Cane

"Cane is one of the most beautiful novels in all of American literature . It’s a hybrid text divided into three parts. The first part is a set of impressionistic sketches of a southern African American folk culture that is fading away. The next section of short stories and poems concern a character who migrates from the South to an urban setting. This section is attentive to the black bourgeois being formed in Washington DC. The final story, written like a drama, is set in Chicago but returns to the South. This section concerns a black artist from an elite background who takes as his subject black folk cultures. Cane does all of that work in a very short span of pages. It is a slim volume, but very dense. Before Cane , black life was written about in a linear way. Cane eschews straightforward storytelling; it’s a very experimental book in both form and content. It identifies the American South—because of and despite its horrors—as a place that black artists almost own by birthright. The women who animated Toomer’s Cane were very compelling, but later black writers used Toomer’s archetypes as starting points for more fully-realized characters. We can see that as early as Zora Neale Hurston and as late as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, as well."

"As you suggest, readers can expect difficulty—rewarding difficulty, I hope—from Cane . Published just a year after Harlem Shadows , it’s likewise about to celebrate its centennial in the public domain. Of all the books of the Harlem Renaissance, Cane best confirms Richard Poirer’s half-joking dictum that “modernism is what happened when reading got to be grim.” Part of its trickiness stems from Toomer’s blending and quilting of genres. He crafts not just a poetic prose—these are all over modernist literatures—but a poetic prose punctuated and surrounded by a prosaic poetry. There are freestanding poems, some first published elsewhere, sprinkled throughout the first two-thirds of Cane ’s fragmentary narrative. They range in design from the existential riddle of “Nullo,” to the anti-lynching blazon of “Portrait in Georgia” (“Hair—braided chestnut, / coiled like a lyncher’s rope”). There are disconnected, also poetic micro-stories, many named after isolated Black women (“Karintha,” “Fern,” “Esther,” “Avey,” etc.), all variations on the theme of the abandonment of a feminized Black South. There is a final closet drama, “Kabnis,” that weds free verse to fiction even as its anti-hero, a brilliant but deracinated Black male artist, fails to marry the violent contradictions of Black folklife. (Any resemblance between this protagonist and Toomer himself is uncoincidental.) The method in Cane ’s high modernist madness consists in mapping the Great Migration—the South-to-North exodus that made Harlem a Black mecca—as a patchwork of displacements doomed to bleed beauty. “The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert,” Toomer explained elsewhere, “That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic.” Only a shape-shifting modernist text, capable of quick cuts between migratory genres, characters, and landscapes, could do the necessary mourning. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Despite his conclusion that the folk-salvage project of the Harlem Renaissance was over before it started, the Harlem Renaissance couldn’t get enough of Jean Toomer. Nothing close to a bestseller, Cane nevertheless became the best-loved blueprint of the Harlem writers who followed. Like the albums of the Velvet Underground, each of the few hundred copies purchased seemed to produce ten works in tribute. Langston Hughes, for one, raised Cane in the Renaissance’s best-remembered manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”: “[E]xcepting the works of Du Bois…, Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America.” Toomer’s book only grew in the estimation of African American writers over the course of the modernist century. When choosing an inscription for Zora Neale Hurston’s refurbished gravestone in 1973, Alice Walker turned not to the Florida muck of Their Eyes Were Watching God , but to the “Georgia Dusk” of Cane . Apart from its poetic pleasures, Toomer’s uncommon text is vital reading for anyone curious about what the Harlem Renaissance most valued, and how its preferences were actively passed down."