a person’s actions” (14). So considering the meaning-making-possibilities
created by this troping, we can see that “karma” punished Bane for leaving Carma alone all the
time, not valuing her, and for punishing her for expressing her sexuality and corporeal freedom
as men often do when they’re away from their spouses. This point is supported by the fact that
twice in the short story the narrator calls out this sexist double standard by first saying, “She had
others. No one blames her for that”--and then later at the very end of the story right right before
the final poetic chorus, “Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I
have it it is the crudest melodrama?” (15). Because of all of this, I believe that “Carma” is
another example of Toomer caring about and seeing people who the rest of the world ignores,
mischaracterizes, and/or misunderstands. The same way that Toomer seeks to promote and
highlight sex workers like Karintha, he also seems to want to illuminate the experiences of
hardworking women like Carma who are strong as any man and way the sexual and corporeal
freedoms that men have.
Besides this attention to the maligned and misunderstood, this story also relates to the
previous pieces in Cane because it contains many of the same images this essay has been

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discussing and highlighting like: cane, pine-needles, smoke, dusk, fields, impending night, and
The Dixie Pike (which again shows these stories are a part of the same locality). These
reappearing images knit the stories and poems of the text together just as much as the similarities
in themes and content does. It is through this implicit patterning that Toomer brings cohesion to
all the disparate, moving parts of Cane.
Much has been written about Cane’s next poem, “Song of the Son.” In many ways, this
poem can be read as an artist statement that declares Toomer’s intentions and objectives for
Cane. In Split-Gut Song: Jean Toomer and the Poetics of Modernity, Karen Jackson Ford affirms
this point writing that this poem “is typically understood to express the mission of the book: to
capture the last echoes of the slave songs in contemporary poetry” (Ford 8). At the end of the
poem’s second stanza, the speaker of the poem declares, “Now just before an epoch’s sun
declines / Thy son, in time I have returned to thee . . . . // To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving,
soon gone” (Cane 16). There are few moments in Cane that are as direct and straightforward. As
the prominent Toomer scholar Nellie Y. McKay notes, “The unambiguous intent of the poet is to
convey his personal commitment, through this song, to the restoration of the glory of his history”
(McKay 89). With this empowering message that ever so closely aligns with the tenets of the
Uplift School of the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance, it is no wonder that this
poem is so popular and “is the most widely anthologized of the individual selections of the book”
(89). And besides being the most popular poem in Cane, “Song of the Son” can also be read as a
kind of ars poetica for the whole book, detailing the book’s origin story. At the same time, this
point obscures the complex texture of Cane, and its subsequent difficulty in finding its literary
place.

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Coming halfway through part one of Cane, “Song of the Son” not only continues
Toomer’s theme of concentrating on endings because he felt “The folk-spirit was walking in to
die on the modern desert,” (Turner 123), as noted previously in this essay, but this poems also
continues and reiterates the image inventory system that Toomer has created thus far in the text.
In this poem we again see Toomer extending upon the pine-needles from “Karintha.” “Song of
the Son” contains “velvet pine-smoke,” “a profligate of pines,” and “pine-wood air” (Cane 16).
Likewise, sawdust returns as “sawdust glow of night,” and instead of the cluster of grapes from
“Face,” we now see the similarly articulated “dark purple ripened plums” (grapes and plums both
sharing the color purple, which is another motif in the text) beginning the poem’s penultimate
stanza (16). This stanza is especially important to comprehending and appreciating this poem as
it performs the figurative of magic of transforming “Negro slaves” into old ripe plums, and one
of those said plums was saved for the speaker. And for the poem’s ending that plum’s seed
morphs into,
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 (16).
The lure of this piece’s lyricism denotes its melancholy; it starkly exhibits and incarnates
Toomer’s “deformation of mastery” through repetition, refrain, and slightly altered refrains, as
every stanza except the penultimate one distinctly and directly utilizes repetition--in stanza one,
“And let the valley carry it along” is uttered twice; in stanza two we see the lines, “Thy son, in
time, I have returned to thee, / Thy son, I have in time returned to thee;” in stanza three, “To
catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone, / Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone;”

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and finally, in the final stanza, “Caroling softly souls of slavery” is uttered twice as well. Then,
moreover, because of the poem’s rhyme scheme we also encounter sonic echoes throughout the
poem piece. Each stanza bears two sound families for line endings, and the final stanza sings
itself out of existence and leaves the long-E-sounds ending “tree,” “slavery,” and “me” ringing in
the reader’s ears and mind. Thus, as shown in these examples, all of the figurative moves and
organizing strategies previously employed in Cane find home in this poem, which is why
scholars like Gerry Carlin claim “no other moment in Cane so powerfully expresses the book’s
elegiac and commemorative mission” (Carlin 54). This move of starting with an ending is found
again and again in Cane.
“Georgia Dusk,” the next work in Toomer’s poetic pairs following “Carma” also contains
a rigid rhyme scheme and displays Toomer’s keen sense of lyricism. Again, we find the sun
setting and “dusk” in this poem, and there is the presence of a “pyramidal sawdust pile” and
“pine-needles [that] fall like sheets of rain” and “whisper” (Cane 17). The return to already used
imagery doesn’t end there as this poem also utilizes reductive, exoticized African tropes very
similar to ones present in “Carma.” In “Carma” we saw “juju men,” “greegree,” “witch-doctors”
and “torches,” and are told that “The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa” (14). And
in stanza five of “Georgia Dusk” we have this comparable description:
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp (17).
These cuts to Africanized moments occur in both of these pieces at night when the working
Black folks are momentarily free from labor and are trying to relax and enjoy themselves. This

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connection seems to attempt to highlight how Black folks’ agency, freedom, and songs are
derived from Africa and not the white American in which they’re currently living. This attention
to geographies and the poetics of space, George Hutchinson argues, shows Toomer troping on
and remixing Robert Frost’s “evocation of a landscape’s human history, to achieve a remarkable
fusion of the mood” (Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance 51). The gesture showing Black
folks’ split selves in the country, partly American, partly African, and partly neither could have
encouraged Toomer to accept his own diversity, but the racial binary ruled—and racial purity,
though impossible, was what he needed for acceptance.
And after this moment of Africanized release, the speaker of the poem then displays
Toomer’s and Black folks’ double-consciousness by asking these caroling (A word we just saw
in “Song of the Son.”) singers to “Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs” (Cane
17). The hybridity of influence--African and Christian--when is comes to notions of salvation
and empowerment and the way the ways these worldviews rub up against one another and cause
friction and fusion is a life obsession of Toomer, and a key theme in Cane and Black literature in
the early 20th century.
“Fern” is another sketch of southern Black female existence. Because of the repeating
reference of the “Dixie Pike” that we’ve seen in other stories in the text, we can assume that this
story also takes place in the same fictional world of “Karintha,” “Becky,” and “Carma.” In these
portraits, Toomer continues his dirge for the fading Black rural south while highlighting the
traumatic lives that many southern women live. Because of this direct, sensitive, and sometimes
insightful treatment of women, many thinkers, such as Alice Walker, have speculated that
Toomer possibly mined these tales from conversations with his mother who he felt great
sympathy for because she was abandoned by Toomer’s father and harshly ruled over by

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Toomer’s grandfather Pinchback (264). Yet, despite this love and empathy for his mother,
Toomer’s portrayal here seems limited in scope as he can only see Fern “as a woman in a
dependent relationship to men” (McKay 109). Toomer’s eye towards women characters was
seens a progressive at the time of the text, but, as I’ve noted before, seems more than limited
through our contemporary lens.
Presumably another mixed race protagonist, Fern is a “creamy-colored solitary girl”
whose “[f]ace flowed into her eyes” (Cane 18). And just as beauty has been a point of precarity
and vulnerability for other female characters in Cane, Fern’s beauty makes her only a sexualized
object in the eyes of the men in town. This ever looming threat causes the speaker of the story to
want to save Fern from the local men’s avarice gaze and from the small minded town in general.
However, despite his gallant efforts and the text’s peculiar plea to the reader to help Fern out
they can, the narrator cannot save Fern because he, too, can’t access her inner psyche because of
his carnal desire for her. The story ends with the speaker making this plea for the reader to save
Fern, which is ironic because we are just as helpless as the speaker when it comes to fighting the
swinging power of systemic sexism and racism.
This bleak display is then countered by tender lyricism of “Evening Song.” Unlike
“Nullo,” this poem contains a person, a character, Cloine, who is portrayed cuddling with the
speaker, the two of them finding comfort in each other. Like previous speakers in Cane, the
speaker here is distantly observing his beloved without access to her interiority. As is often the
case in part one of Cane, here we have another male speaker who wants to love, comfort,
triumph, and understand women but cannot because of his own conceit, lack of real listening,
and sexual desires. Without this access, the speaker is doomed to observe Cloine from the
outside, but he doesn’t mind because “[he’ll] be sleeping soon,” and until then he’ll just lie there

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captivated by Cloine’s beauty as she “dreams, lips pressed against [his] heart” (23). So even
though there’s some connection shown here, the male speaker still can’t understand Cloine,
displaying male and female miscommunication as Cane often does.
With “Esther” Toomer returns to examining the dynamics of interracial relationships in
the rural south as he did with “Becky.” This subject is especially close to Toomer’s heart as he
was in many interracial relationships in his life. The titular character Esther is a light skin Black
woman who has a “high-cheek-boned chalk-white face” and looks like “a white child” (24). Her
father owns the local grocery store, and she works the counter for him. The story is divided into
four sections. In each section, we get a look at Esther during different times of her life, age nine,
sixteen, twenty-two, and twenty-seven. Besides showing the coming of age process of Esther,
each of these sections detail Esther’s infatuation with Barlo. This inclusion of Barlo, a character
from “Becky,” again displays the continuity of place that occurs in part one of Cane, while also
linking an array of women to the land, and in this way, to the violence dealt to both Blacks,
women, and place.
At the age of nine Esther first lays eyes on Barlo when he catches the Holy Ghost and
delivers an impromptu sermon to the whole town. See him in this nearly celestial state totally
enthralls Esther, and by the end of the section the reader is told that “[Barlo has] become the
starting point of the only living patterns that [Esther’s] mind was to know,” “[Barlo’s] image
[left] indelibly upon the mind of Esther'' (25). When Esther is sixteen, she feels guilty for having
sexual fantasies about Barlo. She also dreams of raising a child who she saves from a burning
house. In these visions, we see Esther’s need for sexual fulfillment and her need to take care of
something. At twenty-seven, Esther is done with school and restless. She doesn’t like working at
her father’s grocery store, and she longs for a life with more adventure. With plenty of time to

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daydream at the grocery store counter, Esther often dreams of Barlo. Describing Esther’s
extreme fawning over Barlo, Toomer writes,
Barlo’s image gives her a slightly stale thrill. She spices it by telling herself his glories.
Black. Magnetically so. Best cotton picker in the county, in the state, in the whole world
for that matter. Best man with his fists, best man with dice, with a razor. Promoter of
church benefits. Of colored fairs. Vagrant preacher. Lover of all the women for miles and
miles. Esther decides that she loves him (26).
By this time, Esther’s “body is lean and beaten,” and she hates her hometown and her job at the
grocery store (27). However, her spirits are lifted when she sees Barlo walking by the shop
window. Through town gossip, she learns that “Barlo has made money on cotton during the war”
and that “[h]e is as rich as anyone” (27). Seeing him in this successful and triumphant state
makes her want him even more, so she dreams of him even more intently, and “[h]er mind is a
pink meshbag filled with baby toes'' because she wants to be the mother of his children (27).
Driven by this ravenous desire, she seeks him out in the middle of the night and finds him
partying at Nat Bowle’s place. She tells Barlo that she wants him, and he laughs and refuses her.
Wounded by the rejection, the story ends with her rushing out of Nat Bowle’s place, her self-
esteem destroyed and her burning desire for Barlo thawed. This tale of unrequited love,
demonstrating part one of Cane’s theme of Black women and men being unable to love each
fully because of the cultural mores of the south and systemic racism and sexism.
According to the footnotes of the Norton edition of Cane, “Conversion” was originally
published as the third part of a poem titled “Georgia Portraits” in the Modern Review in 1923.
This footnote goes on to say that “Toomer had intended to use the first five lines of this poem as
part of a longer, untitled poem in a short story, “Withered Skin of Berries” (29). These facts are

