Cane

Writing Cane

Jean Toomer began writing sketches that would become the first section of Cane in November 1921 on a train from Georgia to Washington D.C. By Christmas of 1921, the first draft of those sketches and the short story "Kabnis" were complete. Waldo Frank, Toomer's close friend, suggested that Toomer combine the sketches into a book. In order to form a book-length manuscript, Toomer added sketches relating to the black urban experience. When Toomer completed the book, he wrote: "My words had become a book…I had actually finished something."

However, before the book was published, Toomer's initial euphoria began to fade. He wrote, "The book is done but when I look for the beauty I thought I'd caught, they thin out and elude me." He thought that the Georgia sketches lacked complexity and said they were "too damn simple for me." In a letter to Sherwood Anderson, Toomer wrote that the story-teller style of "Fern" "had too much waste and made too many appeals to the reader."

In August 1923, Toomer received a letter from Horace Liveright asking for revisions to the bibliographic statement Toomer had submitted for promotions of the book. Liveright requested that Toomer mention his "colored blood," because that was the "real human interest value" of his story. Toomer had a history of complex beliefs about his own racial identity, and in the spring of 1923 he had written to the Associated Negro Press saying he would be pleased to write for the group's black readership on events that concerned them. However, when Toomer read Liveright's letter he was outraged. He responded that his "racial composition" was of no concern to anyone except himself, and asserted that he was not a "Negro" and would not "feature" himself as such. Toomer was even willing to cancel the publication of the book.

Structure

Toomer spent a great deal of time working on the structure of Cane. He said that the design was a circle. Aesthetically, Cane builds from simple to complex forms; regionally, it moves from the South to the North and then back to the South; and spiritually, it begins with "Bona and Paul," grows through the Georgia narratives, and ends in "Harvest Song." The first section focuses on southern folk culture; the second section focuses on urban life in Washington D.C. and Chicago; and the third section is about the racial conflicts experienced by a black Northerner living in the South.

In his autobiography, Toomer wrote: "I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end."

Contents

Preamble

"Cane" (poem)

First section:

"Karintha" - A vignette about a young black woman desired by older men who wish "to ripen a growing thing too soon."

"Reapers" - A poem written in couplets about reapers in a field, their "silent swinging," and the stark death of a field rat.

"November Cotton Flower" - A sonnet written in couplets with images of death in nature in the octave. These images become "beauty so sudden" in the sestet.

"Becky" - Vignette of an ostracized white woman with two black sons who lives in a small stone house with the railway.

"Face" (poem)

"Cotton Song" (poem)

"Carma" - Vignette about a strong woman whose husband becomes involved in shady business.

"Song of the Son" (poem)

"Georgia Dusk" (poem)

"Fern" (short story) - A Northern man attempts to woo a southern black woman, with strange results.

"Nullo" (poem)

"Evening Song" (poem)

"Esther" - A young woman who works in a drug store ages and pines for the wandering preacher Barlo, eventually seeking him out.

"Conversion" (poem)

"'Portrait in Georgia" (poem)

Critical reception

Cane was largely ignored during the Harlem Renaissance by the average white and African American reader. Langston Hughes addressed this in his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by saying, "'O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,' say the Negroes. 'Be stereotyped, don't go too far, don't shatter our illusions about you, don't amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,' say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial." Hughes suggests that Cane failed to be popular among the masses because it did not reinforce white views of African Americans. It did not fit the model of the "Old Negro" and did not depict the lifestyle of African Americans living in Harlem that whites wanted to see.

Cane was not widely read when it was published but was generally praised by both black and white critics. Montgomery Gregory, an African American, wrote in his 1923 review: "America has waited for its own counterpart of Maran—for that native son who would avoid the pitfalls of propaganda and moralizing on the one hand and the snares of a false and hollow race pride on the other hand. One whose soul mirrored the soul of his people, yet whose vision was universal. Jean Toomer…is the answer to this call." Gregory criticized Toomer for his labored and puzzling style and for Toomer's overuse of the folk. Gregory believed that Toomer was biased towards folk culture and resented city life.

W. E. B. Du Bois reviewed Cane in 1924, saying: "Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings." Du Bois goes on to say that Toomer does not depict an exact likeness of humans but rather depicts them like an Impressionist painter. Du Bois also wrote that Toomer's writing is deliberately puzzling—"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."

In his 1939 review "The New Negro", Sanders Redding wrote: "Cane was experimental, a potpourri of poetry and prose, in which the latter element is significant because of the influence it had on the course of Negro fiction."

