This is by Jean Toomer (1894-1967), and it was published in 1923. I became aware of it when I read Yonnondio with Haley Larsen and her group. She points out that we can't discuss "the world of working-class literature without gesturing to the centrality of race", and powerfully expressing that centrality is the Harlem Renaissance. This cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s was engendered by the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the deep south to the country's northern cities. Cane played a formative role in it.

And I have been struggling with it for over a year... As I pointed out here, I rarely DNF a book. But I do, fairly frequently, LSL (Let Stuff Linger). So I've read Cane in three bursts. The initial feeling of bewilderment: "What is this all about?" The subsequent determined effort: "OK, I'm going to get to grips with this thing if it kills me..." And this week, the final push: "This is going to linger no more..."

Fortunately, there's lots of help out there. So this post is more a compilation of the useful things others have said about this book than a record of my inadequate interpretations.

I would say this, though: It's worth persevering. I've never read anything quite like Cane, and it plants seeds of insight and curiosity that are worth nurturing. It intersects with work such as The Souls of Black Folk (W.E.B. Du Bois), The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson), and, of course, Beloved (Toni Morrison), but its perspective is quite unique.



***

First, who was Jean Toomer?

Well, this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer... A lot -- really, a LOT -- has been written about his identity and ethnic background, but the best exposition, I think, is by Ismail Muhammad. Some extracts:

"Writing to the Liberator about his racial identity in August of 1922, [Toomer] declared quite congenially that he possessed 'seven blood mixtures,' and that because of this, his racial 'position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am naturally and inevitably an American. I have striven for a spiritual fusion analogous to the fact of racial intermingling.'...

"The young Toomer was subject to a near-constant oscillation between black and white worlds, a movement enabled by the particular privileges that accrued to him as a member of the black elite. After Toomer’s father, a former slave from Georgia, abandoned the family, Jean was raised in his grandfather’s home in a wealthy white neighborhood of DC. In accordance with the dictates of DC's rigorously segregated education system, however, he was educated at the all-black Garnet School. He later lived with his mother in mostly white neighborhoods in New York, but after her death he returned to DC's black elite to live with an uncle. During his adolescence, he attended the prestigious all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School..."

Clearly, then, a man of many influences. He comes across as a tad lackadaisical, though: Six colleges, but no degree... Fortuitously, he was given enough money to enable him to spend time in New York, where he became familiar with the white "Lost Generation" and Harlem's "New Negro" movement. Extraordinarily influential, however, was his short stint teaching at the Agricultural and Industrial Institute, Sparta, Georgia, in the autumn of 1921. "Writing to Sherwood Anderson about his experiences in Sparta," Muhammad tells us, "Toomer recalled an encounter. 'Here were Negroes and their singing,' he wrote. 'I had never heard the spirituals and work songs. They were like a part of me. At times, I identified with my whole sense so intensely that I lost my own identity.'" Muhammad explains: "I take Toomer to mean that he encountered blackness with such strength of perception that the matter of identity passed out of relevance for him. In this light, far from providing Toomer a simple sense of heritage or ancestry from which to write, the South provided him a space and language in which to elaborate his unstable sense of race... The discovery of a black cultural inheritance in his own person exposes Toomer to an 'identity' that is, paradoxically, the effacement, loss, and evasion of stable identity."


Jean Toomer, taken in Taos, New Mexico, c. 1935

But this stance, of course, cuts across societal norms whose goal is to impose arbitrary racial boundaries. Black was the identity that publishers Boni and Liveright wanted to promote: "Whatever Toomer intended to achieve with Cane, the result was his conscription into the role of 'Negro writer.'" And this was something he was not prepared to countenance. "My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine," he famously protested. And you can understand that. No-one wants to be the posterchild woman writer, or black writer, or writer of any other arbitrarily imposed category. But Toomer played hardball, going so far as to refuse Cane’s inclusion in African American anthologies of the late 1920s.

While some (Muhammad, for example) have applauded this determination not to give in to what is ultimately a meaningless and ridiculous categorization, others have seen slightly less honorable, more baldly pragmatic motivations for Toomer's behaviour. He was said to have begun "passing"... Passing as white, that is -- or as someone of East Indian origin. We need to remember that being identified as black legally limited your life in all sorts of ways. Both Toomer's wives were white, and so "his white neighbors in a segregated suburb would not accept a Black/white interracial couple, nor allow his daughter to attend community schools. An East Indian, however, was permissible."

