"In the land of cotton": economics and violence in Jean Toomer's 'Cane.'

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Barbara Foley

All the critics who read Cane as subsuming history under myth do not necessarily applaud the political implications of its idealism. Robert Jones notes that "Toomer's reification of thought is evident in the way he consistently proposed idealism as the solution to racism and social problems, yet without the praxis of social activism" (17). Maria Caldeira chides Toomer for his "belief that he would be able to transcend or solve his conflicts with reality through Art" and charges that he "substituted mysticism for his craving for equality and harmony among people" (548). Edward Margolies contends that Cane achieves a specious unity by "celebrating the passions and instincts of folk persons close to the soil, as opposed to the corruption of their spirit and vitality in the cities." Even the text's representations of violence reflect Toomer's "primitivism" and "neoromantic attitudes": "Is Toomer unconsciously saying that beauty resides in the pain and suffering of black men? . . . Are passivity and withdrawal from life ultimate fulfillment?" (Margolies 39-40). Donald Gibson argues that, by "locating historical causation outside of time and space," Cane offers not "a revelation of the essence of black life" but a "politics of denial" (163, 155). Susan Blake observes that "the central conflict in Cane is the struggle of the spectatorial artist to involve himself in his material"; never fully resolving this conflict, the text "advocate[s] . . . [al retreat into mysticism" (196, 211). To these critics, Toomer's mythic ahistoricity does not enable transcendence of historical tragedy, but instead constitutes an ideological accession and accommodation to that tragedy.

While many Toomer scholars stress Cane's efforts - successful or unsuccessful - to transcend concrete historicity, a number read the book as an intense engagement with the actualities of 1920s Georgia life. Arthur P. Davis, in an early appreciation of Cane, observed that "[u]nderneath all of [the] elusive meanings, . . . one finds a profound knowledge of the Southern scene. . . . There is no overt protest here, but Toomer was always aware of the South's cruelty" (49). Nellie McKay remarks that Cane is about not only "the intrinsic worth of black culture" but also "the pain and struggle wrung from the soul of a people" and the author's own "confrontation with the meaning of that awful reality" (177). Discussing the role played by music in Cane, Nathaniel Mackey notes that Toomer "celebrates and incorporates song but not without looking at the grim conditions which give it birth, not without acknowledging its outcast, compensatory character" (36). Lucinda MacKethan argues that "the Arcadia that is eulogized by a black poet-narrator in Section One is the South, land not only of red soil, cane-field and folk-song, but also land of lynching and prejudice, primitive violence as well as pastoral peace" (229-30). Wahneema Lubiano deplores the "general tendency of the critics of Cane to see it as pastoral, i.e., non-political," and, in particular, to pass over the text's "explicit confrontation with lynching" (92). Trudier Harris argues that, while the lynching scene in "Blood-Burning Moon" can "only suggestively be connected" with the rest of the text, its inclusion places Cane in a tradition of texts about lynching that expose the peculiarly American preoccupation with "exorcizing blackness" (185). For these critics, Toomer's celebration of the resilient folk spirit is always contained within a non-illusory representation of the social forces threatening to crush that spirit.

In this essay I shall contribute to the debate over the nature and extent of Toomer's historicity in Cane by focusing on two issues: Toomer's treatment of the economy of middle Georgia and his reaction to certain contemporaneous episodes of Georgia racial violence. Did Toomer, I shall ask, retreat from the harsh realities of poverty and lynch violence through mysticism and romanticism? Or did he - albeit in a lyrical and symbolistic mode - confront essential dynamics of Jim Crow racism?

Writing in 1923, Toomer indicated his fascination with the "life of rich complexity . . . rising from the agricultural communities" of the South (Rusch 233). Moreover, he considered himself something of a leftist at the time he was writing Cane, noting in his journal that, "if the workers could bellow, 'We Want Power,' the walls of capitalism would collapse" (Papers, Box 60, F. 1411). In his treatment of both agricultural and adjunctive productive activities, however, Toomer offered a somewhat superficial portraiture of the economic life of the sharecropping and working-class blacks dwelling in and near "Sempter," his fictional name for Sparta, the seat of Hancock County, Georgia. Toomer's treatment of the lumber industry provides a case in point. Throughout middle Georgia, lumber mills hired their workers - both loggers and planers - from among the farming population. The mills were for the most part "peckerwood" mills; that is, mills with moveable machinery that operated near relatively small stands of forest for short periods of time and then relocated when the lumber had been removed. Both black and white millworkers were drawn from "the redundant farm population, . . . notoriously a low-income group" (Jensen 78) and thus furnished a "ready supply of cheap labor" without any protection of minimum-wage legislation (Howard 12-13). While the Sparta-area lumber industry provided only intermittent employment to its workers, it was the sole source of ready cash for many tenant and sharecropping families. When the market for lumber shrank and the lumber industry entered a depression in 1921 (several Hancock County lumber mills closed in May), the ensuing layoffs had a drastic impact upon a work force already strapped by the collapse of the cotton market (Sparta Ishmaelite 13 May 1921:1).