you see it, / Her skin is like dusk on the eastern
horizon / When the sun goes down.” The inversion
of the natural, the fact that dusk is best seen on
the western horizon, suggests the elusive nature of
the woman featured in the story and hints at a
backward glance that, while informative, is not
based on straightforward assessment. Karintha, a
young girl who is “perfect as dusk when the sun
goes down,” is a girl to whom the men of the com-
munity are drawn. Each generation finds some-
thing deeply appealing about the young girl who
“at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other
folks just what it was to live.” By the time she has
matured and become a woman, Karintha “carries
beauty” and has been married “many times.” She
maintains her role as the raison d’etre for the men
of her community: the “[y]oung men run stills to
make her money... they all want to bring her
money.” Yet Karintha, who never speaks in the
piece, remains an unknown entity, one who bears
the desires of others and whose body only hints at
her perspectives on the world. Other pieces in the
first section hint at the violence of the South, even
if it is presented as a rich, natural world. The short
prose piece “Becky” features a vicious community
that outcasts a white woman who bears mixed-race
children out of wedlock. She dies much as she
lives, on the outskirts of town without any dis-
cernible emotional or practical support.
The violence of the South only intensifies in
poems like “Portrait in Georgia” and short stories
such as “Blood Burning Moon.” Toomer focuses in-
creasingly on the perilous nature of relationships
and the complicity of the earth that absorbs the
blood of those who are victimized. Tom Burwell
defends the honor of Louisa, the woman he loves,
who is raped by a white man named Bob Stone.
When he mortally wounds Stone, it is only a mat-
ter of time before a self-righteous crowd of whites
lynches him. Toomer does not spare his readers the
graphic details of Tom’s death by a slow-burning
fire. Louisa, despite her recent trauma at the hands
of Stone, is oblivious to the awful murder unfold-
ing in town and does not hear the mob’s noise,
even though it “echoed against the skeleton stone
walls and sounded like a hundred yells. Like a hun-
dred mobs yelling.” That she is impervious to the
events is troubling but consistent with Toomer’s
portraits of women throughout the volume.
In the second section, Toomer shifts his at-
tention to urban scenes and makes specific refer-
ences to the cities of Washington, D.C., and
Chicago. The inhabitants of these places do not
fare much better than their southern comrades.
They live in a fast-paced and uncaring world, one
that still scrutinizes their actions and renders
them impotent and unattractive. The title charac-
ter in “Rhobert,” for instance, is a “banty-bowed,
shaky, ricket-legged man” who is overpowered by
the weight of his house. “Life is a murky, wiggling,
microscopic water that compresses him,” observes
the narrator, who documents Rhobert’s inevitable
decline. In “Avey,” a prose piece that features a
first-person narration, the protagonist is still un-
able to triumph despite the fact that he has a
voice. He is unable to charm Avey, who has feel-
ings for another. Even though she does show ten-
derness toward Robert, the narrator places the
burden of emotional connection upon her: “I
wanted her to love me passionately as she did
him,” he laments. “I gave her one burning kiss.
Then she laid me in her lap as if I were a child.”
The tragic ineptitude only progresses, and the
piece closes without any satisfying resolution that
signals the narrator’s advancement or chance of
obtaining happiness. The story “Bona and Paul,”
which completes the section, is an especially
painful chronicle of an interracial relationship
that does not survive. Bona, an assertive young
white woman, has several interactions with Paul, a
young man with a “red-brown” face. The two do
not survive the real world even though Paul even-
tually attempts to assert that he and Bona will
find happiness. When he leaves her momentarily
to confront a “knowing” look in the eyes of a
doorman, he insists that he is ready to claim Bona
and marshal the richness of the natural world as
he celebrates their romance. Unfortunately, when
he returns to the place where he left her, Bona is
gone, and Paul, like so many of Toomer’s thwarted
protagonists, is once again alone.
The final installment in Cane is “Kabnis,” a
lengthy work that he dedicated to Waldo Frank.
The piece revolves around a man named Kabnis,
who is sequestered in a southern cabin where the
walls are permeated by the voice of the outside
world. As the piece opens, Kabnis, lying on a bed,
begins to listen to the noises that come through74 Cane