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very telling and can perhaps account for why this poem is so impressionist and replete with a
feeling of incompleteness. “Conversion” is the penultimate poem in section one of Cane, and in
it, as he did in “Carma,” Toomer again draws a direct line from the Dixie Pike of Cane’s
fictional town to Africa. But instead of “juju men” and “greegree,” here we see the protector of
African souls (or in other words, the protector of Black culture, the Black, African spirit that
connects all Black people) drunk and devouring the weaker religion/ideology of white folks. In
eight swift, short lines, Toomer anticipates postcolonial theory and indirectly chastises his
ancestors for letting white folks dupe, brutalize, and enslave them. The poem ends with the
African ancestors grinning, crying, and yelling “Amen” and “Shouts of hosanna” (29). With this
gesture, Toomer is setting up Kabnis’ later denial of Christianity that we see in Cane’s final
story.
Considering that it was originally published with “Conversion” as the second part of the
“Georgia Portraits'' in the Modern Review, it makes sense that Toomer would place “Portrait in
Georgia” after “Conversion” (30). The coupling of these two poems again draws the reader’s
attention to the fact that one can trace an almost straight line from the colonial turmoil and plight
of Africans to the persecution and violence on Black bodies by white Americans. Here in this
poem Toomer deftly depicts the lynching and burning on a woman by limning an almost blazon
that conflates the Black female body with the horrors of this murderous discipline strategy of
white folks. Perhaps Toomer conflates the woman and white lynchers and arsons with the land—
but he also projects his own precarity upon these women of the first section. The poem reads in
full as follows:
Hair--braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,

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Eyes--fagots,
Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath--the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame (30).
The smell of burning flesh tinged with the sweet scent of cane is a perfect setup for the final
story in part one of Cane, “Blood-Burning Moon,” one of the book’s most bloody and violent
texts. A story in three parts, “Blood-Burning Moon” is Toomer’s final take on the Black rural
south in section one. Toomer doesn’t again return to this scenery until the book’s final section,
“Kabnis.” Each part the three parts of “Blood-Burning Moon” end with this three lined poem
from which Toomer draws the story’s title: “Red Nigger moon, Sinner! / Blood-burning moon.
Sinner! / Come out that fact’ry door” (32). The red burning fire of the stake from “Portrait in
Georgia'' lends way to the red moon here. This image of the blood moon takes on even more
significance when we remember as Gerry Carlin reminds us that W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of
Black Folk also conjures this bloody moon when he discusses the power of sorrow songs, Negro
spirtuals in the Black tradition, “Oh, the stars in the elements are falling, / And the moon drips
away into blood” (Du Bois 274). In the Black biblical tradition, this blood moon signals the
arrival of Judgement Day, and here in Cane, the blood moon functions in a similar fashion: it
announces the pending judgement that will be bestowed on the Black man, Tom Burwell, who
will eventually kill the white man Bob Stone for being with Louisa, a young Black woman with
which both of the men are infatuated.
And just as “Karintha,” the first story in Cane begins at dusk when the sun is setting,
“Blood-Burning Moon” starts with the impending evening on its way. The liminal space of dusk

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becomes the site where most of the violent and crucial action of Cane takes place. Simply put,
“Blood-Burning Moon” is the story of a love triangle; however, the racist, sexist, and classist
dynamics of the rural south bring extra significance to this saga. As Nellie McKay writes, “Bob
Stone, scion of a once slave-owning family, represents the power and pride of white male
birthright,” and he hates the fact that he can’t just aggressively take and rape Louisa (McKay
119). And Tom Burwell “whom the whole town called Big Boy” works “in the fields all day”
and wants Louisa, too, and always has. But he’s not good with conveying his feelings in words
so he feels as though she doesn’t really understand how much she means to him. Part one of
“Blood-Burning Moon” ends with Louisa on her way to secretly visit Bob Stone in the cane
fields.
Part two of “Blood-Burning Moon” cuts to Tom and some of the Black men chatting at
the end of the work day. Through conversation, Tom learns from William Manning that Bob
Stone buys Louisa silk stockings. This news sends Tom into a fury, and he goes to talk to Louisa
about it. But as usual, he can’t express his feelings. He laments that the “words is like th spots on
dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there’s times when they jes wont come” (33). Eventually he
confronts Louisa about Bob Stone, and without answering him, she asks Tom what he would do
if she was/had been intimate with Bob Stone. To this query, Tom promises to “Cut [Bob Stone]
jes like [he’d] cut a nigger.” These ominous lines foreshadow the tragic climax of the story.
In part three the plotlines converge. Bob Stone goes to secretly abscond with Louisa but
finds out that she’s actually with Tom Burwell, so he goes to Louisa’s house. There the two men
face off fist fight. Tom Burwell gets the better of Bob Stone, so Stone pulls out a knife.
However, Tom has a knife, too, and knows how to use it. As he wields his blade, Tom says,
“That’s my game, sho,” and slices Bob Stone’s throat (36). Chaos then ensues, and eventually a

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white lynch mob drags Tom to the factory to burn him at the stake. This burning fire smelling of
singed flesh and cane in the night below a red moon resolves the image system that Toomer
established and maintained through part one of Cane, an image system that he will return to
again in Cane’s final section, “Kabnis.”
Moving on from the rural south, Cane’s second section takes place in the urban north,
troping off of Toomer’s time in Chicago, New York City, Wisconsin, and of course, his
hometown, Washington D.C. This transition to the north mirrors the Great Black Migration that
began close to the end of World War I. Isabel Wilkerson has written about the Great Migration in
great detail in her seminal text, The Warmth of Other Suns. Describing the migration, she writes,
“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They
left” (Wilkerson 15). Arriving in the north cities, the new Black migrants altered the cultural
currents and trends of American. Describing these platonic shifts, Wilkerson writes,
Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerns left the land of their
forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every
other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It
would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it
touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste
system (9).
The first part of Cane brilliantly illustrates all of the reasons Black Americans would want to
leave the south, all of that uncertainty the Wilkerson highlights here and all of the violence.
“Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929,
according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, for such crimes as ‘stealing hogs, horse-
stealing, poisoning mules, jumping labor contract, suspected of killing cattle, boastful remarks,’

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or ‘trying to act like a white person,” Wilkerson reminds us (Wilkerson 39). This hard truth is
vividly evinced in Cane’s “Blood-Moon Burning.”
Yet, despite all of the migrants' high hopes and dreams, and as the second section of
Cane will show, life in the urban north for Black folks was almost as difficult and dangerous as it
was in the rural, and it presented many new challenges and problems for the Black community.
Putting this strife into perspective, Wilkerson writes,
The receiving stations of the Great Migration were no more welcoming of colored
migrants from the South was--in fact, the arrival of colored migrants set off remarkable
displays of hostility, ranging from organized threats against white property owners who
might sell or rent to black to firebombing of houses before the new colored owners could
even move in (Wilkerson 249).
This precarious world of violence is what Black folks migrated to, and needless to say, just as
Black folks were changing the urban north, the urban north was changing them. And Toomer
didn’t like this change. Really, his animosity to these shifts were, at least, part of the reason he
wrote Cane in the first place. He wanted to accurately portray the rural Black southern culture
before it was gone. To Toomer the urban north was corrupting Black folks, and the first piece in
the second part of Cane, “Seventh Street,” explores this corruption and degradation.
As has been the case with many of the pieces of prose in Cane, “Seventh Street” is
bookended by a four-line lyrical poem,
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks (41).

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This poetic entry and exit deftly conjures the capitalist driven speed of the urban north and holds
it in stark contrast to slower living and economies of the south. Washington D.C.’s seventh street
is the “bastard of Prohibition and the War,” Toomer writes beginning this experimental prose
poem (41). Here, more so than most of part one of Cane, as Gerry Carlin notes, we see Toomer
writing as “fierce, disjunctive and [full of] unexpected imagery [like a] modernist prose poem”
(Carlin 67). The lyrical tracking of the skyline at dusk that we saw again and again in part one of
Cane is gone. Now in this second section the imagistic throughlines will revolve around
industrialism, urban decay, vice, and filth, and the ever looming threat of violence on Black
bodies, always that threat and the blood it brings.
Following Toomer’s macro presentation of the degradation of the Black urban condition
in Washington D.C. in “Seventh Street,” the next piece in Cane explores how the urban
landscapes and the rush capitalism harm Black folks on a micro, individual level with the fabular
yet still somehow so very modern, “Rhobert.” The title of the short story suggests a play on the
word, brother. This punning is further evinced by the story’s two poetic utterances, the one after
the opening paragraph of the story, “Brother, life is water that is being drawn off. / Brother, life
is water being drawn off” and the one at the end of the story, “Brother, Rhobert is sinking. / Lets
open our throats, brother, / Lets sing Deep River when he goes down” (Cane 41-42). The play
between the words brother and Rhobert takes on even more meaning when one remembers that
Black men often colloquially refer to each other as brothers. So this gesture of merging these two
terms allows Toomer to be able to address the urban Black condition at both the micro level,
Rhobert the man, and the macro level, brothers as in the Black male community as a whole.
And even though the prose in this story is often cumbersome and the cohesion of
sentences within paragraphs lacking, we can still feel the mournful, funereal tone of the piece.

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Rhobert, Toomer’s stand-in for the universal Black man, is sinking under the weight of the
financial burdens of his house, which is stuffed full of other financial burdens, which only carry
him further down. This plight leads Toomer to invite us to sing a Black spiritual, the dirge,
“Deep River,” for Rhobert and urban Black men in general.
Many scholars have recognized the similarities between “Avey,” and “Fern” from part
one of Cane. Gerry Carlin writes, “Indeed, ‘Avey’ is an ‘urban’ companion piece to ‘Fern,’ for
again the narrator is a semi-autobiographical version of the author, and the eponymous woman
is, like Fern (and most other female characters in Cane), a mysterious, alluring and elusive
character that the narrator years to understand” (Carlin 70). In addition to mourning the loss of
Black southern rural culture and problematizing essentialist race and gender ideology, one of
Cane’s other biggest themes is the sometimes unconquerable chasm between Black men and
women. Again, again, in Cane, we see a narrator who wants to save, protect, and understand
Black women but just cannot. Affirming this position, Nellie McKay writes, “In many ways,
[Avey’s] behavior recalls that of Fern, the unreachable woman, for whom boys and men compete
and never understand why they are motivated to do so” (McKay 132). Yet, despite this claim, it
does seem as though Toomer wants to show compassion for women who have experienced the
tales he’d heard from his mother and had seen happen in her life. Cane empathetically shows
many different kinds of Black women, all suffering under racism and patriarchy, which reflects
his attempt and sense of failure to protect his mother from the men that preyed upon her and his
inability to protect that vulnerable, multiracial poet side of himself.
“Whether Avey is a prostitute or not isn’t made clear in the story,” writes Gerry Carlin,
and in this five-section short story we follow the maturation process of the speaker and Avey’s
maturation through the speaker’s eyes. And in this coming-of-age story, Toomer returns to one

