Cane

First option: it belongs in the camp with people like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Langston Hughes. The book is included in, for example, the Library of America’s Harlem Renaissance: Five Novels of the 1920s. It has the same sorts of themes as those writers have in their works.

Second option: It belongs it the camp with people like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. It has the same sort of style used by those writers.

Rephrase the question this way: Imagine you had two required courses in English Literature and you want to put this book in one or the other. It can’t be in both courses because students will be taking both courses. The two courses are: “Early 20^th Century Modernism” and “Early 20^th Century African-American Literature.” Where do you put this book?

Jean Toomer would have hated that question, by the way. Convincing us to stop asking questions like that is exactly why he wrote the book.

The book is a collection of short pieces, largely unrelated to one another. Lots of poems and short vignettes (calling them short stories would stretch the definition of “story” to the breaking point). Three sections. The first is all bits about the South; the second is the North; the third moves back to the South with a single long story. Everything in the book is episodic, akin to snapshots of people. What unites these people?

The obvious answer is that they are united by their skin color. So, if you want, you can think about all these people as examples of people with a particular skin pigmentation. But, just as you are about to make that categorization, Toomer drops this poem into the book. The title is “Prayer,” which indicates exactly how you should read it.

My body is opaque to the soul.
Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s longing,
But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul.
O Spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger,
Direct it to the lid of its flesh-eye.
I am weak with much giving.
I am weak the desire to give more.
(How strong a thing is the little finger!)
So weak that I have confused the body with the soul,
And the body with its little finger.
(How frail is the little finger.)
My voice could not carry to you did you dwell in stars,
O spirits of whom my soul is but a little finger…

Do you too confuse the body, the visible body, with the soul? Is the soul even cognizant of the body? “My body is opaque to the soul.” So is the mind. When you see the characters in this book, when you identify them by their skin color, you are looking at the body, not the soul. In fact, you are really only looking at a small part of the body. You are just noticing the little finger, or perhaps something else, as small a matter as the little finger.

The final, longest section is “Kabnis.” Toward the end, Kabnis explains the book you just read.

ORATORS. Born one an I’ll die one. You understand me, Lewis. (He turns to Halsey and begins shaking his finger in his face.) An as f you, youre all right f choppin things from blocks of wood. I was good at that th day I ducked th cradle. An since then, I’ve been shapin words after a design that branded here. Know whats here? M soul. Ever heard o that? Th hell y have. Been shapin words t fit m soul. Never told y that before, did I? Thought I couldnt talk. I’ll tell y. I’ve been shapin words; ah, but sometimes theyre beautiful an golden an have a taste that makes them fine t roll over with y tongue. (sic throughout)

Shaping words to fit his soul. Not to his body, not to the part of his body which you noticed about Kabnis. His soul. The whole of Cane is the attempt to shape words to fit the souls of the people being described. These aren’t bodies and minds you have been seeing in the vignettes and poems. These are human souls.

The souls you have been seeing are beautiful. Well, some of them. Some of them are not. As Kabnis goes on:

Th form thats burned int my soul is some twisted awful thing that crept in from a dream, a godam nightmare, an wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words. Not beautiful words. God Almighty no. Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words

That is why Toomer’s book doesn’t get the attention it merits. This is not a collection of snapshots of beautiful people we can celebrate and makes us feel good. It is not a collection of ugly people either, people we can vilify and to whom we can feel morally superior. It is just a collection of people. Some people like you, some people not like you. Just people.

That was a radial concept in 1923. A book of stories about the souls of people who were primarily viewed as bodies of a particular skin color. The book is screaming: stop noticing the body; start noticing the soul. Kabnis again: “Mind me, th only sin is whats done against th soul.”

That idea was indeed radical in 1923. And, it seems, it is still radical in 2020.