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82 pages 2 hours read

Jean Toomer

Cane

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1923

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Important Quotes

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“The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.”


(Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 1)

Karintha is among several women in Cane to whom men are inexplicably attracted. This unhealthy desire prematurely introduces Karintha to sexual maturity. Toomer uses language like “mate” and “male” to characterize the men’s desire toward her as animalistic and instinctual.

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“Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon.”


(Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 3)

Through men’s desire, Karintha is brought prematurely into sexual maturity. Toomer uses the metaphor of a “growing thing,” connecting the fact that Karintha was still growing up to the recurring agricultural themes in Cane. Toomer repeatedly uses this strategy, where people are described in terms of the natural world, reinforcing his attention in Part 1 of the novel to the natural landscape of the South. 

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“The pines whispered to Jesus.”


(Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 6)

This refrain appears in the epigraph to “Becky” and is repeated throughout the story. Toomer is keen on personifying natural elements (like the half-moon as a “white child” in “Kabnis”). Again, this is in keeping with how Cane blends human life and the natural world. The pines, specifically, also bear witness to experiences that people often do not. In “Becky,” the townspeople never see her once she moves, but the pines of the forest near her home do. Likewise, in “Karintha,” the titular character abandons her newborn on a bed of pine needles. In the absence of a human witness, only the pines are left to testify to the suffering of these women.

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“The railroad boss said not to say he said it, but she could live, if she wanted to, on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road. John Stone, who owned the lumber and the bricks, would have shot the man who told he gave the stuff to Lonnie Deacon, who stole out there at night and built the cabin.”


(Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 7)

“Becky” prominently introduces the reader to a narrative perspective enmeshed in a broad, local community. The narrator invites the reader in by casually mentioning names without explanation, such as “John” and “Lonnie Deacon,” assuming that they know who these people are. Toomer evokes a sense of collectivity common in early African American literature, where texts draw in the stories and opinions of other community members.

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This refrain appears in the epigraph to “Becky” and is repeated throughout the story. Toomer is keen on personifying natural elements (like the half-moon as a “white child” in “Kabnis”). Again, this is in keeping with how Cane blends human life and the natural world. The pines, specifically, also bear witness to experiences that people often do not. In “Becky,” the townspeople never see her once she moves, but the pines of the forest near her home do. Likewise, in “Karintha,” the titular character abandons her newborn on a bed of pine needles. In the absence of a human witness, only the pines are left to testify to the suffering of these women.


(Part 1, Chapter 7, Page 12)

Carma is a formidable character, defined as strong because of how her attire and labor connect to masculinity. However, what really makes Carma strong is her brazenness toward infidelity. Like many of the men in Cane, Carma is a woman who chooses to satisfy her own sexual desire. Yet, as she does this, her behavior is pathologized as manipulation and the cause of her husband’s violent outburst.

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“Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.”


(Part 1, Chapter 7, Page 14)

The cane-brake is a recurring element in Cane, representing the South and its agricultural production. It also serves as a space for escape from reality. In “Blood-Burning Moon,” Louisa maintains her sexual relationship with Bob Stone through meetings in the cane. Likewise, Carma flees into the cane and is lost for hours. Firing a gunshot while hidden there, she tricks the search party and her husband into believing she has died.

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“O land and soil, red soil and sweet gum tree, / so scant of grass, so profligate of pines, / now just before an epoch’s son declines / the sun, in time, I have returned to thee, / the sun, I have in time returned to thee.” 


(Part 1, Chapter 8, Page 15)

“Song of the Son” plays with the meanings of the homophones “son” and “sun.” The description of the sun returned to the land conveys the image of the sunset, a repeated motif in Cane. However, the idea of the son returning to the soil conveys an image of death. In this image, the son is buried in the land as the sun sinks below the horizon line. Death recalls the long history of slavery and anti-Black violence in the American South that Toomer alludes to throughout the novel.

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“Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies.”


(Part 1, Chapter 10, Page 20)

While many spiritual references in Cane relate directly to the Christian religion, Toomer sometimes gestures toward spirituality that is unmoored from a given religious practice. In “Fern,” men are innately drawn to Fern, wanting to please her. Inverting the idea of men forcefully “taking” a woman as passive as Fern, this quote recasts her as a deity to which men sacrifice their bodies. The word “everlasting” evokes this religious tone; it also recalls the way that Toomer distorts temporality in other stories, for example, speeding up time in “Esther” or stretching it out in “Blood-Burning Moon.” 

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“Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes.”


(Part 1, Chapter 10, Page 21)

This quote is yet another example of how Toomer blurs the distinction between human life and the natural world. Fern’s captivating eyes encapsulate the Southern countryside. Fern’s beauty and irresistibility are established through her embodied connection to the landscape

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“I ask you, friend (it makes no difference if you sit in the Pullman or the Jim Crow as the train crosses her road), what thoughts would come to you—that is, after you finished with the thoughts that leap into men’s minds at the sight of a pretty woman who will not deny them; what thoughts would come to you, how do you seen her in a quick flash, keen and intuitively, as she sat there on her porch when your train thunder by?”