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of the most dominant images from part one of Cane, dusk. Near the end of the story, when the
speaker sees Avey again after not seeing her for five years, she appears almost out of nowhere
with the coming of evening with imagery that is very similar to the way the horizon was
described in “Karintha” in the first part of Cane, “Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon”
(5). Describing Avey’s sudden appearance Toomer writes, “One evening in early June, just at the
time when dusk is the 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” (47). Avey leaves the
man she’s walking with to go with the narrator, and they share an evening that gets close to
romantic but never goes all the way there and ends with Avey crying and going to sleep. As is
the case with almost every other woman in Cane, the speaker fully can’t connect with Avey,
can’t access her psyche and interiority, can’t save her. But who could save her? Racism and
sexism being two of the strongest ideologies in America. The story ends with dawn arriving and
the speaker calling Avey an “Orphan-woman” (48). This bleak description is so telling when we
consider all of the multiple jeopardies affecting Black women in America. Although Toomer
portrays Black women in a limited light, when it comes to their thoughts and feelings, he does
accurately diagnose the precariousness of their position in American society.
Turning his gaze from his limited but still intersectional and ahead of his time
examination of the perils of Black women, after “Avey,” we encounter the sonically pleasing
poem, “Beehive.” Full of repetition and slant and hard rhymes, the lyricism of this poem lulls
along the page and leaves the reader lethargic and as lazy as the male bee with which the speaker
identifies:
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,

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lipping honey,
Getting drunk with silver honey” (49).
However, there is so much going here than playful personification and anthropomorphism. This
poem is also a free verse sonnet that continues Toomer’s critique of capitalist, urban Black
America by employing the notion of a hive as metaphor for Washington D.C. or any other
majority Black urban community. This conceit becomes evident when one considers the way the
speaker in the poem insists on depicting the honey as “silver.” And in the modern, industrial, and
capitalistic urban north, the speaker finds himself inebriated, insolent, and idle and dreaming of
an escape, dreaming of returning to the natural world of the Black rural south where he can
(returning to the drone conceit) “curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower” (49). This
nostalgia for the rural south and natural beauty and slowness has also been portrayed by Isabel
Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns. Depicting some Black migrants’ homesickness,
Wilkerson employs two epigraphs, one from Richard Wright’s Black Boy and one from Zora
Neale Hurston’s Dust on the Tracks. Wright’s reads,
Should I have come here?
But going back was
impossible. . .
Whenever my eyes turned,
they saw stricken,
frighten black faces
trying to vainly to cope
with a civilization
that they did not understand.

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I felt lonely.
I had fled one insecurity
and embraced another (Wilkerson 243).
And the epigraph from Hurston simply reads, “I was a Southern, and I had the map of Dixie on
my tongue” ( 285). Thus, although the horrors of the south led many Black folks, they missed the
south and held it close in their hearts.
The conversation between “Beehive” and Cane’s next poem “Storm Ending” is rich and
fecund. This short lyric replete with natural imagery can almost be read as an extension to the
ending of “Beehive” or perhaps even a coda. Far from the urban wasteland depicted in “Seventh
Street” and “Rhobert,” the speaker here invites witness the ebbing of a storm with go-for-broke
gorgeous lines like, “Full-lipped flowers / Bitten by the sun / Bleeding rain” (50). The L-sounds
and B-sounds work in conjunction with the imagery here not only to render the natural scene
vividly but also to mimic the pleasure one feels when watching the end of a beautiful torrent
storm that nourishes the landscape. But Toomer also employs counterpoint here when we
consider the harsh sounds and connotations surrounding words like “rumbling,” “strike,”
“bitten,” and “bleeding.” These violent sounding words illustrate the double-edged memories
that many Black folks had about the south: yes, the landscape was gorgeous, but the constant
threats on their bodies always undercut that beauty and sublimity.
After “Storm Ending’s” lyrical, relaxing reprieve of the Black rural countryside, Cane
returns to the congested chaos of Black Washington D.C. According to Gerry Carlin, both
“Theater” and its later companion piece “Box Seat” are both based on Toomer’s experience as a
manager at the Howard Theater in 1922 (Carlin 73). Very similar to the opening lines of

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“Seventh Street,” “Theater” begins with a fast-paced description of Black Washington D.C. Here
is part of the opening paragraph:
Life of nigger alleys, of pool rooms and restaurants and near-beer saloons soaks into the
walls of the Howard Theater and sets them throbbing with jazz songs. Black-
skinned, they dance and shout above the tick and trill of white-walled buildings. At night,
they open doors to people who come in to stamp their feet and shout. Songs soak the
walks and seep out to the nigger life of alleys and near-beer saloons, of the Poodle Dog
and Black Bear cabarets (51).
Here we see the same vices and alcohol driven debauchery of “Seventh Street,” but now the
hustle and bustle in by the Howard Theater, which is actually very close to the Seventh Street
Toomer depicted earlier in Cane. Here we also see Toomer trying to find a way to make his
diction and syntax match the jagged and sharp edges of Black urban life. The sentences here are
long, clause heavy, and full asides. It is almost as though Toomer is trying to pack all the
information he can into each sentence, which, of course, mirrors the packed and congested nature
of Black urban Washington D.C.
But unlike “Seventh Street” and “Rhobert,” “Theater” does more than just illustrate the
hardships of Black urban life and the toll that takes on Black psyches, “Theater” also returns to
one of Cane’s favorite themes, the way societal, sociological, and ideological factors like racism,
colorism, and classism make Black love very difficult if not impossible. We see this theme again
and again in the first part of Cane. In each of the short stories and sketches of part one of Cane,
despite his valiant yet problematic efforts, the narrator cannot gain access to the interiority of
female characters and therefore is unable to establish a meaningful relationship with them. This

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same dynamic is played out here between John and Dorris. Nellie McKay describes this process
more succinctly writing,
In “Theater,” the second narrative in this section of Cane, Toomer uses the divisive
effects of class distinctions among black people to continue to explore the
negative results of unnatural social restraints . . . In “Theater,” the narrator skillfully
addresses the question of what happens to human closeness when it is punctured by
social-class divisions (McKay 138).
In the first part of Cane this phenomenon was explored more thoroughly in terms of race and
power: consider Tom and Louisa or Becky and her unnamed babies’ father(s). Yet in the first
part of Cane we do see a story that handles these divisions of class within the Black community
in similar fashion as “Theater,” and that is in Ester’s starcrossed longing for Barlo. And just as
the class divide seems insurmountable for these two characters, the same can be said of John and
Dorris.
John is the theater manager’s brother (and therefore very middle to upper-middle class)
and comes to watch the women dance. Dorris is one of the dancers, and her less polished and less
Anglo-influenced dance moves signal her ties to a lower class. The story then flushes itself out as
an unspoken courting between the two of them done through glances and Dorris’ dance moves.
This story is especially interesting because we as readers know the two characters' interior
thoughts while the characters themselves don’t and are only working with each other’s body
language in order to glean meaning. Thus, in a vivid display in the light and dark of the theater,
Dorris dances trying to attract John, and he is attracted but never enough to step to her and ask
her out. His position as a proper, respectable, middle class Black man will not allow him to do so
even though he later dreams and writes about her. This conflict evinces Toomer’s aversion for

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Uplift culture. Here, through John, Toomer shows the pitfalls of this ideology and how it stifles
relationships between Black men and women while also attempting to remove emotion and
bodily desire from the Black experience in hope of white folks seeing Black folk’s humanity.
Toomer doesn’t directly favor the Cabernet School though and instead troubles this binary by
exhibiting how both of these belief systems fail and further isolate and alienate Black folks.
Despite all of this and John’s clear and immediate desire for Dorris, the story still ends
with Mame retorting to Dorris after her gorgeous dancing, “I told you nothin doin” (Cane 54).
Therefore because of the deep class divide, despite their mutual attraction, John and Dorris aren’t
granted the opportunity to try to love one another. This ending reinforces Cane’s theme that
Black love and real love in general is extremely difficult and almost impossible in America
where capitalism, sexism, racism, colorism, and classism are so swinging and consuming.
In “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” Toomer now continues his examination of male and
female romance to the urban north with its mechanical and technological imagery that might as
well be light years away from the rural south from which most Black folks migrated. Here
instead of love in the canebrake fields, lovers kiss under the “whisper of yellow globes /
gleaming on lamp-posts” (55). The pleasing sound work and lyricism of this opening does a
great deal of heavy lifting here and really works in counterpoint to the harsh sounding language
and figuration of the “power-house” and “main wires” in the middle of the poem that build to
the electric shock of the couple’s kiss at the end of the poem, “and press your lips to mine / till
they are incandescent” (55).
A recurring image in Cane, the lips in this poem aren’t announcing great stories and
mangled words as they will later in “Kabnis,” aren’t lamenting terror upon Black bodies, or
yelling for the Lord; instead, they are locked in a loving embrace, and for one of the only times

54
in Cane, we see male and female love functioning without malice, tears, or a lack of
communication. Here love is incandescent and blight; pretty much the exact opposite color of
Cane’s primary colors of purple and almost night sky dusk. This modern and mechanical love
and imagery are the only ones that seem to work in this northern urban world.
Yet, even though love literally glows in “Her Lips Are Copper Wire,” the urban north is
still an isolating and spiritually depleting landscape for Black folks, as is evinced in “Calling
Jesus.” In many ways, this poem can be seen as a companion piece to “Rhobert,” as both of these
poems display the Black folks spiritually and psychologically marooned in the urban north. Here
an unnamed Black woman’s “soul is like a little thrust-tailed dog that followers her,
whimpering” (56). This anaphoric phrase begins the first and third paragraph in this prose poem
and demonstrates Toomer’s position that Black folks lost something sustaining and nourishing
when they left the south. Here in the north, although the threat of lynching wasn’t as
everlooming, this poor Black woman’s soul is “Up alleys where niggers [sit] on low door-steps
before tumbled shanties” (56). This isolation from the soul in Black folks wounds the speaker
here, and leads him to pray that God “soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of
southern cotton, will steal in . . . and carry [the Black woman’s soul] to her where she sleeps:
cradled in dream-fluted cane” (56). This tender wish for the Black woman’s soul again shows
Toomer’s caring eye for Black women. And also worth noting here is how the unnamed Black
woman here is shown comfortably and peacefully resting “in dream-fluted cane” (56). This final
image implies that the south with its aromatic cane dousing the air and swaying in the soil is the
place that Black folks still consider as home, the poem ending with the text’s central image,
cane.

