Cane

Becky is a white woman shunned by both the Black and white people in town because she has two Black sons. She refuses to divulge who the father of her children is, although their secretive relationship appears to be ongoing when her second son is born several years after the first. Townspeople offer her help—allowing her to live on the land by the railroad, building her cabin, bringing her food—but they all do so in secret, as there is a stigma around kindness toward this outcast. Ultimately, Becky’s boys grow up and leave, and her house collapses.

Becky’s story is told from the third-person perspective of a narrator revealed to be a man from town. “Becky” is marked by the outside perspective; Becky’s life is shrouded in mystery, and years go by without folks ever seeing her. Additionally, Becky is made an outcast because of the perception of others. She is forced to live “on the narrow strip of land between the railroad and the road” (7) that is both part of and outside of the town; this reflects her liminal space in society, where her intimacy with Blackness leaves her unable to be a part of the white or the Black community.

Carma cheats on her husband, Bane, because he is often away for work. When Bane confronts her about this, their argument leads to Carma running off into a canebrake with a gun. Bane and other men in town go searching for her, afraid that the gunshot they heard in the cane was a suicidal shot from Carma’s gun. Later, when they find her, they learn that she has deceived them, which sends Bane into a violent rage against the men who helped.

Carma is characterized as more masculine than most other women in town. She is “strong as any man” (12), wears overalls, and drives a mule. While this might speak to her physical appearance and fortitude, what makes her strong is not her size or strength but her brazenness toward infidelity. Carma is not afraid to challenge and manipulate Bane to her own ends. While she is as wayward as most of the other women in Cane, her defiance is more active, whereas characters like Avey or Esther are more passively unusual and disruptive.

Like most of the women in Cane, Fern is beautiful. Men are very attracted to her but often disappointed upon realizing that she does not return their desires. All the men, including the narrator, want to bring her something that will satisfy this woman who seems unsatisfiable. When she and the narrator take a walk, he tries to express his desire for her but appears to overstep an unspoken boundary. This triggers her somehow, and she collapses in inexplicable anguish. The narrator eventually goes back home to the North, resented by the men in town.

As a character, Fern is an enigmatic, empty woman. Her “eyes desire nothing that you could give her” (20). She is easy to fall in love with but impossible to understand; she speaks only one sentence in the entire story. Like many of the other women in Cane—though in different ways—Fern is less a subject and more so an object, a receptacle for men’s affection. Yet, “Fern” cannot definitively decide with whom the power lies. In this interpretation, the power lies with the men who can often have their way with her. And yet, in her withholding of returned affection, Fern leaves the men desperate to please her. Toomer writes, “Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies” (20). This sentence inverts the dynamic of men “taking” her and recasts the many incidents of men getting with her as sacrifices being made at an altar to a deity. As George Hutchinson writes in his Introduction to Cane, “A desire for domination and control competes and is thoroughly intertwined with a desire of the male to lose himself in the sublime embrace of the female” (xxvi).

Esther is the very fair-skinned daughter of the wealthiest Black man in town. She is what other characters would call “dictie”—upper-class and perceived as acting white. She has a very mature face and is an unusual girl; men in town do not find her beautiful. One day King Barlo has a vision and gives a sermon in the street; Esther is inspired and thereafter in love with Barlo. However, when he returns to town many years later, he turns out to not be what she expected; he is drunk, ugly, and of a lower class.

“Esther” is in part about dangerous dreaming. At 16 years old, she daydreams twice about McGregor’s notion shop catching fire. Though the dreams have some distinguishing differences, both feature a baby. In the first, it is a “dimpled infant;” in the other, it is a “[b]lack, singed, wooly, tobacco-juice baby” (30). Never having been desired, Esther wants a baby to love and love her back. When she eventually develops a dream to be with Barlo, it drives her to sneak out at night and seek him out. Ultimately, her dreams remain unfulfilled; the baby never comes, and Barlo is nothing like she imagined him.

King Barlo appears in “Esther” as a prophet who draws the attention and admiration of people in town. He has visions that he claims come from God and one day publicly describes in dramatic detail a vision of an enormous Black man being chained up and brought into slavery. He soon leaves town on a bull. When he returns many years later, he is wealthy and extravagant. Esther confesses her love for him, but he is drunk at a party when she finds him. Ultimately, he is not the flawless man she remembered him to be.