(Part 1, Chapter 10, Page 22)

In the narrator’s direct address to the reader, he constructs a type of reader that is a heterosexual man who would “surely” have the “thoughts that leap into men’s minds at the sight of a pretty woman.” This echoes the overall masculinist perspective of Cane, which observes and understands its woman characters through the male gaze. Interestingly, however, this constructed reading man is not racially specified; he may be “in the Pullman or the Jim Crow” car—white or Black.

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“They lead him t th coast, they lead him t th sea, they let him across th ocean an they didn’t set him free.”


(Part 1, Chapter 13, Page 29)

King Barlo receives a vision from God that he shares publicly with the people in town. He describes an enormous Black man who is captured and brought into slavery. Barlo alludes to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the historic kidnapping of Africans to be slave labor in the Americas. The direct quotes of Barlo’s speech feature words that are abbreviated to imitate his Black Southern dialect. The language and his vision draw a historical through line from the history of slave labor and 20th-century African Americans in the South.

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“He left his image indelibly upon the mind of Esther. He became the starting point of the only living patterns that her mind was to know.”


(Part 1, Chapter 13, Page 29)

This quote foreshadows the romantic obsession that Esther develops for King Barlo in his many years of absence. Cane frequently utilizes the trope of a distant woman and men who desperately desire her. “Esther” reverses this trope, where it is the woman who longs for an unattainable man.

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“African guardian of souls, / drunk with rum, / feasting on a strange cassava, / yielding to new words and the week Palabra / of a white-faced sardonic God— / grins, cries / amen, / shout hosanna.”


(Part 1, Chapter 14, Page 35)

“Conversion” appears to directly connect with “Esther,” the chapter that precedes it. Following this interpretation, the poem plays on the messianic portrayal of King Barlo in the story. However, the poem relocates Barlo from a Christian tradition into an unspecified African spiritualism. Instead of the analog between Barlo and Christ, Barlo is recast as an “African guardian of souls.” Likewise, Esther is elevated to the divine realm and described as a “white faced sardonic God.”

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“Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in the fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees.” 


(Part 1, Chapter 16, Page 37)

Like Fern, whose eyes contain the beauty of the Southern landscape, Louisa’s body is also described using metaphors from the natural world. This relates back to the overarching motif of agricultural and natural elements that characterizes Part 1 of the novel. However, this description of Louisa emphasizes her physicality and observable traits and deemphasizes her mind and feelings. She is stripped down to her female anatomy, her sexuality, and her role as desired.

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“As if to balance this outer change, his mind became consciously a white man’s.”


(Part 1, Chapter 16, Page 42)

Bob Stone, a white man, reflects on his relationship with Louisa and his thoughts about Black people in general. He refers to them using racial epithets and believes himself to be superior. In writing this section, Toomer uses the literary device of focalization to narrate from a perspective that is close to Bob’s own while still writing in the third person. Toomer inhabits the thoughts and minds of a (racist) white man, a move reminiscent of what Modernist writer and white woman Gertrude Stein makes as she complicatedly attempts to inhabit the mind of a Black woman in her story “Melanctha.” 

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“Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thing, stuffed, prop up in the air.”


(Part 2, Chapter 18, Page 53)

“Rhobert” is a prime example of Toomer’s use of the Modernist writing style. In this chapter, Toomer leans into absurdity, where there is a mix of the logical and the illogical. On the one hand, it makes sense to say that Rhobert’s legs are shaky and bowed due to his medical history. On the other hand, it is nonsensical to suggest that Rhobert somehow literally wears a house on his head. Toomer also demonstrates Modernist literary aesthetics through repetition of this list-like description of Rhobert as a “banty-bowed, shaky, ricket-legged man” (54), which reappears on the following page.

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“I sat beside her through the night. 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…”


(Part 2, Chapter 19, Page 62)

Toomer draws aesthetic connections between the pale setting where Avey and the narrator sit and Avey’s own face. The Capitol dome, Avey, and the dawn are gray. As she falls asleep against the narrator, she fades into the background, forced to be a passive listener to the narrator’s endless speech about how he thinks her life should be. When she falls asleep, she passively refuses the terms he sets out for her, leaving him frustrated.

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“Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers / Rumbling in the wind […] / Bleeding rain / Dripping rain like golden honey— / And the sweet earth flying from the thunder.”