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Continuing with his puny and playful titles, with “Box Seat” Toomer tropes off the fact
that modern, urban life in the north is claustrophobic, confining, repressive, or “boxed-in” for
Black folks from the open, rural south (Carlin 78). In this short story we also see another
treatment of Black male to female relationships crumbling and not functioning. Both Muriel and
Dan, the story’s two protagonists, boxed-in both the urban north and its culture of respectability
politics. In section two of Cane Toomer plays up the dichotomy of Uplift Black culture and
Carabaret Black culture in compelling ways, indirectly calling for a third way, a between way
just as liminal as the color purple, dusk, and harvested cane, dead but still so alive with aroma.
On a mission to see Muriel, Dan is worried about how the white people on Muriel’s block
will view him. This anxiety leads to a panic attack that presages Kabnis’ outbreaks later in Cane.
Toomer reveals Dan’s interiority. In a rage because of the weight of the white gaze, looking at
Muriel’s nice, fancy iron gate and front door, Dan thinks,
Break in. Get an ax and smash in. Smash in their faces. I’ll show em. . . . Grab an ax and
brain em. Cut em up. Jack the Ripper. Baboon from teh zoo. And then the cops come.
‘No I aint no baboon. I aint Jack the Ripper. I’m a poor man out of work. Take your
hands off me, you bull-necked bear. Look into my eyes. I am Dan Moore. I was born in a
canefield. The hands of Jesus touched me’ (Cane 57).
This is how it feels to be a problem in the urban north. In the south, feeling like a problem means
the everlooming threat of lynching, the remanants of slavery shining still in every instituion and
social interaction. Here in the urban north, the physical threat is present as evinced by Dan’s fear
of violence from the cops, but because of the boxed in, mechanical, and urban landscape, the
Black soul is more forlorn, and Dan longs for the canefield he was born in, the canefield, of

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course, symbolizing the south where Jesus and the spirit of the land was still with Black folks,
who spiritualized their suffering, even though they were a problem.
Even though Dan has come to see Muriel, she doesn’t want to see him. Muriel, who is
able to live in this neighborhood because “Her hair is like an Indian’s,” and because of “The
flushed ginger of her cheeks” which are “touched orange by the shower of color from the lamp”
(59). Her passing features give her passage to this world with Mrs. Pribby, her blue-eyed
roommate. As is often the case when Black male and female characters meet up in Cane, Muriel
and Dan have trouble communicating and spend most of the first section of the story in silence
with Dan thinking about how much loves Muriel and Muriel thinking, “You irritate me. Dan,
please go” (59). Her friend Bernice is coming, and they’re going to the theater. This gives Muriel
an excuse to get rid of Dan, but she’s not able to do so without him grabbing her to the point of
scaring her and declaring his love for her. The threat of Mrs. Pribby coming into the room was
Muriel’s only effective weapon to get him to finally leave.
The second part of the story takes place entirely at the theater. Dan crashes the show to
spy on Muriel and Bernice. Muriel, of course, quickly spots him, and again Toomer reveals each
character’s inner thoughts, which show Dan’s obsession with Muriel, and Muriel repulsion and
hatred for Dan. After almost getting in a fight with the gentleman sitting next to him, Dan
watches Muriel and one of the sideshow performers, a dwarf, have an awkward, sexualized
interaction. The sight of this seems to break Dan, and he yells, “JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER,”
punches the gentleman he almost fought earlier, and runs out the theater (67). This same type of
rushed exit will happen in the final story of the second section of Cane, “Bona and Paul” And the
use of non-sequitur, spiritual interjections and asides to symbolize psychotic breaks from the
weight of being America’s problem previews Kabnis’ outbursts and tantrums at the end of Cane.

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Just like so many of the characters and speakers in the second section of Cane, the
speaker in “Prayer” is hurt, weak, and in a state of crisis in the urban north. The poem opens with
the speaker lamenting, “My body is opaque to the soul” (68). Very similar to the unnamed Black
women in “Calling Jesus,” we again see Black folks’ souls divorced from their bodies. Three
times in the poem the speaker admits that they are weak and wishes that their voice could lift up
to the heavens and find reprieve or salvation. But the weakened speaker who has endured the
condition of being Black in America, of being a problem in America, has a soul that is “but a
little finger” as the poem reminds us five times. This image of the human finger reaching
towards God is, of course, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling where we see
Adam and God’s index fingers separated by a small gap. Having a keen and tender eye for this
gap, this between-ness, this liminality, this not day not night state, what lies between the Black
and white ideologies of race in America, is another theme in Cane and in Toomer’s life in
general. This gap-existence is one of the ways it feels to be a problem, Toomer seems to argue.
The dirge of the gone south that Black folks left in the Great Migration continues in
“Harvest Song.” Alienated and confined in this urban landscape the speaker here is just as
desolate as the speaker in “Prayer,” and the poem begins with these disheartened lines, “I am a
reaper whose muscles set at sundown . . . And I hunger” (69). His fellow reapers are on another
hill (back in the south), and he longs to be with them: “It would be good to see them” (69). Yet,
he fears that his voice is too weak to get to them. This feeling of inadequacy was also present in
“Prayer” when the speaker of that poem lamented the fact that their voice was too weak to reach
God’s. Both of these poems exhibit Toomer’s position that the urban north left Black folks
spiritually bankrupt and isolated from the land, which sustained them in the south even though
the terror of the race line was more violent and stark there. Also worth noting here is the fact that

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the poem starts at sundown, dusk, that in-between time in which Toomer sets so many of the
scenes in Cane.
Just as so much of part one of Cane is influenced by Toomer’s time in the south as a
teacher, “Bona and Paul” also seems to be autobiographical and is based off of Toomer’s time
Chicago where he “lived, worked, and enrolled in a physical training college in 1916” (Carlin
84). According to Gerry Carlin, “Bona and Paul” is probably the first story Toomer wrote for
Cane and is the only story that takes place in a completely white world (84). This white world
forces Paul, one of the story’s protagonists, to pass for white in to be present, in order to live, in
order not to die by lynching, burning, etc. the usually tools of power by white ideology during
those times. The fact that Paul is passing is made apparent very early in the story when his best
friend, Art, wishes to himself that Paul would “come out, one way or the other, and tell a feller”
(Cane 75). But, of course, just as Toomer in his real life didn’t want to be pushed into identifying
as either Black or white, Paul wishes to reside in the liminal, in the in-between.
And just as Toomer has had in his real life (while in Chicago Toomer dated and was
eventually rejected by a white woman named Eleanor Davis because of his “negro” blood), Paul
has a white girlfriend, Bona. Paul, Art, Bona, and her friend Helen are all meeting up to go to a
nightclub (Larson 181). Despite being afraid that Paul may indeed be Black, Bona tells Paul she
loves him right before they enter the club. Already feeling isolated and alienated from his peers
and emotionally exhausted from the burden of passing, Paul doesn’t return Bona’s words, and
suddenly feels anxious as they all enter the club. Toomer depicts Paul’s uneasy, distressed nature
as follows: “A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the
people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he
knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him

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to himself. . .” (Cane 74). This is the same apartness, the same isolation that we witnessed in so
many of the speakers and characters in the second section of Cane. But this isolation and
alienation seems to be at its highest and most damning here in this story as Paul stands alone as
the only Black person surrounded in a white space. This is Toomer’s answer to Du Bois’
question of how it feels to be a problem. Being able to inhabit both the Black and white worlds,
Toomer and Paul are both problems to the formula of racial ideology and caste in America.
Because Toomer and Paul reside in the liminal space between Black and white they trouble not
only their own imaginations and interiors but also the whole country’s.
The weight of all of this, the burdensome aloof state of this, leads Paul to run out of the
club just as Esther ran of Barlo’s, just as Dan ran out of the theater, just as Kabnis will flee the
cabin later in Cane’s final part. The weight of the raceline, the weight of being a problem, the
weight of being liminal, drives speakers and characters in Cane to panic attacks. When one
considers these tragic and desperate scenes, it’s hard not to think of Toomer metaphorically
fleeing the literary scene for the George Gurdijieff cult (George Gurdjieff was an Armenian
philosopher and mystic who had a compound in Prieuré at Avon in France during 1920 and 30s.
Many famous thinkers and writers, including C. S. Nott, René Zuber, Margaret Anderson, and,
of course, later Jean Toomer joined Gurdjieff and his followers there in order to his special mix
of western philosophy and eastern mysticism.) because of the literary world’s demand that he be
either Black or white but never both merged, never the new American identity that he envisioned
himself being and would write about long after his literary career was over.
A story of a Black man caught passing and forced to flee the white world is how Toomer
decided to end the second part of Cane. Considering Toomer’s biography and the fact that he
told Waldo Frank that Cane really starts with “Bona and Paul,” which Toomer called an

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“awakening,” one can surmise that this first short story may be the impetus for Toomer going
south to “find” his Blackness and those songs of sorrow about which Du Bois wrote, which of
course leads to Toomer writing Cane. Therefore, it can be argued that “Bona and Paul” is the
seed that grew into the harvest that is the full book, Cane.

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4. The Beginning is also the End: “Kabnis” C an e ’ s Final song
Jean Toomer wrote the first draft of “Kabnis” on the train ride home back to Washington
D.C. after he left his teaching position in Georgia because of being disappointed by the education
system there and ways of the South, or in other words, segregation and Jim Crow (Carlin 88).
Jean Toomer originally desired “Kabnis” to be a play, to be a vessel render with the flesh and
voice, voices that linger and stick with the audience long after the performance is over just as the
whispering night winds of Georgia, a through-line in “Kabnis” sticks to the ribs of the reader like
good southern grits eaten with lots of butter and salt. According to Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry
Louis Gates Jr. “[t]he famous American director-producer Kenneth Macgowan rejected it
[“Kabnis”] because, he stated, it lacked a strong plot” (Cane 81). Indeed, one wonders about the
plot of Cane, so leapy, so episodic and ultimately leaving the text’s protagonist in almost the
exact same condition and place in which he began, with the night sky of Georgia splitting open
into the ripe cane-aired day. The way “Kabnis” eschews the linear progression of narrative is
just one of the ways the work destabilizes notions of telos and anticipates circular notions of time
that are all too familiar to us now, yet were just starting to work themselves out in Toomer’s
Modern context. “Kabnis” like the entire text of Cane and Toomer himself anticipate so much of
our current Postmodern thoughts from non-existentialist positions on race to centering black
women’s voices and recognizing their multiple jeopardies and insectional plight. Moreover,
writing “Kabnis,” it could be argued, allowed Toomer to re-enter the south, with his aim to give
voice to the very particular conditions of multiple women, living under the shadow of slavery,
family division, poverty, and exploitation. In this way, he made a stage for the Karinthas, the
Beckys, the Carmas, the Ferns, the Esthers, and most importantly the Ninas, his mother, of the
world.

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In some ways, “Kabnis” can be read as a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story detailing
the maturation process of a creative, sensitive black man learning his place in America. “Kabnis”
begins in medias res, with Ralph Kabnis trapped in the clutches of an existential crisis. His
position at the local school isn’t going as well as he figured; saving his southern black brethren
through education isn’t going as well as he planned. “Kabnis'' is one whole single entity broken
into six sections or scenes. Each section paints another picture and manifestation of Kabnis’s
racialized existential angst and the isolation and mania he feels from his dislocation from being
in the south.
At times, it feels a though Kabnis is the hero of the text, that he is, indeed, the noble
poetic soul who can save the whole red-dusted world of Sparta, Georgia, but other times it feels
as though Kabnis is a spineless, drunk who is feckless too pessimistic. As McKay writes, “The
character of Kabnis embodies a striking duality. On one hand, he is a schoolteacher, who is
laughably fearful and seemingly malleable; on the other hand, he is a sensitive poet, painfully
searching for meaning in the black identity” (McKay 152). Of course, this bifurcation of Kabnis’
personality lends itself easily into W.E.B. Du Bois’ construction of double consciousness. In The
Souls of Black Folk Du Bois writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness . . . One
ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (Du Bois 45). And, Du Bois, himself deeply
admired the text and praised it. Probably speaking of “Kabnis,” and considering the mysterious
fornications of the party in Halsey’s basement, Du Bois wrote that Toomer was a “writer who
first dared to emancipate the colored world from the conventions of sex” (McKay 85). And, to
complicate things even more, “At the same time, Toomer also makes Kabnis a comic character

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and weaves elements of burlesque, parody, and mock epic into his persona” (152). Kabnis,
therefore, embodies all of the different sides and selves of Toomer.
“Kabnis is Me,” Jean Toomer told Waldo Frank as drafts of Cane were starting to come
together and the work was becoming more than a vision and was becoming a book with the flesh
and blood of page and ink (Carlin 88.) And, just like Kabnis, Toomer had been a colored,
racially ambiguous man—but black in America’s eyes, the one-drop rule governing over bodies
in draconian fashion that drowned nuance and left it on the shore to die—from the north who
was down south teaching, trying to uplift his people through education. Surely, when Toomer
first arrived in Sparta, Georgia, townsfolk probably talked about his “Brown eyes [staring] from
a lemon face” just as the speaker of “Kabnis” described the high yellow titular character (Cane
81.)
And, Kabnis, poor Kabnis from the more diverse north, the more cosmopolitan north,
wasn’t used to explaining his body, wasn’t used to one’s appearance telling the whole story of
one’s life. During these times, as shown in part two of Cane, in the metropolitan north, the Black
male body was often confined and celled, as Rhobert is, but in the south, this same Black male
body was too often brought to demise and felled. But, Kabnis isn’t a fool and, like any Black
man in America, Kabnis had been fully schooled in white folks’ ways and knew and understood
the precarity of his body, knew the way his flesh and bone were but kindling and sticks waiting
for the scorching flames of white anger. The whole Georgia landscape announces this message to
Kabnis as he voices this song to the turn of the wind:
White-man’s land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children