Barlo is a reinterpretation of Jesus Christ from the Christian faith. There are obvious connections: he claims he receives visions from God and is regarded as a prophet. Additionally, Barlo is a street preacher, sharing his wisdom outside rather than as part of an institution; likewise, Jesus’s ministry involved a great deal of public, outdoor speaking rather than within a synagogue. Just as Jesus’s message created resentment among the Jewish religious leaders (who would eventually have him executed), “white and black preachers confer as to how to best rid themselves of” Barlo (29). Finally, as Barlo rides “out of town astride a pitch-black bull” (29), it parallels Jesus’s ride into Jerusalem on a donkey. With this parallel imagery, Toomer illustrates why Esther would have found Barlo so entrancing while also making it obvious to the reader that her love for him will never be returned because he is so otherworldly but certainly no messiah.

Louisa is the main love interest of “Blood-burning Moon.” A Black woman, she carries on a relationship with both Tom Burwell (a Black fieldworker) and Bob Stone (the white son in the family where she is a domestic worker). Like Carma, Louisa is unfaithful, but she is not as daring as Carma. When Tom and Bob find out about each other, they get in a fight that ends with Bob dead. When people learn of Bob’s death, a white mob captures Tom and burns him alive.

Louisa’s love for both Tom and Bob is forbidden because it is a breach of traditional monogamy and because of their interracial relationship. While Louisa appears to be the main character, in many ways, she is the battleground upon which a racial conflict between the two men is staged. For Bob, Louisa is like his property; he considers it his right to have her and thinks himself superior to Black people. Meanwhile, Tom is gentle with Louisa and cannot believe that she would be unfaithful. Yet, they both respond to the discovery with violence against each other that culminates in an act of racial violence.

Like Fern or Karintha, Avey is beautiful and easily attracts the attention of the local men. She is also the object of the narrator’s unrequited affection. While the narrator and his friends desire her, she carries on a relationship with a college student. When the narrator finally gets Avey’s attention, she is only interested in him platonically. When they sit together in the grass one day, Avey falls into a deep sleep while the narrator goes on talking to her.

Avey is very much like Fern in “Fern.” Both women inexplicably draw the desire of men in town yet are relatively withholding with their affection. In both stories, the narrator is in love with her but finds himself hurt by the woman’s indifference. As Avey and the narrator grow up, the narrator shifts from idealizing her and appreciating her enigmatic persona to resenting her indifference, calling her “lazy.” On their final date, when she falls asleep, the narrator hardly leaves her room to speak and dictates how he thinks she should be and where she ought to live. While Fern responds to the persistent narrator through an ambiguous mental crisis, Avey shuts her persistent narrator out. Her character demonstrates that a speaker needs a listener to have power. In other words, as much as the women in Cane are often narrative bridges to male interiority or enigmatically shallow objects of affection, Avey’s story exposes how these male characters need “empty” women like her to validate the meaning they ascribe to her and assert a sense of importance.

In “Theater,” John is the brother of the manager of the Howard Theater in Washington DC. John watches the show rehearsals, paying special attention to the chorus girls. He takes an interest in Dorris as she dances on the stage. Dorris observes his interest from afar and returns it. She would like to get with John. However, he is fair-skinned and upper-class; according to Dorris’s friend, Mame, John is way out of Dorris’s league. When Dorris and John do eventually get close, John disappears into a daydream of a possible life with Dorris. Dorris misreads his blank facial expression as disinterest and runs away, distraught.

In a historical and cultural landscape where interracial relationships were controversial (as in “Box Seat”), John and Dorris offer a different example of a relational conflict that is intrarracial but frustrated by class. John perceives Dorris as easy to access; meanwhile, Dorris is plagued by several presumptions before even meeting John, solely because of his social and economic standing. John is “dictie,” as they say, and therefore less accessible. John and Dorris demonstrate how class divides, even within the Black community, can prematurely destroy a relationship before it begins. This is not unlike King Barlo and Esther in “Esther,” where the titular character dreams up a relationship with Barlo but ultimately cannot pursue it once their differences in class and social standing become apparent.

In “Box Seat,” Dan Moore pays Muriel a surprise visit and professes his love for her. She loves him too, but they ultimately cannot be together; as Muriel says in response, “the town won’t let me love you” (78). There is a negative public opinion about their relationship. Muriel goes to the theater that night with her friend, where Dan shows up also unexpectedly. Muriel sits up in the box seat as he sits below, yearning for her. During the show, Dan is disruptive, leading to a fight with another man in the audience. Before the fight can continue outside, Dan simply walks away.