Byrd and Gates maintain: "He lived as a Negro while growing up. And then he decided to live as an ex-Negro almost as soon as the print was dry on Cane." In sum, he reinvented himself "to enable his upward social and artistic mobility..., because of all of the circumscriptions placed upon Negroes and Negro writers in America in the early 1920s, when he began his career."

They don't "blame" him. But their "considered judgment, based upon an analysis of genealogical evidence previously overlooked, [is] that Jean Toomer -- for all of his pioneering theorizing about what today we might call multicultural or mixed-raced ancestry -- was a Negro who decided to pass for white."

I don't know. It's probably a bit of both: An early understanding of the social construction of ethnicity, and a keen eye for what works. If you live in a fundamentally stupid and unjust society, you can't be reproached for finding ways to avoid its idiocies (the extent of the nonsense is evident in the wildly different classifications Toomer either claimed or had imposed on him in the course of his life). Whichever was the major motivator, however, Toomer never published another book, and when the Harlem Renaissance faded, Cane faded with it.

Which is a tragedy, really. Langston Hughes, while enjoining fellow black writers to express what they are "without fear or shame", is totally mindful of the pressures: "This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America -- this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible..." These writers struggle to find their own voice because they are beset with expectations from the black and white communities alike. "Both," he adds, "would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane." And sure enough, as I just noted, nothing equivalent emerged from his pen again. Waldo Frank's Introduction stands utterly disproven: "It marks the dawn of direct and unafraid creation. And, as the initial work of a man of twenty-seven, it is the harbinger of a literary force of whose incalculable future I believe no reader of this book will be in doubt."


Langston Hughes (1901-67)

Now, however, Cane is back. Has been since the late 1960s, and the burgeoning of Black studies programmes. It exercised an influence on James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and William Faulkner, amongst others, and its continuing relevance, for Tamlyn Avery, is crystal clear: "A century after its publication, it remains a visionary masterpiece that offers new ways of relating to the past and rethinking the politics of identity in the present."

***

And what about the book itself?

Cane, Avery tells us, has a dark context. It is born of the nationwide 1919 riots, "in which Black communities defended themselves against mobs emboldened by the white nationalist 100 Percent American Movement, a revived Ku Klux Klan, and President Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to condemn white terrorism". Lynching was still practised (in the first decade of the 20th century, there was an average of 85 lynchings per year; in the second an average of 61).

An example of literary modernism, Cane is made up of fragments (although they cohere as a "spiritual cycle of disparate stories, verses and images"); and it's polyphonic, with overlapping voices "woven together like a fugue". It's also impressionistic, often breaking an object down into abstract parts whose reassembly offers new perspectives. The epigraph illustrates this:

Oracular.
Redolent of fermenting syrup,
Purple of the dusk,
Deep-rooted cane.

"The poet," says Avery, "takes a simple object: a sugarcane plant. Instead of looking at the whole object, he breaks it down into abstract parts and associations: we smell boiling sugar, see purple stalks the colour of sunset, recognise the deep secrets of the plant’s vast root system.

"Cane is therefore highly symbolic, like an oracle’s message. Breaking it down into its parts opens our senses to new ways of viewing the reassembled whole. The epigraph offers a lesson in interpretation, and a method for approaching Cane itself, as a dense 'syrup' of seemingly disconnected forms and parts..."

This quality, for sure, is also what I found daunting about it. It can be maddeningly elliptical.


This is "clean" sugar. But humankind's desire for this crop has a lot to answer for down through the ages

The text is divided into three parts:

"Set in Sempter, Georgia -- a fictionalised depiction of Sparta... -- Section One consists of prose portraits of rural women interspersed with symbolic poems that examine interracial tensions, sexual violence and social estrangement...

"Largely set in Washington DC -- where Toomer was educated -- the second section of Cane explores the Great Migration, focusing on southern Black men residing in vibrant but spiritually isolating northern cities...