64
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground (81).
Describing the isolation he feels amongst Black folks, the places he’s supposed to feel safe and
comfortable, Kabnis utters, “God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty.
Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. Stinking like unwashed niggers. 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” (83). Kabnis wants community and wants to feel nearness and not
isolation and alienation, so he pleads to night, “Near me. Now. Whoever you are, my warm
glowing sweetheart, do not think that the face that rests beside you is the real Kabnis. Ralph
Kabnis is a dream” (81). Throughout the story we find doubles like this. Kabnis’ self is split as
he tries to find a way to reside and survive in between the Black and white worlds. The staccato
and abrupt fragments and syntax enact Kabnis’s frantic state of mind. The swell of his delirium
has made him think that he isn’t real. The plight of his mind, the burden of blackness, the fact
that this is the “White-man’s land” where “Niggers, sing . . . Till poor rivers bring / Rest” is
nearly too much for him to bear so he has distanced himself from himself (81). He has become a
dream of himself because he can’t be what he wants to be because the limits of race pen him in
too severely and cripple him.
The first section of “Kabnis” ends as it began, with Kabnis hearing the night wind lip the
song of “vagrant poets as he falls asleep:”
White-man’s land.
Niggers, sing.
Burn, bear black children

65
Till poor rivers bring
Rest, and sweet glory
In Camp Ground (85).
Ideology, sexism, racism never sleep.
And, while the first sketch of “Kabnis” begins right in the midst of his late night mental
breakdown in his cabin, the second section begins in the parlor of Fred Halsey’s home. Halsey
and Layman tell Kabnis, the northern, one more story about the horror of Jim Crow. Layman
delivers the story of Mame Lamkins,
She was in the family-way, Mame Lamkins was. They killed her in th street, an some
white man seein the risin in her stomach as she lay there soppy in her blood like any cow,
took an ripped her belly open, an the kid feel out. It was living; but a nigger baby aint
support t live. So he jabbed his knife in it an stuck it t a tree. An then they all went away
(90).
As expected, Kabnis reacted with pure shock and horror, “Christ no! What had she done?” And
Layman replied, “Tried t hide her husband when they was after him” (90). While Layman is
telling this heinous story (This story is actually a fictionalized version of the lynching of Mary
Turner, which took place in Valdosta, Georgia in 1915.), the wails and moans of a church service
nearby are loud and are punctuating the most gripping and harrowing parts of his narrative. This
weaving of Layman’s deadpan deliver of tthe horrors of the murder, the aching catharsis of the
church, and Kabnis’s unadultarated fear gracefully enacts the swirling nebulous of screaming
anger and fear that is the black condition in America.
The third section of “Kabnis” mainly finds the title character in a panic attack: Kabnis is
all panic. Now that he’s inside his cabin he begins to vocalize his anxiety attack from the fear of

66
the white lynch mob. Kabnis says to himself, “God Almighty, theyre here. After me. On me. All
along the road I saw their eyes flaring from the can. Hounds. Shouts. What in God’s name did I
run here for? A mud-hole trap. I stumbled on a rope. O God, a rope” (91). Kabnis isn’t safe in
Halsey’s parlor. Kabnis isn’t safe in the cane field. Kabnis isn’t safe in his own cabin. In this
section, we are also introduced to Lewis, who Toomer employs as a mirror character of Kabnis.
Whereas Kabnis is weak and is often bruised by the world, Lewis is strong, confident, and direct.
Whereas Kabnis is brought to paralysis from the fear of white supremacy, Lewis stands boldly in
the face of it and is a community organizer from the north who has come to advocate for Black
folks in the south. Whereas Kabnis can’t find his way in the Black rural south, Lewis is also out
of place but can fit in significantly better than Kabnis. All of this leads Kabnis to deeply resent
and adore Lewis. “Kabnis has a sudden need to rush into the arms of this man. His eyes call,
‘Brother.’ And then a savage, cynical twist-about within him mocks his impulse and strengthens
him to repulse Lewis:” this is how Toomer describes Kabnis’ feelings towards Lewis (96).
It is as though seeing Lewis is like looking in the mirror for Kabnis, and Kabnis doesn’t like
what he sees.
For the first time in the story, a section ends without poetry and song. Instead, at the end
of section four, we are introduced to Halsey’s sister, Carrie K. She enters the workshop in order
to take lunch to blind Father John in the basement. For a quick moment, Lewis lusts after Carrie
K and wants to save her from the South, wants to take her up North with him. As has been shown
throughout all of Cane, Toomer has a real investment in saving Black women from their
precarious positions. This want perhaps comes from his desire to save his mother from the ills of
her life, which was marred by heartache, hard work and sickness. This mapping of Lewis’
interiority is interesting because until now in the text we have only been able to access the

67
interior of Kabnis. Therefore, I believe this gesture even more shows the connection between
Kabnis and Lewis and the way Toomer has made them double for each other.
At the beginning of part five, Halsey leads Stella, Cora, Lewis, and Kabnis to their
descent into “The Hole” for a dark, candle-lit basement party. The scene is depicted as follows:
“The walls are of stone, wonderfully fitted. They have no openings save a small iron-barred
window toward the top of each. They are dry and warm. The ground slopes away to the rear of
the building” (103). And more importantly, we are also given our first real depiction of old blind
Father John, the elderly black man who lives in “The Hole.” In section four, we learned that
Halsey’s sister, Carrie K, feeds and tends to him. Now, we finally get to see him, and Toomer
writes that “He is like a bust in black walnut. Gray-bearded. Gray-haired. Prophetic. Immobile”
(104). Lewis can’t stop looking at him. The others ignore him. Lewis asks what everyone calls
the old man. Halsey simply replies, Father, and when Lewis presses Halsey as to why, he doesn’t
have an answer. So Lewis decides to call the old man Father John saying that the old man is “[a]
mute John the Baptist of a new religion” (104). Lewis implores Kabnis to look at the old Father
John because “[t]he old man [is the] symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past” (106). Kabnis won’t
look at him and denies connection to Father John’s Southern, rural religious version of
blackness, saying “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods,” effectively denying his blackness,
just as Toomer will do later in his life (106). Lewis then holds Kabnis to task for this. “Cant hold
them, can you? Master; slave. Soil; and the overarching heavens. Dusk; dawn. They fight and
bastardize you. The sun tint of your cheeks, flame of the great season's multi-colored leaves,
tarnished, burned. Split, shredded: easily burned. No use. . .” (107). Lewis can see the source of
Kabnis’s plight right on his face because it is also Lewis’s plight. It is the plight of all black folks
in white America, the splitting and shredding of self.

68
Section six begins with Halsey waking up everyone from a drunken slumber. Everyone
protests, but eventually he’s able to get everyone up except for Kabnis. Kabnis stays downstairs
and berates Father John. Kabnis believes Father John spoke during the night. The word “death'' is
what Kabnis believes he heard the old man say. The others don’t believe him and leave Kabnis to
verbally tussle with the old man. Trying his best to hurt the old man, Kabnis tells him, “Theyve
put y here t die, damn fool y are not to know it. . .Do y think youre out of slavery?. . . damn you,
by yourself, with th flies buzzin an lickin God knows what they’d find on a dirty, black foul-
breathed mouth like yours. . .” (113). As Kabnis is admonishing the old man, Carrie K. comes
down the stairs to feed Father John. Kabnis stops his verbal jabs as Carrie K. tries to calm him
down telling him that he should go to church in order soothe his soul. Kabnis rejects this notion,
and then, out of nowhere, Father John begins yelling the word sin over and over again. This
words sends Kabnis into another panic attack. He yells, “The whole world is a conspiracy t sin,
especially in America, an against me. I’m th victim of their sin. I’m what sin is” (114). Finally,
Kabnis has landed on the source of his pain. He is a sin against America because of his Black
body, and he can feel it. He can always feel it, which is why he tries to write about it, to sing
about it, but he can’t because the weight of being a sin is too much for him to take. Du Bois once
wrote, “How does it feel to be a problem, black America?” Well, Kabnis and his story directly
answers this question. It feels like the mania we see in Kabnis. The mania Jean Toomer felt, the
mania that I, too, feel as Black man in America today. The latter is one reason Cane needs
dusting off and to be reread as a lyric rendering of fragmented Black subjectivity.
Toomer then ends “Kabnis” in a way that no other story in Cane ends. Instead of ending
at dusk, that in-between state in which the text began, “Kabnis” ends right before dawn, during
that period when it is neither day nor night just as dusk isn’t. This liminal space reminds me of

69
how my Great Auntie would describe her short time working the field when she was young as
getting up at “can’t see in the morning” and working until “can’t see at night.” Black folks’ lives
beginning and ending on the edges of thresholds just as Cane does. Moreover, the light that can
be seen “streaks through the iron-barred cellar window,” and “Within its soft circle” we see “the
figures of Carrie and Father John” (115). The last two characters Toomer decides to let us see are
Carrie and Father John: Carrie symbolizing the text’s devotion toward the preservation,
promotion, and centering of Black women, and Father John symbolizing the text’s focus and
problematizing of the Black experience in the south. Through Father John, it seems as though
Toomer is arguing that Black folks were closer to God and earth in the south. Father John’s
tongue is forked with the words of God, and he literally lives inside the earth in a basement.
And then after highlighting these two characters, Cane comes full circle and ends just as
it begins with the sun on the eastern horizon rising, a “Gold-glowing child” illuminating the
southern town just as Cane has done, even with Toomer’s typographical ingenuity of the sickle’s
arc, trying to make a whole but never obtaining it, shedding light on and preserving Black rural
southern culture. Therefore, although many argue that Cane’s ending is pessimistic because
Kabnis doesn’t change and is just as broken at the end of the story as he is in beginning, we must
recall “Kabnis” was written before the first section, making its lyric coherence appear to have
emerged from Kabnis’s broken search. Therefore, one can see hope in this sunrise ending, this
new day dawning, where Black women and the gems of Black southern culture are spotlit and
are probably our strongest and sharpest tools for fighting against the feeling of being a problem
in America.

70

Testify
I

Looks like “Lord have mercy” do not help me none.—Furry Lewis

71
Loud Looks

You better rap, my brother
says—he can
b-box his ass off.
Got Dj scratches and spins,

will drop it on the two
and four, the three and four.
Whatever you need.

Me posing my bars: My flows
are second to none, come here,
son. See how it’s done.

Wanted to be a rapper? Check.
Thought I was going to the NBA? Check.
Father went to prison? Check.
Brother too? Check.
Mother died when I was eight? Check.
Hung pictures of Luke Perry
on my bedroom wall?

What?

Yep, give me a bit, and I’ll sprinkle
some subjectivity on it.

I loved that dude, his whisper-voice, his lean.
Auntie worried on the phone:
Girl, he got photos of some white boy
all over his walls. Me rocking out
to Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”

Silent head nods do more
than throw shade.

All black people are fluent

in silence. Mangled Baldwin quote?
Let’s keep wrenching. Everybody’s

fluent in silence.

You know what
a switchblade glare means. No need

72
to read the look she gave me

as I sang, Let me run
with you tonight.

73
Washing Palms
When the junkies my father sold crack to got
too close to me, he told them to back up

six dicks’ lengths. This is the man who when I was
seven caught me under the bed crying and said:

Save those tears. You’ll need them later.
The man who told me he smoked crack

because he liked it, the man sitting on his couch
now watching the History Channel, scratching

the nub beneath his knee where his leg used to be,
gumming plums, his false teeth

soaking in vinegar on the table. I’m sitting
across the room trying to conjure each version

he’s shown of himself, trying to lie
in water warm enough

to soak away the switch he hit me with.
To help me summon love for the man

who just asked me if he can borrow 200 dollars,
the man who once told me: Wish

in one hand, then shit in the other,
and see which one fills up the quickest.

