Source of book: I own this
This book is one of my two official reads for Black History Month. Too many concerts meant it took me a while to get to and finish, so this is a bit late.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of the Harlem Renaissance. It is probably not a coincidence that the great flowering of African-American art, music, and literature during the 1920s and 30s coincided with the rise of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan. Which “caused” the other is probably a pointless question - one could simply go with Newton’s Third Law and leave it at that.
In any case, these opposing forces of good and evil represented in their own ways the future course of the United States, with recurring episodes of racial hatred on the part of bigoted and hate-filled white people backlashing against social and economic gains by black people. But also, the Harlem Renaissance was hugely influential not only in the black culture of the future, but indeed in American culture of the future.
Jazz and blues would form the basis of whole genres of music to come, including Rock and Roll. Poets such as Langston Hughes would create uniquely American forms of expression that would influence future poets, white and black, for the next 100 and more years. Black artists would bring a vibrancy and sense of motion that would influence popular art and design.
And novelists would integrate literature, demanding fully-realized black characters, the diversity of our nation, and consciousness of race and class be a part of any true American literature of the future. To read Harlem Renaissance literature is to realize how deeply its ideas have penetrated our culture, and changed it for the better.
I recommend checking out my index of Black History Month selections, which includes the list of works by black authors I have written about on this blog. There are a lot of Harlem Renaissance authors represented.
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Just a couple of recent non-literature arts from the Harlem Renaissance I want to mention:
My wife and I visited NYC in 2024, and got to see the Met’s exhibition on the Harlem Renaissance. It was fantastic, and one of the best things we saw there. Unfortunately, I can’t find a page with all the artwork on it, but you can probably use the guide online to find pictures. There is a video tour on Youtube as well, I believe.
More recently, I got to play Harlem by Duke Ellington with the Sequoia Symphony Orchestra. It’s a fabulous work, which I had previously heard at the Hollywood Bowl.
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The Library of America recently released a two-volume set of Harlem Renaissance novels. This is in addition to their other volumes for specific authors. I made a rare splurge on a new book, and got it.
I plan to read through it over the next few years, so stay tuned.
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Jean Toomer was an interesting character. And Cane is an unusual book.
Toomer was born Nathan Pinckback Toomer, but went by Jean (Eugene) after his father abandoned the family, because his mother hated the association.
Because Toomer’s parents were of mixed race - although his father was born enslaved - his appearance was fairly “white.” His mother was a descendant of the “Free People of Color,” and was also very light skinned.
This led to Toomer struggling with identity. Legally, he was black. Physically, he could pass for white. Even though he contributed to the Harlem Renaissance, he distanced himself from it. He chose to identify as “American” rather than black, and I can’t really blame him. In a very real way, he was as American as they came - an amalgam of races, not any one thing.
His childhood and formative years likewise failed to categorize him entirely. At times he attended all-black segregated schools. But he also attended an all-white school. Which, therefore wasn’t all white, I guess?
He would marry two white women, both with essentially the same name, which is an odd coincidence. (Margery and Marjorie) His first wife died in childbirth, alas.
The draft board listed him as black. The census listed him as white, as does his death certificate, while his birth certificate has him as “mulatto.”
So what was he? Socially, he sometimes passed as white. It seems he didn’t specifically try to, but he didn’t try not to, if you know what I mean. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
As I said, I can see his problem. He didn’t look “black” enough to fit in with African American society. But he was legally “black” under the “one drop rule.” I very much sympathize with his desire to be just “American” - a new race, if you will. If racism were not a continuing issue, perhaps we could all acknowledge that Americans aren’t really black and white - we are brown and beige and every shade in between.
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Having introduced Toomer, let me talk a bit about the book.
It is difficult to classify the book as any one genre. It was written during and about Toomer’s time spent teaching at a segregated black school in Georgia. It combines poetry with prose vignettes, fiction with autobiography, and narrative with drama.
In between the prose sections, there are poems. Most of the prose sections are vignettes, fairly short stories about various people. These are often situated on the race line, with interracial relationships (in a time when that was dangerous), conflict between black and white, ambiguous racial ancestry, and more. The characters are memorable, and the writing excellent.
Toward the end of the book, there are two prose sections that are different. First is “Bona and Paul,” which is longer than all except the last section, and contains an interesting use of the format of drama to have the two main characters show their inner thoughts.
The other is the novella-length story, Kabnis, which has multiple chapters, is somewhat autobiographical, and combines the forms of narrative and drama. It feels a bit like a play, but with extended description that is part of the story itself. It is hard to describe, but interesting to read.
Overall, Cane, was a good read, thoughtful and nuanced, with good characterization, interesting settings, and a real look at a particular place and time.
I find it interesting that Toomer himself thought it failed to capture what he wanted. Critics mostly liked it, but it didn’t catch on with the public at the time, perhaps because it didn’t tell the story that was expected. It wasn’t “racial” in the way that many white readers were comfortable with, but it also wasn’t exactly typical of works written by black people for black people.