Dan and Muriel are in love, but it is difficult for them to be together because of their class difference. Dan is impulsive and passionate about his feelings for Muriel; he is hot-tempered and persistent. Muriel must contend with the expectations of African American bourgeois respectability politics. As much as she loves Dan, she struggles to commit to a relationship because of all the criticism it may bring. “Box Seat” is one of several stories in Cane that spotlight intrarracial class conflict through a relationship.

Bona is a young white woman at a school in Chicago training to be a teacher; Paul is a young Black man in the same program. Bona takes an interest in Paul while the students practice basketball one day; likewise, Paul likes Bona. The two end up on a double date with Art (Paul’s friend) and Helen. Bona confesses her love for Paul, but Paul wants them to be sexually intimate before making a similar confession. Paul’s reluctance to open up creates tension in their relationship, and they leave early. Upon leaving, Paul turns around to assure a curious Black man that his relationship with Bona is legitimate and beautiful.

As with Dan and Muriel in “Box Seat,” perception, exposure, and being seen are significant themes for Bona and Paul. Bona is constantly thinking about what she believes Paul thinks of her. This question of how she perceives him and how he perceives her leaves her often discontented. She is also preoccupied with how the other white students perceive Paul negatively because he is Black. When they begin bickering on the dancefloor, Bona must adjust her behavior: “She tries to pinch him. Then sees people staring, and lets her arms fall” (104). She is aware of the racial stereotype of aggressive Black men and innocent white women victims. Likewise, Paul is made painfully aware of his racial difference when he gets stares from other white diners at the restaurant. He is forced to see himself from the outside as a Black man separate from the white friends he sits with: “Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him” (100). This issue of seeing himself as he is and as he is seen echoes sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of “double consciousness”: “this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro” (W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” The Souls of Black Folk, 2). “Bona and Paul” ends with Paul trying to manage public perception of his pairing with Bona, attempting to convince the curious Black man that their relationship is indeed beautiful.

Ralph Kabnis is a Northern Black man who has come down to Georgia to teach at a Black school. He is a passionate but negative person, feeling strong disdain for the South, the school, and its values that prohibit him from drinking and smoking. After Principal Hanby finds him drinking with friends and fires him, Halsey takes Kabnis in at his workshop. There, they and some friends gather in the basement for a party one night. Kabnis is critical of Halsey’s deaf and blind father—Father John—who sits still in the basement with them. Kabnis is shocked when Father John mutters briefly the next day about the sin that white folks have brought upon themselves. Ultimately, Kabnis begins and ends the story miserable, discontented, and shrouded in darkness.

Kabnis is painfully aware of the legacy of racial violence in the South. He detests the South and echoes the sentiments of the poetic refraining that repeatedly interrupts the narrative—“white-man’s land” (140). When his friends tell the story of a recent lynching, Kabnis becomes extremely paranoid that he will be the next victim of such violence. Kabnis embodies the excessive overdramatizations of the South as a dangerous and detestable place, perpetuated by an emphasis on its history of immense racial violence. Kabnis says of the Georgia night, “There is beauty in the night that touches and…tortures me. Ugh. Hell. Get up, you damn fool. Look around. What’s beautiful here?” (112). If Cane is a love letter to the South in all its complexity, then Kabnis is Toomer’s way of responding to the negative perception of it that has prevailed about the North.

Lewis is a Black man who has to Georgia from the North to be a schoolteacher. He arrives more recently than Kabnis. While he is obviously an intelligent man, he is also someone that everyone in town finds peculiar. Though he is mostly a quiet fellow, he asks many questions and readily offers his opinions. The townspeople’s discomfort with him leads him to ultimately decide to leave town earlier than he had planned.

Though not exactly, Lewis is a foil to Kabnis. Both men are schoolteachers from the North who have come south to work at the school. However, while Kabnis hates the South, Lewis is ready to embrace it. Kabnis regards his boss, Principal Hanby, as a “cockroach” (112); meanwhile, Lewis gets along with Hanby and has his respect. Kabnis is reluctant to engage with the town, leaving the Sunday church service early; Lewis, on the other hand, is inquisitive, offering suggestions for improving conditions and curious about others’ experiences. Yet, while the cold Kabnis manages to stay in the South, it is Lewis who must ultimately leave.