"The artist’s role in modern society -- a classic modernist theme -- comes under scrutiny again in Cane’s final section, a 35-page drama entitled Kabnis. Ralph Kabnis, an intelligent but troubled northern teacher, transfers to Georgia, where he feels disconnected, despite his ancestral roots there. He is a flawed artist type, who wants to turn words into a source of redemption, but he finds only chaos, disorder and hypocrisy."

There were two other sources that I found really helpful as I battled with the text: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt, who takes you through the book section by section with huge enthusiasm ("I have never stopped reading Cane, I am always reading it. It is not finished for me. I have barely begun"); and Laura Reis Mayer, whose teacher's guide offers useful pointers and pertinent questions.

Informed by them, I'll isolate a few of the themes that really stood out for me:


Martin Puryear, from the portfolio Cane, 2000

WOMEN

The first story, Karintha, opens like this: "Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child... This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her." Karintha has no voice; she's an object onto which surrounding males project their desires. "Karintha is a woman" is the refrain that acts as its beating heart. It's an uncomfortable story of a woman allowed no real childhood.

The story called Becky begins: "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." This haunting, rhythmic exposition is repeated word for word at the end. Becky is rejected by black and white alike... And again she is revealed to us by the way others see her.

Carma, the protagonist of the next story, described as imposing and "strong as any man", is again the object of the narrator's gaze: "I leave the men around the stove to follow her with my eyes down the red dust road... Maybe she feels my gaze, perhaps she expects it."

I'm including the next paragraphs verbatim, because they illustrate Toomer so well. Lyrical, evocative, yet ultimately elusive...:



And then we pick up again: "Carma's tale is the crudest melodrama. Her husband's in the gang. And its her fault he got there."

After a couple of poems, we meet our next protagonist, Fern. She has extraordinary eyes. And it's a similar tale: "Men saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern's eyes said to them that she was easy... Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies. Something inside of her got tired of them... She did not deny them, yet the fact was that they were denied." Fern is a strangely elevated character, unapproachable. "She became a virgin," we're told, and she's subject to strange religious seizures (as happens when she's with the narrator, who feels an ineffectual but strong desire to do "some fine unnamed thing" for her).

This is a bewildering story. Even EBSCO offers only unhelpful vagueness: "Ultimately, the story raises questions about the nature of connection, longing, and the societal boundaries that inhibit true understanding between individuals from different backgrounds. Through this brief yet impactful relationship, Toomer invites readers to reflect on the enduring complexities of race, identity, and human connection." Yes. Thank you...

Rhodes-Pitt: "We are again in the puzzle of an irresistible woman -- figured as denying, withholding... The woman is known by her effect on others. Alice Walker wrote of Toomer's women, 'In the selfless abstractions their bodies became to the men who used them they became more than "sexual objects," more even than mere women: they became "Saints." Instead of being perceived as whole persons, their bodies became shrines: what was thought to be their minds became temples suitable for worship.'" Note that Walker is not extolling this situation, in which "to be a Saint is the only alternative when a black woman cannot be an artist".

All women have suffered from the virgin/whore/mother stereotype. But black women have suffered more than most, since they are still more likely to be objectified and dehumanized. This is why Laura Reis Mayer invites students of Cane to "track the sexual objectification of southern black women" in Toomer's vignettes.


Winold Reiss, The Librarian, 1924/25. In 1924, Reiss was "commissioned by Survey Graphic magazine to capture the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance with portraits of the residents of Harlem in New York City"

The story called Esther is rather different. But again we encounter the theme of religiosity. Esther becomes obsessed with a travelling preacher, called Barlo. He's "clean-muscled, magnificent, black-skinned". Profoundly impressed, she resolves to tell him she loves him when he returns to town. Which she attempts to do. But then she realizes that Barlo is drunk, and "seems hideous". She withdraws, to the jeers and hoots of the crowd.

Again, I'm not sure I totally get it...

Moving on... To Portrait in Georgia, one of the most chilling little poems I've ever come across:

Hair -- braided chestnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
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.

Shudders...

Rhodes-Pitt: "Toomer's 1921 sojourn in Georgia overlapped with some notable atrocities. Earlier that year a plantation owner evaded investigation for enslaving convicts in peonage by murdering all of the workers on his land -- which pushed the governor of Georgia to launch a state commission on the plight of 'The Negro in Georgia.' But published reports did not stop a lynching in December 1921, just 50 miles from Sparta, where Toomer lived and worked. This would have been toward the end of Toomer's time down south."

