stories of ‘‘Fern,’’ ‘‘Carma,’’ and ‘‘Becky’’ and the
poetic prose pieces ‘‘Nora’’ and ‘‘Seventh Street.’’
With the publication of the latter piece, Toomer
began to write more about Negroes in the North.
These pieces were included inCanein contrast
to the poems and prose portraits which resulted
from his Georgia experiences. All of the sketches,
poems, and stories ofCane, as well as the revised
version of the culminating dramatic novella
‘‘Kabnis,’’ were composed by the end of the year.
To further clarify the conception one merely
needs to consider the arcs printed on separate
pages inCane, one preceding both ‘‘Karintha’’
and ‘‘Seventh Street,’’ and two preceding ‘‘Kab-
nis.’’ The arcs represent the basic design ofCane,
which like a circle, moves from the simple forms
of life in the South to the more complex forms in
the North and back to the South in ‘‘Kabnis.’’
Thematically, the structure of the book begins
with a lyrical response to the beauty and natural
impulses of six primitive women who live close to
the soil and, to varying degrees, act outside con-
ventional Christian morality. It then moves to a
consideration of the Northern Negro, a trans-
planted Southerner who has become the victim
of technology and white mores. Finally, the book
deals with Kabnis, an urbanized Northern Black
who returns to the ancestral soil in an abortive
attempt to discover meaning and acceptance in
his heritage.
The discovery and acceptance of heritage is
implicit in the first section, embodied in the point
of view of the poem ‘‘Song of the Son.’’ Though
Toomer believed that the folk-spirit and sponta-
neity of the Southern Negro were dying, he tried
to capture vestiges in the portraits of the book’s
first section. The gallery of Southern women and
the poetry of this section bear out the nostalgia
the poet feels in ‘‘Song of the Son’’ and empha-
size physicality, natural impulse, and the soil.
The section moves toward the sexual repression
of ‘‘Esther’’—a result of the infiltration of white
morality—and the symbolic murder of Black
vitality by white culture in the poem ‘‘Portrait
in Georgia’’ and the short story ‘‘Blood-Burning
Moon.’’
The next section, or the book’s second arc, is
concerned with the pervasive effects of white
culture upon the Black man of the North. The
Northern Negro has undergone a spiritual death
not unlike the physical one of Tom Burwell in
‘‘Blood-Burning Moon.’’ In counterpoint to the
first section ofCanethere is thus an emphasis
upon exclusion from the soil, natural impulses,
and the soul. Exclusion is most clear, for exam-
ple, in the poetic prose piece ‘‘Calling Jesus.’’ The
second section begins after two pieces of related
poetic prose, with ‘‘Avey,’’ the portrait of a North-
ern Black woman who retains, despite the wishes
of the story’s narrator, the natural and sensual
impulses associated with the emotional South.
The movement of the section then focuses on the
repression of these impulses in the characters of
John in ‘‘Theater,’’ and of Muriel and the South-
ern Black man Dan Moore in ‘‘Box Seat.’’ In
‘‘Bona and Paul’’ there is an awakening of Paul’s
consciousness to the natural and racial beauty of
the first section, brought about as a result of his
need to gather petals and to comprehend why he
was unable to hold the sensual though domineer-
ing Bona. In this story, which ends the book’s
second section, or arc, there is a basic counter-
point between Bona, the Southern white woman,
and Louisa of ‘‘Blood-Burning Moon.’’ Instead of
the moon and blood associated with the latter
story, there is sunburst and the Crimson Gardens,
forces which act in concert with the story’s crim-
son-uniformed Black doorman to activate Paul’s
consciousness into understanding his confused,
i.e., ‘‘moony,’’ racial identity.
The two arcs which precede the last section
ofCane, ‘‘Kabnis,’’ represent the neuroticized
Black consciousness of the North in quest of its
uprooted spirituality and racial identity by
means of a return to the moon-filled Southland
of ‘‘moon-children.’’ ‘‘Kabnis’’ thus incorporates
the significance of the previous two arcs: the
artistic need for lyrical beauty and the discovery
of terror of the first section; the stifled spirit and
awakening consciousness of the second. The
‘‘Kabnis’’ section ofCaneends, in contrast with
the fading past associated with the setting sun in
the book’s first section, with the sun, a ‘‘Gold-
glowing child,’’ arising and sending forth ‘‘a
birth-song,’’ the everlasting song of the ‘‘Deep-
rooted Cane.’’ The overall design ofCaneappa-
rently became clear in Toomer’s mind by the time
he was writing the second section of the book.
Both of the last two sections ofCanedeal
with the effects upon Black people of the fading
of the beautiful and ancestrally linked folk cul-
ture, symbolically completed by the impending
death of Father John in ‘‘Kabnis.’’ Aesthetically,
however, the consciousness of Kabnis is able to
discover the forms which it seeks in the portraits
of the book’s first section. The arcs unite in a
circle, and this form remains fluid by means of
the organic unity and metaphor of the artist’sStorm Ending