Later readers and critics would come to realize how underrated it was. And also forward looking - a kind of bridge between writers like Edgar Lee Masters and early James Joyce to more experimental modernism.
The title refers to the “cane country” of Georgia, and all of the vignettes, stories, and poems are really about the setting as much as the people. The land and its inhabitants are all connected.
I was somewhat surprised at how much I liked the poetry. I was expecting a novel, but found some incredible lyrics.
There are a few I want to feature, as well as some passages that I thought were particularly excellent.
First up, the poetry:
Reapers
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
Face
Hair -
silver-gray,
like streams of stars,
Brows -
recurved canoes
quivered by the ripples blown by pain,
Her eyes -
mist of tears
condensing on the flesh below
And her channeled muscles
are cluster grapes of sorrow
purple in the evening sun
nearly ripe for worms.
Georgia Dusk
The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
The setting sun, too indolent to hold
A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,
A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.
The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill
Their early promise of a bumper crop.
Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low
Where only chips and stumps are left to show
The solid proof of former domicile.
Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,
Race memories of king and caravan,
High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.
Their voices rise. . . the pine trees are guitars,
Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .
Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane
Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .
O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.
And this one, which is just gorgeous:
Her Lips Are Copper Wire
whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog
and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes
telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate
(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)
then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent
I could literally have quoted all of the poems. They were uniformly excellent.
Next are my favorite passages of prose.
This one is the opening of “Fern.”
Face flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip.
As I mentioned, in “Bona and Paul,” about an ambivalent relationship, the characters express their thoughts in a drama-like format.
Bona: He is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf.
Paul, like Toomer, is of ambiguous race. The other characters speculate about whether he is black or white. Art, Paul’s roommate, is one of them.
Queer about him. I could stick up for if he’d only come out, one way or the other, and tell a feller.
You see this not only in matters of race, (“what are you, anyway?”) but also gender. As more of your younger people embrace non-binary gender expression, you see the usual demand, “Are you a woman or a man?” along with attempts to legislate clothing along a binary. As humans, we have a tendency to categorize, and all too often those who do not fit a category cause others discomfort.
But, as in the question of Paul’s race, the problem isn’t the answer - it is the question itself. Paul is Paul, regardless of whether society calls him black or white.
Kabnis is an interesting slice of Georgia life, and has autobiographical elements. There are a few fascinating lines in this one. For example, Kabnis’ sleepless night, where his brain goes around in circles.
“Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you? God, he doesn’t exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from Him is ugly. Lynchers and business men, and that cockroach Hanby, especially. How come that he gets to be the principal of a school?”
Religion - and the contrasting styles of North and South, play a key role in the story. I noted the use of a peculiarly Southern expression, the “Amen Corner.”
There is a continual tension in the story between those two styles, as well as the inherent issues of the enslaver’s religion. Even today, you find white “christians” calling black Christianity heretical, in no small part because it doesn’t sanctify white supremacy. (See: MacArthur, John.) Father John, an elderly man with significant disabilities, talks rarely. In one crazy scene involving a basement party, sex workers, and Father John, there is this conversation:
Father John: Th sin whats fixed . . . (Hesitates.)
Carrie K. (restraining a comment from Kabnis): Go on, Father.
Father John: . . . upon th white folks-
Kabnis: Suppose youre talking about that bastard race thats roaming round the country. It looks like sin, if thats what y mean. Give us somethin new and up t date.
Father John: -f telling Jesus - lies. O th sin th white folks ‘mitted when they made th Bible lie.
That line has stuck with me. It really is the most succinct description of the great sin of white Evangelicalism. They made the Bible lie. They made it say that God prefers white people, and blesses the oppressions of the past and present. There is nothing I hate worse than being lied to, and this is one of the worst lies I was told. And the main reason I will never return to Evangelicalism.
Toomer doesn’t seem to be particularly pro-religion in this book, and it is hard to blame him. In this story alone, he points out the self-righteousness of white people, of course, but also the fact that within the Southern black church, those who do the most evil during the week are the most pious on Sunday. The businessmen who get rich off the backs of the poor buy off the consciences. The drunks pray the loudest. The women who sleep around cry and wail and draw attention to themselves. It all seems to Kabnis/Toomer that it is a scam, a rip-off that distracts from the real needs people have and the real injustices in society. He isn’t exactly wrong.
It has at least been refreshing to see the reinvigoration of genuine religion as a response to Trump and MAGA and the rest of the present-day Klan. Perhaps there is hope that it will be more than therapy for guilty personal consciences and more of a public conscience holding the rich and powerful accountable for their evil. We will see, I guess.
Again, this was a good book. It was very different from the usual, but the whole was a coherent picture of a time and place, and an impressionist exploration of humans and their relationships to each other and their place.
I definitely recommend further exploration of the Harlem Renaissance - art, music, poetry, and literature. It was a tremendous moment that has left its trace on American culture in so many ways.
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