74
Aubade

I’m being watched
by a gold timepiece,
tethered and swinging

from a belt loop
on pleaded khakis ironed
stiff as rigor mortis.

Red second hand
tells me, Don’t worry.
A woman waits

with a bare tit for your lips.
Saying what I want to say
is like soothing the sun

with spit, like ladling out
the bowels of an oak.
Shine tests my eyes. Flex

of heart. Air that’s mine
to catch. Circle, circle,
dot, dot. Nobody gave me

my shot. There must be
a word, a phrase.
Break, voices! Interrupt.

A furnace churns
downstairs. Cadavers
step out of my selves.

75

Little Fires Left by Travelers

The smoldering stops
me. I see my father in knee-deep
snow.
Wet white sticks
to the blade. In Grandpa’s snowsuit
dad is blue flame. Come
summer he’ll be nude
under his overalls, yes, no

drawers, letting it hang and swang,
straight raw. Newport shaking
its red cherry. Smoke trailing
behind:
something kind of like
the sparklers I used to write
my name with
on the Fourth
of July, something not unlike

lightning bugs fighting night
with the shine of their asses.
Dad’s shotgun bucking:
all strobe and flash.
Can I get
a James Brown scream? Father’s
legless, not Godless, charms the Lord
with his tongue, reads the red
words of Christ when I go.

76
Get Your Head out of the Gutter

I want to dive inside, to graffiti
the walls of your mouth
so you’ll never forget me, want to lay
a cobblestone road
upon your tongue.

At St. Mary’s,
teachers told us sex is
when a man loves a woman
so much he wants nothing

between them so he lies close
enough, inserts his—
There, the bell
tower never knelled, not for weddings
or the going of the old. On a dare,
I climbed the stairs. A rope released

dust when I took hold
and pulled. I heard chimes,
felt rust fall into my eyes.

77
Luxury Items

A plastic bag.

Whim’s wind.

No zipper like the ones they put bodies in. Suspended,

after flitting, after being
animate. A buoy,

easily ignored:
how many have I passed? What

did I need? Matches, rubbing
alcohol, razors?

So many things I would like to return:
fist I plunged

into my brother’s gut, saliva
I hocked on his forehead

when he already had enough,
our mother
dead on the cooling board.

Plastic bag, hard to observe,
impossible to ignore, waits
for a face.

78

As if I can unchisel pain,

I stare at the statue

of a man stuck mid-crawl, right arm outstretched,

palm up as if begging,
hand cupped and empty. Is it

always empty? No, leaves and weeds,

rain and snow, shine and shadow
sometimes rest there. I have,
too many times,

left hands bare, ignored pleas,
turned my glare instead of looking. On his head,

a crow lands and stares.

79
Feels like Rain

Dead black cat on the porch,
tongue out.

I touched it!

No regrets. I’ve told myself
for as long as I can forget.
I rode a Big Wheel

through snow, couldn’t go back

as far as planned. Manx cat, do you want a tail?

Left too many blades under pillows. Band-Aids
never big enough. My father aches

in legs he doesn’t have. That cat
was more his than mine.
He’s like both of ours
only let’s keep him at my house.

With a lit cigarette, I plugged an anthill.

80
Baubles

A crucifix hangs
in my skull.

Scriptures drip from my lips.
Choiceless,
I caulk my mouth

to hold and save. Call them
coins, worth still

undetermined. Overhead,
a murder of crows, tar-babies

of God.
Mother’s eyes swirled,

showed only white
before she died.

Church mailed a Bible.

Gift and/or onus? It’s in a box,
which resembles hers.

81
Entreaties
My brother promised me I was a God
and the world would end
on the first day of the 2g, said:

Little Doug, you need to be
on this real shit, this black shit,
this Five-Percent shit. When I asked

Grandma, she opened her Bible, moved
the red ribbon to the side, and placed
her long fingernail under David’s pleas:

With a loud voice I cry out
to the Lord; with a loud voice
I beseech the Lord. My complaint

I pour out before him. I know
to close my eyes when holy words
are spoken. I do, and then it’s 1989.

Troy has an afro and a white jeep,
bricks of crack in the trunk. He’s
rapping Rakim to me: My name is

Rakim Allah, and R & A stands for "Ra."
Switch it around, but still comes out "R."
Rap lyrics seemed the only words

he said to me, hitting my chest
for emphasis at every dope line.
These niggas be telling the truth,

Little Doug, he would say. Grandma prayed,
prayed hard: Dear Lord, seat of wisdom,
mirror of justice, cause of our joy, please

have mercy on this boy and his brother.
Grandma died in November. Troy’s back
in prison. I haven’t prayed in years.

82
Heading Down

We shouldn’t raise mixed babies
in the South, Kay says as I drive up the crest
of another hill on our way into Kentucky.

The South, where humidity leaves
a sweat mustache, where a truck
with a Confederate flag painted

on the back windshield skitters in front
of us. In its bed, avoiding our eyes,
a boy with blond hair

split down the middle like a Bible
left open to The Book of Psalms.
His shirtless, sun-licked skin drapes,

a thin coat for his bones, his clavicles sharp.
I want to know who’s driving this raggedy truck.
I want the boy to look at us. I want

to spray paint a black fist over that flag.
I want the truck to find its way
into the ravine. I want to—

Stepping on the gas, I pass the truck.
Kay and I turn our heads. The boy smiles
and waves. The man driving doesn’t

turn his head, keeps his eyes on the road. Kay
turns red as she draws her fingers
into fists. I stare at the whites of her eyes.

83
Me, The Boondocks. Her, South Park.
I hate Token. She can’t stand
Uncle Ruckus. We watch reruns,
Def Comedy Jam. The medium
is the message. I have trouble
laughing until a man—What’s his nuts?
An expression I stole from her—
says, We all black when the lights go
out: his rationale for fucking
white girls. Her mouth remains
shut, not the least tickled. Right
then, I knew we were a power drill
without a bit, lots of twerking,
no purpose. All that is to come is
vanity. Polar Vortex, 2010, white kids
ice skating to campus. Black ice
isn’t black, just unseen. My car careened,
stuck for hours. She came
to get me. When Elijah Muhammad tried
to give Baldwin a name, James asked
for a ride to the white part of town. North
Side Chi-town. Sixty stories high,
we peered down at Lake Michigan’s
snow-water-sheets fighting, colliding,
refusing to become solid ice.

84
Mic Drop

Grandma’s grave remains unmarked. It was me
who was supposed to buy her headstone.

After finding out her plot was still uncrowned,
I promised.
I promised to give dad my truck.
I promised to quit smoking, to say sorry more.

My apologies as bare as the stretch of land above her.
Promised I’d send my brother fifty dollars. Promised

I’d holla at my auntie at least once a month.
In the restlessness night gives,
I saw Mounds State Park,

the pavilion filled with every broken promise
congregating as though this was a church revival.

Mother and father both walking as though their legs
were never lost.
Me at a podium, with a microphone:
I’m sorry. I am so sorry.
My act of contrition
interrupted by voices. My past and future selves loudest

of all. They offer punishments: Lashings? Guillotine?
Electric chair? The noose? Banishment? Stones?

To get out of there I had to become Father Bob,
the holiest man I ever saw in flesh. Mirror to face,

I am him, aquiline nose, crow-claw eyebrows, skin
yellowed around eyes and joints.
We do the magic trick

he always did. He pulls my thumb
off, and after a quick smoker’s cough, puts it back.

85
Indefensible

Honestly, I went to church camp for the girls.
Those youth group trips were the closest I’d ever get

to them. Holding hands to pray, crying as we passed
the candle and confessed our teenage evils. So much

lust but little of it had to do with the Lord.
The homies and I used to say, She got a body on her.

Meaning we found her attractive or that her body
was the only thing about her we liked. Her face, man—

We all memorized Pac’s “Dear Mama”
and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” but he’s the same man

who gave us All Eyez on Me. Yep, “All Bout U”
and “Wonda Why They Call U Bitch.” On the floor,

in the front room, playing chess, a female friend challenged
my love of hip-hop, called it sexist, asked what my dead

mother would think, talked about my brother
and father’s prison bids. I didn’t have the pocket cop-out

reply I have now: Everything that’s wrong with hip-hop
is the same shit that’s wrong with America. I put on

“Brown Skin Lady.” I tried to get in more than a checkmate.

86
Best Act like You Know
Corner of Nickel and Arrow,
marked by a stop sign, factories

and auto-plants gone, Bingo Halls
teeming like weeds, we share

a Newport. Troy’s talking
about getting the feet on his car.

The Feet? I ask. Rims, nigga, he replies.
Two men approach, their fists

clenching bottle necks.
Troy lifts up his white shirt to expose

the nine. Just in case niggas trying
to clown, he says. Gauging the distance

between my present and past is as hard
as trying to gouge out the eye of a fly.

Raw coke in a baggy. Fools pleading
to hoop-score sentences for them rocks,

he reports—Doug Fresh, you will never
catch me slanging another fucking stone.

87
My Brother Smoked Rocks with a Qur’an at His Feet
When the man with the Nation of Islam
asks if I wanna buy a Final Call,

the burned plastic smell of crack
wafts into my nostrils, and I think

of Troy, my brother who bought me
Jordans and clothes two sizes too big,

the brother who taught me how to dribble
and play chess, pawns clasped

in his palms. Troy, the man everyone calls
Shabba Ali, the name he received in prison.

Troy who wasn’t allowed to come
back home because of the rocks

in his pockets, the rocks he sold
on the corner of Fourteenth and Sycamore. Usually

Black Muslims ignore me
because of my white lover, but Kay isn’t

with me today. Troy used to say:
You’ll never catch me with a white woman.

Still, I grew an Afro just like him,
loved the Wu-Tang Clan,

tried to be left-handed.
The man senses my hesitation, offers

me incense: Ten for a dollar.
I see Troy in his polo and baggy khakis.

He always stomped me when we played chess
but never could outsmart the cops.

88
Bad Son

Ghosts hang from hooks.
I don’t know myself
in past pictures. In the Polaroid
days, I was a hi-top fade
and a lip-smile. Just lost
my two front teeth.
Didn’t want who to see?
Probably me. Can’t remember
what staring in the mirror
felt like then. Probably something
like taking off skates
and feeling shorter but stronger.
No, the present presses and mints
the past into a gold coin
you can’t spend anywhere.
A savings account
with negative interest. Had dreads
in high school, wore almost
a pound of hemp. Sandals, my
shoes of choice. Amber
and shea butter, my smell.
Dad transferred
to Anderson’s jail. More charges
pending. I didn’t visit him.

89
I’ll Leave Your Ass Here

Fuck you will, boy.

His steps, slow motion,
trail behind me, learning

to walk again. Two new prosthetic legs.
Six months ago he was all flat line

and moan. I wasn’t there, didn’t
go to the hospital, said I was too busy, was told

about him coding three times in one
night. I tell him, Falling’s not an option, Dad.

His 250 pounds
too much: he’ll always be more than

me. Dougie, you ain’t never
lied. He’s lying, always does, does

so much he doesn’t even know it.
Once, we were walking.

Daddy, why the moon keep following me,
I asked, rushing to catch up. Because you

the only nigga who matter in the world.

90
II

Y’all be nice to the crackheads.—Ghostface Killah

91
“Are You Ready to Help the Parents of This Child in Their Duty as Christian Parents?”