(Part 2, Chapter 21, Page 64)

(This analysis references the SuperSummary study guide for “Storm Ending.”) In its totality, “Storm Ending” privileges aesthetic experience over the intellectual. The poem’s every word is physically descriptive and devoid of abstraction; even such seemingly conceptual words as prepositions denote physical reality, whether that of spatial relation (“above our heads” [Line 1]) or visual similarity (“like golden honey” [Line 8]). In a literary-historical context, the poem’s pure physicality reflects the philosophy of the Imagist movement. However, the aesthetic significance far extends the trappings of this context; the poem is, on one essential level, about aesthetic experience. 

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“His mind, contained above desires of his body, singles the girls out, and tries to trace origins and plot destinies.”


(Part 2, Chapter 22, Page 66)

In “Theater,” John examines the chorus girls and imagines what a future with each of them might be like. Once he meets Dorris, he becomes so lost in his daydream about her that he is nearly absent from his body. This scene encapsulates the theme of mind/body separation that Toomer uses in other chapters, such as “Calling Jesus” and “Prayer.” 

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“Dan: break in. Get an ax and smash in. Smash in their faces. I’ll show them. Break into an engine-house, steal a thousand horse-power fire truck. Smash in with the truck. I’ll show em. Grab an ax and brain em. Cut them up. Jack the Ripper. Baboon from the zoo. And then the cops come.”


(Part 2, Chapter 25, Page 75)

The threat of violence lingers heavily in “Box Seat” long before the final scene where the fight breaks out between Dan Moore and a man in the audience. As Dan’s thoughts enact and foreshadow violence, they also convey a message that thoughts, too, can be dangerous. This message relates to other examples in Cane, including Esther’s misguided dreaming of a life with Barlo that ultimately leaves her disappointed (“Esther”), or John’s imaginings of a future with Dorris that leave Dorris feeling confused and feeling rejected.

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“And then she caught my eyes. Don’t know what my eyes had in them. Yes I do. God, don’t I though! Sometimes I think, Dan Moore, that your eyes could burn clean…Burn clean…BURN CLEAN!…”


(Part 2, Chapter 25, Page 85)

In the world of Cane, eyes can become spaces that hold things inside of them. For instance, the Southern landscape is described as flowing into Fern’s eyes in “Fern.” Likewise, here, Dan Moore identifies the sight of Muriel as something inside his eyes from the outside, in addition to whatever emotion and desire he knows can be observed by Muriel from inside his eyes on the outside. In Dan’s thought’s here, he even addresses himself, imagining himself as an observer outside of his own body. Ultimately, perception is a central theme for this chapter, where both Muriel and Dan are concerned with how they are viewed.

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“As her hand touches it, Dan springs up in his seat and shout: JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!”


(Part 2, Chapter 25, Page 89)

The “Box Seat” narrative builds tension in Dan’s fidgeting, discomfort, anxiety, and conflict with his neighbor in the audience; this tension erupts with Dan’s exclamation, the story’s climax. In his introduction to Cane, George Hutchinson writes about Toomer’s style that prioritizes chaos and energy. He writes, “swift, dramatic shifts, Soliloquies in rapid transit between different thoughts, moods, and physical impressions were to suggest a dynamic structure and explosive forces, with chaotic flexes terminating in decisive statements. The effect was to be kaleidoscopic” (xxiv-xxv).

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“What can I say to you, brave dear woman—I can’t talk love. Love is a dry grain in my mouth unless it is wet with kisses.”


(Part 2, Chapter 28, Page 99)

In “Bona and Paul,” Paul refuses to return Bona’s confession of love for him before they kiss. While the kiss is a precondition of love for him, Bona is frustrated, as she believes the love should precede the kiss. As with many other chapters, the men demonstrate that they are not interested in the women’s feelings and desires but only in their bodies’ sexual capacity. While the Black women in Cane are often still taken advantage of sexually in the absence of their emotional interest, Bona, as a white woman, is able to refuse Paul’s stipulation and cut their date short.

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“It’s diff—that is, there’s lots of northern exaggeration about the south. It’s not half the terror they picture it. Things are not half bad, as one could easily figure out for himself without ever crossing the Mason and Dixie line.” 


(Part 3, Chapter 29, Page 117)

Kabnis, who detests the South, makes this obliging statement in the presence of Southerners. Yet, as he attempts to downplay his deep-seated prejudices and fears about the South, his language betrays him. Through his repeated use of the word “half” and his mention of the Mason-Dixon line, Kabnis reinforces his mindset that the North and South are fundamentally different. Though the South may not be “half the terror” people say it is, this does not preclude his feeling that it is still more of a terror than the North.

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


(Part 3, Chapter 29, Page 158)

In the final scene of “Kabnis,” sunlight breaks in upon the darkness of “the Hole” (Halsey’s basement, where his father lives). The soft circle of light around Carrie and Father John evokes the halo that typically surrounds the heads of religious figures like the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ in early Christian art. This is in keeping with the characters’ choice to call Halsey and Carrie’s father, Father John, a reference to the New Testament figure of John the Baptist.

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By Jean Toomer