the cracks in the wooden panels. The “cracks be-
tween the boards are black,” intones the narrator,
before adding that “[t]hese cracks are the lips the
night winds use for whispering. Night winds in
Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.” The song
that Kabnis then hears has a “weird chill” to it and
refers to a deadly “White-man’s land” where im-
peratives govern the lives of people of color: “Nig-
gers, sing. / Burn, bear black children / Till poor
rivers bring /Rest, and sweet glory / In Camp
Ground.” Kabnis is uneasy in the South and hardly
at home in his temporary quarters in which rats
appear and must be killed. As the piece proceeds,
Kabnis’s experience of the South only becomes
more unappealing. He is plagued by the gruesome
stories of lynchings and the murders of unborn
children snatched from their dead mothers’ bellies.
When he is targeted directly as an outsider and re-
ceives an ominous message that instructs him to
leave, he slips into extreme anxiety. The narrator
outlines his reaction in staccato phrases: “Fear
squeezes him. Caves him in. As a violent external
pressure would. Fear flows inside him. It fills him
up. He bloats.” “Kabnis” ends without any dra-
matic resolution, a fact that reflects Toomer’s self-
confessed confusion about the best way to
conclude the volume. While the trek through the
nation from South to North and back again to the
South has been concluded, there is no comfort in
the image of a cyclical journey or the specter of
closure. Caneis a haunted volume, one in which
individuals find little peace and are unable to tran-
scend the persistent and seemingly innate violence
of the post-slavery world in which they live.
Like CLAUDE MCKAY,LANGSTON HUGHES,
NELLIERATHBORNEBRIGHT, and other writers of
the period, Toomer drew material for his work from
his own travels and experiences in the South. In a
1922 letter to the LIBERATOR,one of the magazines
in which portions of Canehad appeared previously,
Toomer confessed that “a deep part of [his] nature,
a part that [he] had repressed, sprang suddenly to
life and responded” to the “rich dusk beauty” and
“folk-songs com[ing] from the lips of Negro peas-
ants.” Indeed, one of the major strengths of the vol-
ume is the blend of literary and narrative styles and
genres. As critic Harold Bloom suggests, Caneis
“one of the most remarkable novels of its time be-
cause of its prose-poetic language, its amalgamation
of literary genres, and its rich evocation of the lives
of both northern and southern black Americans.”
Canestill is hailed for its piercing, haunting, and
evocative sketches of life in the Black Belt region of
the South and for African Americans in the urban
North. Toomer assembled a memorable set of testi-
monies that constituted a powerful record of dehu-
manization, racial objectification, and a defiantly
evocative American culture.Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, ed. Black American Prose Writers of the
Harlem Renaissance.New York: Chelsea House Pub-
lishers, 1994.
Bontemps, Arna. “The Awakening: A Memoir.” In Re-
membering the Harlem Renaissance,edited by Cary
Wintz. 1972, reprint, New York: Garland Publish-
ing, 1996. 235–260.
Bowen, Barbara. “Untroubled Voice: Call-and-Response
in Cane,” Black American Literature Forum16, no. 1
(spring 1982): 12–18.
Caldeira, Maria Isabel. “Jean Toomer’s Cane:The Anxi-
ety of the Modern Artist,” Callaloo25 (autumn
1985): 544–550.
Foley, Barbara. “In the Land of Cotton: Economics and
Violence in Jean Toomer’s Cane.” African American
Review32, no. 2 (summer 1998): 181–198.
Ikonné, Chidi. From Du Bois to Van Vechten: The Early
New Negro Literature, 1903–1926.Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1981.Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by
Negro PoetsCountee Cullen(1927)
COUNTEE CULLEN, the editor of Caroling Dusk,
took great pains to introduce his collection of
works by African-American writers of the period.
“I have called this collection an anthology of verse
by Negro poets rather than an anthology of Negro
verse,” he wrote, “since this latter designation
would be more confusing than accurate. Negro po-
etry... in the sense that we speak of Russian,
French, or Chinese poetry, must emanate from
some country other than this in some language
other than our own” (xi). Cullen’s assertions un-
derscored the effort by some Harlem Renaissance
writers to have black writers recognized, cele-
brated, and confronted as Americans, individuals
with long-standing histories of industry, patriotism,
and excellence. His remarks also revealed his beliefCaroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets 75