My godmother answered Yes and traced
the sign of the cross on my forehead. I’m driving
to see her, pines blotching the side
of the road. I want Sandy to stay
young. She uses a walker now, an old woman,
curly hair and wrinkled hands
soft as feathers. In her backyard,
we feed birds bread. Pigeons so close
we could christen them. Wrens and warblers
congregate. Sandy drove me to church every Sunday
after my mother died. Before I leave
today, she’ll make me recite the rosary in the parlor,
sunlight revealing new lines on her face.
We don’t go to church anymore.
She doesn’t travel well. Christmas and Easter—
the only times we step inside St. Mary’s. Make a wish,
she says—a cardinal’s just landed, red cap sharp
as the pope’s hat. Sandy was Mother’s
catechism sponsor. She remembers her voice. I can’t.
This pecks at my head, so I tell her.
But I’ve never told her how I call
her my fairy white godmother, never admitted
I no longer believe. As always,
when we go inside, I light the votive candles.

92
Of Wasp Hum and Catacombs

Because my brother cooked
coke into crack, some baking soda,
water, a little of this, a little of that.

If I remove the plank from his eye,
I’ll break my mother’s back. Oh,
how I forget! Mix up and confuse.

That’s okay. She can’t walk anyway.
And here I am walking, no, swarming
because a friend said something

about mothers scraping off
their daughters’ clits in Somalia. I wish
I had a twin sister, whose eyes itched

when mine itched, whose ears—
My limbs dance alone.
Is someone talking about me? I don’t

talk to my brother on the phone. Hello,
you have a collect call from—. Seneca
choked on bloodsmoke. I fear my bones

are lined with cancer. I’m not joking.
I’m not cooking. I’m walking home
from the grocery, arms full of brown bags.

93
I’m My Father’s Name
I’m the tangled Christmas tree lights he cursed,
the logs he split for six dollars an hour, his Thunderbird
and/or the gnats haloing his bottle’s lips. I’m the heel
of the platforms he wore in ‘72, the cake-cutter Afro pick
he split that white boy’s wig with, the glass dick
he smokes his crack from. I’m the perm kit, the false
teeth bubbling in the cup on the nightstand as he sleeps,
the record collection he sold for crack. I’m the luggage
his eyes carry, the pride seeped out of his lips
when death stood on his chest and left for a future visit.
I’m the smell of his breath: menthol cigarettes,
tooth rot, and biblical thoughts. I’m each purple scar
on his face, the dance hall he never got to open,
the hamburgers he smuggled to TV night in prison. I’m
the fire in his voice when he told his stepdad,
If you hit me again we’re going to war. I’m the sawed-off
he shot into the front porch, the Dawn dishwashing liquid
he showered with, the latex glove he used to pull out
his shit when he was constipated. I am Little Douglas.
I am Locust Street, his street, the block he made pop
with junkies. I am the boy on the corner, waiting to yell, Police!

94
Lost Side of Loss

That rattling animal, the self, you left

inside your mother. Take
your eyes away from the soil.

Look at the birds worrying
the trees.

Act as if someone
is rubbing your head, whispering

without face, without tongue.

There’s a hole
in your pocket, a gold frame

around her photo.

In suits, men carry away
her casket, her voice, your eyelids.

95
Keeping It Real

is like damming a river with a toothpick,

like Afros dowsed in kerosene, like tattooing

“Suburban Life” across your stomach

or humping a pillow-top mattress. Keeping it real

is like smoking a cigarette, wearing a nicotine

patch, and chewing Nicorette, like waiting

for Ecstasy pills to hit. Keeping it real is nail clippings,

nose hairs, and Ornette Coleman’s saxophone.

The real shit is crying as your Dad places the glock

from his pocket in your palm—

Don’t be no girl, motherfucker, shoot, nigga, shoot.

96

The First Time I See My Father’s Blood Cleaned

Fried chicken and cigarettes
in my backpack,

I stand at the door
unable to cross

the threshold. As if
that hospital floor

is ice too thin to bear
any weight. I hear

your younger self caught beneath,
knocking your fists

against the brittle cold,
not strong enough to break

through, your gray-black skin
a city at night. Still,

I’m at the door
with the greasy chicken

and smokes you asked for,
watching you bleed.

Blood rushing
through tubes so fast

it seems not to move. Artificial
kidney does work

yours won’t. You don’t see
me. You shiver between death

and sleep. I place my bag down,
try to give you my time,

the thing you wouldn’t ask for,
and didn’t need, what

I’d been longing to give.

97
Fishing

I hear myself on voicemail, and I’m afraid.

Did time start the moment I began measuring it—
the way I was just a baby until I was named?
Once my tongue loosed words,
there was nothing to talk about. Hunting
and pecking, I found my way. The picture
on the wall is of me only because my mother
told me. I drag fingernails across my flesh.
Someone told me every seven years
we’re brand new. If only we’d leave
skins like cicadas.
If I believed in Jesus, I’d ask to touch
the wounds. It’s not me moving;
it’s the dark. Black hides on both sides
of the mind. No one tells the maple leaves
to let go. I cannot catch the sun even though

I’ve wrapped it in a vowel and two consonants.

98
This Poem Isn’t Black

I am not myself. I am sleeping

on the backseat of my brother’s
white Jeep Cherokee.

Crack

under the seat. Crack flooding
his blood.

Hard to tell memory from the real. I am trying,

trying to make this image tar,
but I don’t wanna be leashed

to only reading this poem
on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

Brightness leaping
from the Cherokee.

He always tells me,
You be acting white.

Those words

skin me down to the white flesh.

99
Vertigo
I tell you all the reasons we shouldn’t be
together: (None of them involve race or the face
I gave you the first time I saw your parents’ crib.)

my immeasurable desire,
my dreams of other women riding me,
the ebb and flow of daily routine

that could lull our love to sleep. You tell me
sober up, but my mind is clear
as Canyon Lake when our canoe

twirled us in circles as though the two of us
were one leaf spinning
with nothing beneath but wide sky.

100
Whose Little Boy Are You?

Too ornery to die,
while he coded blue,
my father saw us
arrive by helicopter,
my lover and me walking
on the hospital lawn.

Y’all looked just like the Obamas, except for Kay

being white, he said.
Before chest-shock rocked

his body back, he talked
to his mother, grandmother,
and my mother.
Call it
the Yalta Conference.
Peace made. Demarcations
drawn. I thought he’d be different.

Doctor said his brain
sat without oxygen
for a long time. I know

I was the one y’all asked about pulling the cord.

He doesn’t remember dying,
only dreaming. How kind
of the body, I thought,

and wondered if that’s the way
it always goes.

101
Give Me My Mama Back

I’m gonna kidnap Christ.
Give me a roll of duct tape
and a switchblade. I’m gonna
gash out his eyes, lash
his other side, finger his stigmata.
I’ll cut myself, give up
a pound of flesh, slit Satan’s wrists,
piss on his flames, lift dirt
from graves, unfasten the manacles
of slaves. With my tongue,
I will pick the lock
on death’s door. All this to hear
her voice calling me home,
to see her eyes behind
those cat-eye frames, to feel
her cigarette breath against my neck
as she combs through my curls,
me between those thighs
that once spread wide,
so I could come into this world.
A joint hanging from her lips, she
tells me, Boy, you know we gonna
get in some shit for this.

102
Crow, Opening Wings and Rising, Kills Me

Dew falling from grass blades kills me.

Picture of Amiri and Hettie kills me. The one
where he’s holding their mixed baby kills me—

is that Kellie or Lisa? Ever seen the photo

of Louis Armstrong throwing shade? No
Satchmo smile.

Fog obscuring Long Beach docks kills me.

How easily eyes meet when crossing paths,
how difficult. Squeeze of hand to fist. Watching

my father’s three-hour morning routine.

Slight breeze and all the dandelion seeds leave.
Icicles sweating. The way my auntie

triumphantly throws down the Big Joker.

Uncle tossing her dollar. Futile efforts
at not thinking. Whole afternoon spent thinking

about not thinking. Staring contests

with that dude in the mirror. Quivering mouse
on the glue trap. Once we saw that,

my lover and I decided to let them run wild.

103
Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices

Said enough about dad, mom, and brother.
What about my aunt, more mother
than the headstone I visit on Mother’s Day.
Movies, softball, and Bingo, her hobbies.

The coverall pays 1,000 dollars, enough
for two months’ rent. So often all she needs is O-64.
Who knows how much money she’s spent?
Dougie, get your mind out my purse! Don’t

be counting my money, she’d say.
Card games at our house. Cigarette smoke,
threaded gold letters on Crown Royal bags.
Games of choice, Tonk or Spades.

That’s my high. Jessie, you got the low.
High yellow Miss Tammy had elbows darker
than shadows. Girl, she know she need
some Vaseline. Didn’t go to Bingo as much

as I should have. Her brother has all his Bingo cards
memorized, more than two tables’ worth—
I think of Malcolm X believing West Indian Archie
would have been a great mathematician

if there was no Jim Crow. I think of the night
I told her she didn’t know enough about me
to love me. The way she told me I was a fool
for not believing in God. I’m sorry for all my sins

with all my heart. She helped me memorize
my prayers. Catholic school duties.
After her surgery, she told me,
Dougie, now you’ll always be my only baby.

104
Never Left My Name

in wet cement, haven’t
observed Lent since high school.

Desert dust too much
like rust for forty

days. Ashes to frothed
tongue. Her mouth bruised

around her lips if
we kissed too long.

South Mountain, I rub
my skin to stone, felt

less and/or more alone.
Forgettable flesh. After

sex, I asked her to strip
every star from her

ceiling. She turned off
the lights to make it easier.

Her pinkie toes
had no nails.

105
We Had the Second Biggest Gymnasium in the Nation

Razor blades for breakfast,
washed down with aftershave.
Clean upper lip.
Need something to stop me
from looking like my dad.
Need something to stop
me from acting like my dad.
Can’t help but walk
the way he used to before
his legs were amputated. Difficult to
swag-stroll on two prosthetics,
but he tries, leans to the side
when he drives
those electric wheelchairs at Wal-Mart.
Take him there,
and I can end up anywhere:
Dougie, I got me a taste for a shake.
Stop by Big Boy’s.
Anderson is small enough
to cross in fifteen minutes.
Trust me. I don’t know
how many times
I’ve done it.
Rable Avenue to Columbus.
Riding by the high school.
It’s not Dad’s, nor mine.
The three schools combined.
What year? We don’t remember.
Factories gone too. Vacant lots,
dandelions working the cracks
in the cement. Windows
full of hairline fractures. Guide
Lamp and Delco Remy made this city
flush with greenbacks
long before crack made pockets
fat. I left town in 2004.
Never felt like home until I was walking
out the door.

106
Testify
I swear on the melody of trumpet vines,
ants feasting through animal crackers, Burt’s Bees,
Tyler Perry movies, my daddy’s .38 slug, footie-socks
inside high-top Jordans, disidentification, drag
queens, blond dreadlocks, headstones
salt-and-peppering the grass, vanilla wafers
in banana pudding, Zeus-swan chasing,
blunt-guts, sharp thumbnails, keloid scars,
cash-only bars, R&B songs, on what the pot
called the kettle. I put that on my mama’s good
hair, on playing solitaire with a phantom
limb, the white woman I go home to,
my auntie’s face when she says: You know
he always loved them pink toes. I put that on
everything, on the signifiers I gobble up,
candlesticks blown out by whistling lips.
I put that on dervishing records scratched
on down-beats, empty beehives,
fresh-fade head-slaps, hand claps, bamboo shoots,
liminality, mestizos, the purple-black crook
of my arm, split sternums, on You can’t save
him now. I put that on skinny jeans, get rich
quick schemes—Gotta get that C.R.E.A.M. Know what
I mean?—freckled black faces, leafless trees
throwing up gang signs, phlegm hocked
onto streets. I swear I catch more stones
than catfish. I lose more collard greens than sleep. I think
nothing is here but us darkies, high yellows, red bones,
cocoa butters. Someone, no, everyone has jungle fever.
Don’t touch my forehead. Blond
as moonshine, mute trombone choking.
I put that on Instagram. Post me to the endless chain
of signifiers. Strawberry gashes on kneecaps, Let me
get some dap, Newports, Kool’s, and folding
chairs instead of barstools, that white drool
caked on your face. Mommy please wipe away
the veil. I thought I was passing into the eye
of the streetlamp. I swear. I promise on frondless
palm trees, long pinkie nails, sixteen years, serve eight,
and Miss Addie’s red beans and rice, Ol’ Dirty Bastard
and the brother on the Cream of Wheat box. It don’t mean
a thing if it don’t buckle your knees. Open your hands.
I’ll give you a song, give you the Holy Ghost
from a preacher’s greasy palm—When he hit me, I didn’t
fall, felt eyes jabbing me, tagging me. Oh no he didn’t!—

107
give you the om from the small of her back.
I put that on double consciousness, multiple jeopardy,
and performativity. Please make sure my fetters
and manacles are tight. Yea baby, I like bottomless
bullet chambers. I swear on the creation of Uncle Tom—
some white woman's gospel. She got blue eyes? I love
me some—on Josiah Henson, the real Uncle Tom, on us still
believing in Uncle Tom. Lord, have mercy!
Put that on the black man standing on my shoulders holding
his balls. Put that on the black man I am—I am not—on
the black man I wish I was.