Modern criticism

Alice Walker said of the book, "It has been reverberating in me to an astonishing degree. I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it."

In The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone wrote: "By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, Cane ranks with Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style."

Gerald Strauss points out that despite "critical uncertainty and controversy," he finds that Cane's structure is not without precedent: "it is similar to James Joyce's Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters's poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) ... Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally."

Legacy

In 1973, Alice Walker and fellow Zora Neale Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered a grave they thought was Hurston's in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. The line "a genius of the south" is from Toomer's poem "Georgia Dusk", which appears in the novel. Hurston, who could be deceptive about her age, was actually born in 1891, not 1901.

The novel inspired the Gil Scott-Heron song "Cane", in which he sings about two main characters of the novel: Karintha and Becky.

The novel inspired Marion Brown in his "Georgia" trilogy of jazz albums, especially on Geechee Recollections (1973), where he put "Karintha" to music, recited by Bill Hasson.

Critical studies (since 2000)

as of March 2008:

Book monographs / articles/chapters

Snaith, Anna, "C. L. R. James, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer: The 'Black Atlantic' and the Modernist Novel", in Shiach, The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press; 2007. pp. 206–23.

Lamothe, Daphne, "Cane: Jean Toomer's Gothic Black Modernism", in Anolik and Howard, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland; 2004. pp. 54–71.

Petesch, Donald, "Jean Toomer's Cane", pp. 91–96, in Iftekharrudin, Boyden, Longo, and Rohrberger, Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story. Westport, CT: Praeger; 2003. xi, 156 pp. (book article)

Terris, Daniel, "Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, and the Critique of Racial Voyeurism", in Hathaway, Heather (ed.); Jarab, Josef (ed. and introd.); Melnick, Jeffrey (ed.); Race and the Modern Artist. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press; 2003. pp. 92–114.

Fontenot, Chester J., Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois's 'Of the Coming of John,' Toomer's 'Kabnis,' and the Dilemma of Self-Representation", in Hubbard, The Souls of Black Folk One Hundred Years Later. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press; 2003. pp. 130–60.

Griffin, John Chandler, Biography of American Author Jean Toomer, 1894–1967. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press; 2002.

Fahy, Thomas, "The Enslaving Power of Folksong in Jean Toomer's Cane", in Meyer, Literature and Music Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi; 2002. pp. 47–63.

Lemke, Sieglinde, "Interculturalism in Literature, the Visual and Performing Arts during the Harlem Renaissance", in Martín Flores and von Son, Double Crossings/EntreCruzamientos, Fair Haven, NJ: Nuevo Espacio; 2001. pp. 111–21.

Wardi, Anissa J., "Divergent Paths to the South: Echoes of Cane in Mama Day", in Stave, Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark, DE; London, England: University of Delaware Press; Associated University Press; 2001. pp. 44–76.

Journal articles

Farebrother, Rachel, "Adventuring through the Pieces of a Still Unorganized Mosaic": Reading Jean Toomer's Collage Aesthetic in Cane, Journal of American Studies, December 2006; 40 (3): 503–21.

Baldanzi, Jessica Hays, "Stillborns, Orphans, and Self-Proclaimed Virgins: Packaging and Policing the Rural Women of Cane", Genders, 2005; 42: 39 paragraphs.

Banks, Kimberly, "'Like a Violin for the Wind to Play': Lyrical Approaches to Lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer", African American Review, Fall 2004, 38 (3): 451–65.

Whalan, Mark, "'Taking Myself in Hand': Jean Toomer and Physical Culture", Modernism/Modernity, 2003 Nov; 10 (4): 597–615.

Ramsey, William M., "Jean Toomer's Eternal South", Southern Literary Journal, Fall 2003, 36 (1): 74–89.

Hedrick, Tace, "Blood-Lines That Waver South: Hybridity, the 'South,' and American Bodies", Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South, Fall 2003, 42 (1): 39–52.

Edmunds, Susan, "The Race Question and the 'Question of the Home': Revisiting the Lynching Plot in Jean Toomer's Cane", American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, March 2003, 75 (1): 141–68.

Whalan, Mark, "Jean Toomer, Technology, and Race", Journal of American Studies, December 2002, 36 (3): 459–72.

Battenfeld, Mary, "'Been Shapin Words T Fit M Soul': Cane, Language, and Social Change", Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters, Fall 2002, 25 (4): 1238–49.

Da-Luz-Moreira, Paulo, "Macunaíma e Cane: Sociedades Multi-raciais além do Modernismo no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos", Tinta, Fall 2001, 5: 75–90.