To "Flash White Light from Ebony": The Problem of Modernism in Jean Toomer's Cane - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by Catherine Gunther Kodat

Fern's most arresting physical feature is her eyes. While the narrator describes other, also striking, aspects of her face (her cream-colored skin, the light-brown mustache on her upper lip, the "aquiline, Semitic" nose [16]), he repeatedly returns to her eyes. We are never told their color, shape, or size; rather, we learn that hers were "strange eyes" in that "they sought nothing--that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied" (16). Fern's eyes are striking for their emptiness--or rather, what men "fooled themselves" into taking as an emptiness. The narrator convinces himself, too, that Fern's "I" is an idle, empty shape, waiting for "some fine thing" to fill it:

If you walked up the Dixie Pike most any time of day, you'd be most like to see her resting listless-like on the railing of her porch, back propped against a post, head tilted a little forward because there was a nail in the porch post just where her head came which for some reason or other she never took the trouble to pull out. Her eyes, if it were sunset, rested idly where the sun, molten and glorious, was pouring down between the fringe of pines. Or maybe they gazed at the gray cabin on the knoll from which an evening folk song was coming. Perhaps they followed a cow that had been turned loose to roam and feed on cotton-stalks and corn leaves. Like as not they'd settle on some vague spot above the horizon, though hardly a trace of wistfulness would come to them. If it were dusk, then they'd wait for the search-light of the evening train which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home. Wherever they looked you'd follow them and then waver back. Like her fac e, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes. Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia's South. (17)

Fern's eyes function here as a narrative mirror held up to nature; the point of this passage is not a description of Fern but a description of the landscape in which she is set. We learn nothing of Fern as a character, but we learn much about Fern as a function. When, after this passage, the narrator confesses that it was "better that she listen to folk-songs at dusk in Georgia... [than that] she came up North and married. Even a doctor or a lawyer, say" (17), it becomes clear that a rural Georgia dusk without Fern would be a rural Georgia dusk without art: Cane needs the mediation of Fern (and Karintha, Becky, Carma, and Avey) in order to exist at all. The "I" needs Fern's eyes in which to see itself reflected as speaking and whole.

In Cane's signifying dialectic of repression and expression, this gesture of generative domination momentarily exposes itself when the narrator takes Fern into the cane field. As she holds him with her eyes, he holds her in his arms, and then does "something--what, I dont know" (19). Fern leaps up, runs "some distance" from the narrator, then

Fell to her knees, and began swaying, swaying, swaying. Her body was tortured with something it could not let out. Like boiling sap it flooded arms and fingers till she shook them as if they burned her. It found her throat, and spattered inarticulately in plaintive, convulsive sounds, mingled with calls to Christ Jesus. And then she sang, brokenly. A Jewish cantor singing with a broken voice. A child's voice, uncertain, or an old man's. Dusk hid her; I could hear only her song. It seemed to me as though she were pounding her head in anguish upon the ground. (19)