And indeed, from here we move to a story called Blood-Burning Moon. The facts it recounts are horrible: Bob is white; Tom is black. They both love Louisa. Bob takes her by force; Tom attacks him. The white mob burns Tom. And the story is very creepily told, with the full moon -- "an evil thing, an omen" -- hanging ghoulishly over the scene.

Ultimately, I found it hard to judge Toomer's portrayal of women. Elaine Margaret Sisson, in what she entitles "a feminist critique" of Cane, argues that the book "reproduces dominant narrative structures", suppressing and marginalizing female discourse, and identifying women with nature and the non-intellectual. She quotes W.E.B. Du Bois's commentary (the original of which I've been unable to find) "to illustrate the extent to which the sexual representation of women is accepted as a given: 'Here is Karintha, an innocent prostitute? Becky, a fallen woman? Carma, a tender Amazon of unbridled desire? Fern, an unconscious wanton? Esther, a woman who looks age and bastardy in the face and flees in despair? Louisa with a white and a black lover? Avey, unfeeling and unmoral and Dorris, the cheap chorus girl. These are his women, painted with a ...certain splendid, careless truth.'" Cane is a male discourse, says Sisson, and it "is achieved at the expense of containing or framing women in a narrative".

I find it hard to gauge whether Toomer is a) just telling it how it is (in a society where blacks counted for little, and black women for even less); b) presenting a version of reality that's slanted by his own particular vision, and therefore "one-dimensional and distorted"; or c) creating, in the shape of its whole cycle, "a complex vision of womanhood which defies the easy stereotypes of the individual stories".

ECONOMIC HARDSHIP AND MIGRATION

It's not surprising that the 60 panels of the 1941 Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) -- who was influenced, you remember, by Toussaint Louverture -- draw on many of the themes evoked by Toomer. The poem November Cotton Flower, for example, begins:

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing...

Rhodes-Pitt tells us: "Toomer was on the scene during the harvest season of 1921 during what was reportedly the starkest decline in Georgia's history. The state had produced on average from 1.5 to 2.0 million bales a year between 1915 and 1920. In 1921, less than 800,000 bales were harvested."


And here's Lawrence: "They left because the boll weevil had ravaged the cotton crop"

The brief story called Seventh Street, which ushers in the second part of Cane, is introduced and signed off with a few telling lines:

"Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks."

To this very different world of the north the migrants head. "Who set you flowing?" Toomer asks in the story.

In the next piece, Rhobert, the eponymous protagonist "wears a house, like a monstrous diver's helmet, on his head". He's a man in trouble: "The earth is round. Heaven is a sphere that surrounds it. Sink where you will. God is a Red Cross man with a dredge and a respiration-pump who’s waiting for you at the opposite periphery." Hmmm... I told you these weren't necessarily easy stories...

As Rhodes-Pitt puts it: "Another mad scene, though unlike the others, we don't witness cause, only effect. Madness is the given state of things." She quotes the expression Ralph Ellison uses to describe the culture shock experienced by black people moving north: "slum-shocked". As he says: "The cultural history of Negroes in the North reads like the legend of some tragic people out of mythology, a people which aspired to escape from its own unhappy homeland to the apparent peace of a distant mountain; but which, in migrating, made some fatal error of judgement and fell into a great chasm of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end ever against a wall."

Poor Rhobert. The story concludes:

Brother, Rhobert is sinking.
Lets open our throats, brother,
Lets sing Deep River when he goes down.

And by the way: a) The lack of apostrophes is characteristic of the text; and b) Here can be found a beautiful rendition of Deep River by Roland Hayes, who made it a signature piece.


Lawrence again: "Their children were forced to work in the fields. They could not go to school"

And then we're on to Avey, the eponymous heroine of the next story. Here the female lead seems (at least to the besotted narrator) passive, enigmatic, even callous. Essentially, she sees men as a means of economic survival. And ultimately, she does indeed become a sex worker. But it's the narrator you roll your eyes at. A talker, a mansplainer: "I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her. I asked her to hope... I recited some of my own things to her... And then I began to wonder why her hand had not once returned a single pressure..." Poor Avey is just bone-tired, and she has fallen asleep... Eventually, he does show compassion, making sure she's warm and protected as she sleeps. The story closes with some of Toomer's classic lyricism: "I saw the dawn steal over Washington. The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea. Avey’s face was pale, and her eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn. I hated to wake her. Orphan-woman..."

