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

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Barbara Foley

Other poems and stories in Cane even suggest that the cotton industry is healthy and expanding. In "Esther," Barlo is said to have "made money on cotton during the war. He is rich as anyone" (23). Some Hancock County blacks did indeed partake of the wartime bonanza in cotton, but for' the vast majority the profits were more than eaten up by the subsequent depression. If Barlo still has money, he is indeed exceptional - particularly since Tom Burwell indicates in "Blood-Burning Moon" that Barlo is, like himself, not a landowner but a wage laborer whose earnings depend on daily production ("Came near beatin Barlo yesterday," Tom boasts to Louisa of his speed in picking cotton [30]). In the historical Sparta of 1921, it is unlikely that either Barlo or Tom would have had any work - at least steady work - at all. Moreover, Tom's ambition to have his own farm ("An next year if ole Stone'll trust me, I'll have a farm" [30]) is highly ironic in the light of what "having a farm" under the circumstances of Stone's beneficence would actually mean: entry into a sharecropping or tenant farming contract at precisely the moment when landowners, themselves stockpiling past harvests in hope of a higher future price, were characteristically withholding from their tenants all the wages, loans, and advance payments that they could. Finally, in "Cotton Song," Toomer replicates the rhythms and imagery of a work song chanted by laborers heaving bales of cotton; there is no suggestion that such bales are in short supply. Udo Jung argues that Toomer's lyric resembles a song recorded by the antebellum travel writer Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted's report "might well have been Toomer's source," Jung notes, since "the resemblances are too great to assume that the poet heard these shouts exactly the same way during his visit to Sparta, Georgia" (331-32). If Jung is right, Toomer may have found his work-song prototype not in any voices of laboring folk that he heard in 1921 Georgia, but in an historical account of the South of some eighty years earlier, when cotton was indeed king.(3)

If Cane relegates many significant realities of lumber and cotton production to the margins of the text, it insistently foregrounds the presence of cane. Indeed, cane furnishes the book with its title, its dominant image, and its epigraph: "Oracular. / Redolent of fermenting syrup, / Purple of the dusk, / Deep-rooted cane" (v). At once prophetic and sensuous, suffused in the air and rooted in the soil, cane supplies Toomer with a metaphor ideally suited to his romantic portraiture of the black peasantry. It signifies an earthy eroticism: In "Box Seat," Dan Moore "was born in a canefield" (56); in "Theater," Dorris's singing is of "canebrake loves and mangrove feastings" (53); in "Blood-Burning Moon," Bob Stone hurries by laborers boiling cane and cuts himself in a canefield as he jealously seeks his rival Tom Burwell. Cane signifies, moreover, an entry to cosmic spiritual realities: Fern goes into a religious fit when the narrator takes her to a canebrake; Carma hides in a canefield where "time and space have no meaning" (11). Above all, the scent of cane suffuses the landscape and sweetens its inhabitants, transmuting their suffering into beauty and signaling their fusion with nature. In "Georgia Dusk," the "genius of the South" that is "surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds" has a "cane-lipped scented mouth" (13); in "Kabnis," the "pain-pollen" on the faces Lewis beholds in Halsey's basement "settle[s] downward through a cane-sweet mist" (106). Blacks who migrate from the South do so at the risk of losing connection with their own spirituality behind the North's "iron hinges" and "storm doors"; it is recoverable only at night, when they sleep "cradled in dream-fluted cane" (55).