Cane
by Jean Toomer
Summary
Toomer builds Cane out of short prose sketches, poems, and a closing dramatic piece called Kabnis rather than a single continuous plot, moving in three loose sections from rural Georgia, where women like Karintha and Fern live and suffer under the weight of white violence and Black communities' own harsh expectations, to Washington, D.C. and Chicago, where the book's urban figures navigate a different, more anonymous set of pressures, and back finally to the South for Kabnis, in which a Northern Black teacher named Ralph Kabnis moves to Georgia to teach and finds himself unable to reconcile his own identity with the region's history of violence and the rural Black culture around him. The book never resolves into a single storyline the way a conventional novel would; its recurring images, cane fields at dusk, work songs carried across open land, sudden eruptions of racial terror, accumulate across the sketches instead, building a portrait of Black life in the segregated South and the industrial North through juxtaposition rather than through a plot that runs start to finish.
Toomer writes with enormous lyric compression, packing more atmosphere and implication into a page and a half of sketch than most novelists manage across a chapter, and the book demands to be read as a whole rather than dipped into, since its sections comment on and complicate one another as they go. It is a formally daring, sometimes difficult read, closer in method to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or Joyce's Dubliners than to a realist novel, and critics have long called it the most formally adventurous single work to come out of the Harlem Renaissance.
Toomer began writing the sketches in November 1921 on a train ride from Georgia, where he had briefly taught, back to Washington, D.C., and completed a first draft by that Christmas; he was of mixed race ancestry and objected sharply when his publisher's marketing leaned on his race, resisting the label of Negro writer from the first.
Historical Context & Significance
Cane sold poorly on its 1923 publication by Boni and Liveright and was largely ignored by general readers, Black and white alike, even as critics who did notice it responded with real admiration; Montgomery Gregory called Toomer's arrival the answer to calls for an authentic Black artistic vision, while W. E. B. Du Bois found the book's impressionistic style deliberately puzzling rather than straightforwardly realist. No prize existed at the time built to recognize a book this formally unusual, and Toomer largely stopped publishing fiction not long afterward, unsettled in part by his own doubts about the book, writing privately that when he looked for the beauty he thought he had caught, it thinned out and eluded him, even as reviewers praised it.
Scholars rebuilt Cane's reputation decades later, and it is now ranked by critics including Robert Bone alongside Native Son and Invisible Man as among the most significant achievements to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Alice Walker has written of the book reverberating in her own work, and it has generated more than a hundred scholarly articles studying its treatment of race, form, and Southern Black life.