Theater gives us the travelling road-show, "another emblem of movement that paralleled the start of the Great Migration". These remnants of vaudeville were "a crucible in which blues and jazz musics were refined and met the world. Cosmopolitan by definition they carried the new sound north and south and back again." John is the manager's brother; Dorris is a dancer in the chorus line. Dorris is self-confident, feels herself every bit as good as some manager's brother. She sets out to impress John. But he continues to feel superior, and there's "nothin doin".

The story entitled Calling Jesus brings us another migrant. She's home-sick, and this tiny story gives us Toomer at his best: "Her soul is like a little thrust-tailed dog that follows her, whimpering..." It's so easy to lose your soul in the urban streets and alleys, in the big houses with their vestibules and storm doors. Her soul, the little dog, is left in the vestibule at night: "Some one... eoho Jesus... soft as the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of southern cotton, will steal in and cover it that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane."

Box Seat is another super-strange story. Even Rhodes-Pitt, who has so much better a grasp of this work than I do, points out: "There is a strange effect of toggling between realism and abstraction. You have to tumble along on language, as disoriented as the characters..." Dan, the character whose internal monologue we follow, seems to harbour a vast sea of violence within. Nasrullah Mambrol comments: "Box Seat is perhaps the most provocatively ambiguous short story included [in the book]... It is therefore not surprising that even so sensitive an analyst of African-American 'double consciousness' as W.E.B. Du Bois could say that the story 'muddles me to the last degree'." So I'm in good company...



BLACKNESS

Bona and Paul is the last story in the second section. Paul is black, or at least racially ambiguous. He is homesick for Georgia. Art, Paul's friend, is trying to set him up with a date. Art's date is Helen (who is very dubious about Paul); Paul's is Bona, "soft, and pale, and beautiful". Paul goes with them to Crimson Gardens, a club, where the guards are confused ("What is he, a Spaniard, an Indian, an Italian, a Mexican, a Hindu, or a Japanese?"). He feels self-conscious: "Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference." Rhodes-Pitt: "The intense scrutiny drawn by Paul's racial ambiguity pressures those around him; his presence disrupts their position in the accepted order. It's impossible to read this description without thinking of Jean Toomer himself and how he navigated the world, eventually rejecting racial identity." At the end, there's an exchange with the black doorman, whose "eyes are knowing"... "Youre wrong," says Paul. He continues: "I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals..." They shake hands. But by that time, Bona has gone. "Has she returned to the safety of whiteness," Rhodes-Pitt wonders, "unwilling to go further with Paul?"

The theme of identity is taken up again in the third section of the book. This extended story, a mix of drama, narrative, poems, and songs, is entitled Kabnis. The character Ralph Kabnis -- a stand-in for Toomer himself -- is a mixed-race northerner who is teaching in Georgia (the area his family originally hailed from). He's uncomfortable, alienated. During a disturbed night, "he thrusts open the outside door and steps out into the serene loveliness of Georgian autumn moonlight. Some distance off, down in the valley, a band of pine-smoke, silvered gauze, drifts steadily. The half-moon is a white child that sleeps upon the tree-tops of the forest. White winds croon its sleep-song:

"rock a-by baby..
Black mother sways, holding a white child on her bosom.
when the bough bends...
Her breath hums through pine-cones.
cradle will fall..."

For Rhodes-Pitt, this is "a lullaby as twisted as the reality it depicts: the use of enslaved black women as wet nurses for white children". There's more on this here.


Nurse and Child, c. 1850

The sight of the courthouse tower also disturbs Kabnis: "He sees white minds, with indolent assumption, juggle justice and a n....r." He muses on the hypocrisy of the ban on smoking: "The stillness of it: where they burn and hang men, you cant smoke." By now he's very jumpy, fearing ghosts, fearing madness.