108

III

There’s no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it.—James
Baldwin

109
Goodnight, Baby

I see Mother naked

on the cooling board. Stopping

the incision, the mortician turns to me and says Never forget.

I am a boy but know

how flesh stiffens, how

voices keep.

*

Mound of dirt her body makes

sleep to reach
sleep to

reach her hand

*

Cemetery hills, red maple

red dogwood, red bud tree, weeping

cherry. We’re gas poured then smoke.

*

Her breasts, why do

I remember? Men

in white ripped the blouse from her chest.

*

If the sound

110
of the wind. If I don’t

smile at the Pacific,
if I become stone.

*

I wore a choke-chain for years, hoping

she would pull.

*

Jesus and myself high above it all. God no

where like Mother. God no

where the day she died. Here

but gone. Godless. Her not Mama or Debbie, now nameless. Now her

headstone. Her name written there. I read

it aloud. She won’t

answer. It’s Mother’s Day, the air thick. Wet

from her spit, from her mouth yelling my name.

When I was born, she called me Baby. The night

before she died, she said

Good night, baby.

*

She could read stones like faces.

*

She died at thirty-four.
I’m thirty-three.
What used to be flakes off like dry skin.

111

Crown Hill Cemetery
It isn’t the chessboard of stones,
the grass, the flags flailing in the heat,

the wigged birches with their thin
white arms and necks.

It’s one headstone the size of a child,

white envelope to the right that says
From Mom placed next to the picture

of a boy born in 1983 like me. He’s
clutching a yellow-eyed cat and hanging

above it all—staked, a headless
camouflage hat.

112

Bullets Ain’t Got No Names on Them

Aim imprecise.

Misses like language.

Watch out.

Those are bodies falling through the cracks.

Brother from ‘round the way says They left
niggas leaking last night.

PoPo had the block

hot as a sauna. I see spray painted T-shirts.

I’m tired of RIP. I’m tired of TV. I’m tired
of shootings. He assures me,

This Napghanistan, homie.

113
What I Wish My Mother Had Told My Father
Tell your bitches
I’m coming out.
Tell ‘em I’m gonna
wear my skirt,
that skirt that makes my ass
the apple of your eye,
that tight black mini
that turns heads, that skirt
I bought for myself
because you’re a broke ass.
I’m gonna put on
my yellow heels,
the ones that let
my toes peek out.
I’m gonna run
the hot comb
through my hair.
Tell your bitches
my hair is too fine
for a perm. Tell ‘em
they better back
the fuck off
the moment I walk
through the door
swinging my hips,
licking my lips, because
it’s my bed you come
home to after
your small head spits
out all its bullshit.
Tell ‘em I’m the one
with the bail money,
the rent money, the light
money, the food money. Shit!
All the money! Tell your bitches
I’m coming out tonight.

114
I Can Run Five Miles but Can’t Get to the Other Side of My Mind

Always been the type to hold a hornet

in my fist—numb is another word

for fed up. I pull

nose hairs to cry. Love, to me,
is the vine strangling the locust tree. Tell me

to take a stand. I’ll have a seat.
Show me heaven’s cliffs. I’ll leap.

I’m a June bug,
and it’s September.

My lips hate one another, so I can’t shut up.

115
Is That My Father?

At the hospital, I rub his heel with oil, saving
some for that knob that was once his full leg.

The blinds slice a streetlamp’s light into stripes
above his nappy hair. IV tubes and cords

writhe around his bed. His mouth circled with froth.
In the morning as I drive out of the parking lot

and head toward Highway 65, light sweeps
into the empty passenger seat, the place where he

would be sitting if I didn’t have to leave him, if
he wasn’t dying. In a cornfield, he struts

on two legs, wearing suspenders and a white bowtie,
his right arm loose, swinging time. He smiles,

spins in place, his hair relaxed, black,
and flat. Glistened to shine by golden stalks and sun,

anointed and crowned—I’m a bad man,
he yells to me, both of us annihilated by all that light.

116
I’m Suspicious

if it fits, if it exists.

Chiseled, our ways.

Me, for instance,
always chewing the end

of my pen. I like
ink blue, the hue
of the Seventh note. Sound

more tangible. I am
against easy,
in the pocket, right

where voices meet. Give me discordance

and a Forty of Mickey’s.
Punch the sundial. Pile

your kitty litter dreams.
Reach in. Dig, fool, dig.

Dust had enough.

Put some stank on it. Let’s
drink to what

remains unlocked. Not
the key, holed for chain,

round body thinning
to jagged teeth.
Not the open—

the shut is what I
want shut.

117
All Is Laughter

A dance of fists—I wasn’t
there, but people say you were

too drunk. Wind would
have toppled you if his punches

hadn’t, but you fought anyway,
swung wide and wild, landed

only a couple blows, while his
fist struck sixteenth notes

on your face. You staggering
up. Him telling you to stay

down. I am sitting on your lap.
I am your little brother. I am

younger than I am now. We are
eating ice cubes. You tell me

you love the sound of knuckle
to skull, the look a face gives

before a man falls. Making
my hand a fist, you place it

on your jaw, buck your eyes
and push my small clenched hand

into your mandible. You tumble
us to the floor.

118
Knee Deep

Father wants to be buried in a pinstripe suit,
says give him a money clip full of loot and the Funkadelic
record, Uncle Jam Wants You. Me, I imagine cremation:

ashes released at Joshua Tree or into the Pacific. Cliché,
I’ve thought, so now opt for the plot beside my mother:
maybe we’ll talk, maybe our voices will mix into a stew,

bone-mash and echoing-shadow. Wouldn’t care how
they dressed me as long as I was cleaned and touched
with love before I was put away to rot. I think more

people should get massages. Face down in the nude,
somebody pushing love into you. Not a luxury,
the receptionist at Massage Envy says, a necessity. Probably

not, but I bought a membership. Buried alongside my mother,
grandma, grandpa, uncles, and aunts: a clan of us. Admission?
Blood, family squabbles, awkward kisses. One cheek

or two? Dare for the lips? I never asked Dad if he wanted to be
buried with his prosthetic legs. Surely, he’d need them.
Surely, they’d be fastened secure when he got up to rise.

119
Pray to This
1.

Wet memory of my dead
mother’s voice, a soaked
residue. What

I remember is fluxed before
the fall off the cliff: no
splash, clash, or clang

ringing off the rounded gong
of gone. The difference
between I think it was

and I don’t recall,
too slick. Her voice on the tip
of my tongue, then snatched.

120
2.

Don’t let the streetlights catch you,
Mama says before I leave.

Tall poles with glaring bulbs,
their limbs could grab me,

take me into some deeper night. It isn’t
shining beams she fears.

Don’t let—hooded figures—
the streetlights—who spark

guns—catch you—specters selling
white rocks. Flames

I can’t see. She can
but can’t know

her body will quit—Don’t let
the streetlights catch you—can’t

know those red and blue lights
taking away Dad,

brother, and her body too.

121
3.

I hold on to the priest’s words
floating on dark, needing
the calm of his homily.
I see that small boy with the hi-top
fade, the one who wore
those itchy slacks his mother bought.
Her favorite song: “On Eagle’s Wings.”
He doesn’t know why. Inside
this church today a woman
with white hair sings:
And He will raise you up. I rise,
step into the Communion line.
I sing: You need not fear the terror
of the night. The priest
lays bread on my tongue. Body
of Christ. I say Amen. Red wine
warms my head. I say Amen.

122
4.

Your mama gonna send me to the penitentiary, Dad says.

The lawn bathed in milklight, his face straight and solemn,

eyes cold as the moon as he shows where

her fingernails dug craters into his cheeks. Still

in half-sleep, I see bees and flies sharing sky. Knuckles

swollen, he slips from his belt loop a gun,

hands it over. Its metallic barrel throws a rainbow

across my face. The pistol, heavier than a full milk jug.

123
5.

Mama’s not in this picture, already

dead in August. It’s my first
Communion. Father Bob’s there.
My father stands behind him

on a step, a shadow. His black
shades hide his eyes.

His mustache touches his nostrils
the way mine does now.

Is he high?

124
6.

Mama’s still

plaiting rows in my hair,

one strand over another, crisscrossing
down the nape.

The lanyard-curls warm,

a coiled snake.
She rubs grease

into my scalp, cooling the pull,
the tear of hair, the smell

of olive oil.

Then ash, her fingers, her hands, her

face blown away.

125

7.

Background red.
Mama, Grandma, where are y’all?

Both dressed in black,
Grandma with her fedora cap, purse

in her lap—I only remember
her Pall Malls. There must be

a pack in her purse. Mama’s standing
next to her, must be before

multiple sclerosis, before her mind let go
of her legs. She wears a tie, a skirt

to her ankles. Dark stockings hide
her light skin. Grandma sits

in a wicker chair, Huey P. Newton style
but without the rifle and spear.

Mama’s hair’s curled. She had to sleep
in rollers to make it stay.

126
8.

Boy perches on top a ladder,

below a swirl of umbral-pull and light-push,

his brother hot-boying: coke, baking

soda, and water boiling in a pot, his father

flaming a white rock. His mother

tries to wiggle her toes, can’t, and stops.

127
9.

All and nothing sacred.
Skin more nothing more

than cloak body taut
ripped from thought.

Somewhere in the thick of gone,
what waits to show me what

I forgot, what

I let drop?

128
The Cripple and the Crackhead

If there is a way, a proper way, to lift
your damp, naked ex-wife

out of the bathtub, he guesses this is it,
folding one crack-slackened arm under

her legs, the other above the small of her back.
Once there were women with ice-pick eyes

and sin-grins, the ones he fucked
while she slept in their bed alone. But now

he’s here. Crack somersaults in his veins,
but he is here, her wet, black hair

dripping on the back of his hand. The sound
of this moment not the blues, not a plea, a testimony:

her lips touch his cheek as he carries her.
This instant wide and round—

their son’s eyes when he sees that kiss.

129

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Asset Metadata

Creator Manuel, Douglas Wayne, II (author)

Core Title How does it feel to be a problem? Revisiting Cane and the life of Jean Toomer

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 07/25/2021

Defense Date 05/06/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American literature,Black literature,Black modernism,deformation of mastery,double consciousness,Harlem Renaissance,Jean Toomer,Literature,mastery of form,modernism,New Negro Movement,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,W.E.B. Du Bois

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Gomez, Ivette (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email dmanuel@usc.edu,dwmanuel2714@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC15622071

Unique identifier UC15622071

Legacy Identifier etd-ManuelDoug-9872

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Manuel, Douglas Wayne, II

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu