Cane 1075majority of African Americans experience in the
South. However, the majority of the black people
situated in Ralph’s social milieu feel that he can
make better use of his time by focusing more on
just being able to survive the daily challenges of
poverty. In response to this lack of support, Ralph
experiences an alienation so great that he becomes
displaced from his social reality and believes that
“Ralph Kabnis is a dream.” Although Ralph is alive
physically, the reason he feels his life is nothing
more than a “dream” is that the people situated in his
social milieu have not afforded him the opportunity
to fulfill his intellectual aspirations—his true dream.
While the combination of race, place, and people
is tremendously important in contributing to Ralph’s
alienation from his social reality, the reader also wit-
nesses how the academic institution in which he
teaches contributes to his alienation from his social
reality. Kabnis attempts to fulfill his aspirations
as an educator at an academic institution, but the
school in which he teaches has stringently strict and
oppressive policies. One of its policies forbids teach-
ers to consume alcohol or smoke cigarettes, and it is
ultimately an alcoholic beverage that is responsible
for Kabnis losing his job. While the school desires
to maintain policies that will demonstrate it upholds
the highest moral standards, Ralph illuminates the
hypocrisy of its rules: “ . . . where they burn and hang
men, you can’t smoke. Can’t take a swig of licker.”
Kabnis cannot understand how a school that is try-
ing to uphold the highest moral standards can forbid
individuals to smoke cigarettes and drink alcoholic
beverages but will not condemn the lynchings that
are commonplace in this same location. In revealing
how the school’s oppressive policies impact him,
he says, “How did I ever land in such a hole? Ugh.
One might just as well be in his grave.” Thus, the
school in which he teaches is not an ideal place for
fulfilling his passion for education and teaching; in
fact, the place eradicates his passion entirely. By los-
ing his job, Kabnis no longer has the motivation to
pursue his intellectual aspirations, and without that
motivation, he transitions into a new alienated life of
constant inebriation and mediocrity.
In this multi-genre text, the reader experiences
multifarious interactions with the theme of alien-
ation. Cane speaks to the historical alienation that
blacks have experienced. As a result of being denied
democratic freedom, the alienation that Kabnis
experiences comes to represent the real experiences
of African Americans.
Antonio Maurice Danielsrace in Cane
The presentation of race in Cane is complex.
Although most of the characters in the book are
African American, Jean Toomer carefully describes
the range of skin tones of these characters with an
artist’s eye: Slaves are “dark purple ripened plums.”
Fern’s face “flow[s] in soft cream foam”; Esther, with
her chalk-white face, is drawn to Barlo’s glistening
blackness; Louisa’s skin is “the color of oak leaves on
young trees in fall”; Karintha’s beauty is “perfect as
the dusk when the sun goes down.” Toomer repeat-
edly associates dusk—the time between light and
darkness—with beauty, showing the physical come-
liness of his mixed-race characters. In the poem
“Georgia Dusk,” the end of the day brings “folk-
songs made from soul sounds” that echo a proud
African past of kings and high priests.
Dusk is also a time of transition when black and
white roles are blurred. In “Blood Burning Moon,”
Louisa’s two lovers, one white and one black, bal-
ance and pull against each other one night as dusk
comes and a blood-red moon (an omen of violence)
rises. The feelings of Bob, the white man, are com-
plicated by his and Louisa’s respective races. He does
not understand her race, yet he finds her attractive
because she is black. He is embarrassed that he must
sneak around to see her instead of simply taking
her as she bends over the hearth as a master would
have done in the days of slavery. As night falls, his
thoughts turn to Louisa, and he becomes darker.
Toomer symbolizes this with the purple flush of
Bob’s cheeks and notes that to counter this change,
Bob consciously adopts the mind-set of a white
man. He views Louisa as a possession and refuses
the notion that a black man like Tom could be
with his girl. He longs for the days when a white
man never had to consider such things. When Tom
knifes him in a fight over Louisa, Bob gives Tom’s
name to the gathering white mob who reassert the
power of whiteness by “flatten[ing] the Negroes
beneath it” as they lynch Tom.