Then we meet Frank Halsey, a wheelwright. The description of his parlour focuses on the photos, and it's clear what matters: "To the right of the great-grandfather’s portrait hangs a family group: the father, mother, two brothers, and one sister of Fred. It includes himself some thirty years ago when his face was an olive white, and his hair luxuriant and dark and wavy. The father is a rich brown. The mother, practically white. Of the children, the girl, quite young, is like Fred; the two brothers, darker."

Next, we're introduced to Professor Layman, teacher and preacher. There's only two kinds of blacks, he announces: "Good an bad. An even they ain't permanent categories. They sometimes mixes um up when it comes t lynchin. I've seen um do it." When Kabnis makes a comment, we're given this exchange:

"Layman: Thems th things you neither does a thing or talks about if y want t stay around this away, Professor.
"Halsey: Listen t what he’s tellin y, Kabnis. May come in handy some day."

They tell Kabnis about a horrible lynching that took place the previous year, involving the killing of the unborn child of Mame Lamkins. Suddenly a stone crashes through the window; wrapped around it is a threatening message. Spooked by the context, Kabnis assumes it's meant for him, and hares off. But Halsey and Layman follow him, assuring him that he's not the quarry.

Then we meet Hanby, "a well-dressed, smooth, rich, black-skinned Negro who thinks there is no one quite so suave and polished as himself. To members of his own race, he affects the manners of a wealthy white planter." And finally, we encounter Lewis, who is "what a stronger Kabnis might have been". He's the one who's the object of the threatening stone.

As Rhodes-Pitt comments, "This scene is remarkable for the different figures it crowds together. I can't think of another scene in literature populated by five black men, none reduced to a type or a foil for a white character... Toomer, though an outsider, takes us into the center, with this scene of black life."

Kabnis starts to work for Halsey, and it's in this context that he comes across Ramsay, "a shriveled, bony white man", whose condescension makes Kabnis feel that "the whole white South weights down upon him". The young man is "not equipped for [the task Ramsay gives him] nor for the basic subservience required of interactions between white and black men. For all Halsey's talk of manhood during the story so far, upon Ramsay's departure he names his predicament: 'They like y if y work fer them.'"



Another bit of brilliance from Toomer: "Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South. Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories are fecund at her touch. Night’s womb-song sets them singing. Night winds are the breathing of the unborn child whose calm throbbing in the belly of a Negress sets them somnolently singing."

I love Rhodes-Pitt's exposition of that section: "This ode figures the night as a pregnant black woman, inevitably recalling up the vicious lynching mentioned earlier. The 'calm throbbing' of the 'unborn child' is the command that draws songs out of 'cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps and sawmills and factories.' If at first one could read this list as an atmospheric litany of Southern scenes the meaning unfurls when you consider that these are the economic engines of the South. The breathing of the unborn child -- the child of the fictional Mame Lamkins, the historical Mary Turner -- is sacrificed to this machine. Meanwhile the fecundity of black woman was the literal economic driver under the rape culture of forced pregnancy within plantation economy (America's chief innovation of the plantation system compared to South America and the Caribbean was that wealth in the form of human chattel was bred, not imported). And the rape of black women by their enslavers was another song sung at night... The [subsequent] song cruelly juxtaposes the brutal existence of racial subjugation with the small comfort offered by religion: eventual 'rest, and sweet glory'. As in earlier verses, it feels like Toomer combines two opposing strains of black folk expression: the clear, cold realism of a blues with the deferred, expectant hope of the spirituals."

Adding to the cast of characters is Halsey's ancient father (a former visionary and preacher whom they call Father John), and Halsey's sister, the saintly Carrie Kate. Not to mention Stella and Cora, filles de joie. All life is here...

Lewis diagnoses the source of Kabnis's pain: He "can't hold" the tensions surrounding him. "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..."

But we close with a tableau that might -- I suppose -- direct our gaze upwards:

"Light streaks through the iron-barred cellar window. Within its soft circle, the figures of Carrie and Father John.

"Outside, the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town."

Is this, wonders Rhodes-Pitt, "an image of hope"?

***

So... The endless nature of this post illustrates the way I have tussled with the book. But I don't regret the mental labour. I may not be able to understand everything or accept everything, but I've enjoyed the often breathtaking beauty of the prose, and I've learnt a tremendous amount. It would have been a terrible pity to DNF...