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

African American Review, Summer, 1998 by Barbara Foley

Sitting upon the mower whittling cane, Chewing the sugar from the white pared pulp. I am not yet a failure. No, not yet. (Papers, Box 60, F. 410)

Nonetheless, Toomer's focus upon cane as the central symbol of the merging of the real and the ideal - coupled with his relatively superficial understanding of the lumber and cotton industries furnishing the mainstay of Hancock County economic life - reveals that Toomer's stance was indeed, as Blake has argued, largely that of the "spectatorial artist."(5)

If Toomer's understanding of the material conditions endured by Hancock County's laboring population was somewhat shallow, this does not mean that he was unconcerned with the most visible and dramatic manifestation of Jim Crow racism - namely, lynching. Critics who defend Toomer against the charge of ahistoricity routinely adduce "Blood-Burning Moon" as evidence of Toomer's unwillingness to slough over the oppressive realities faced by the Georgia peasantry (Reilly; Lubiano; Harris). More significant as proof of Cane's engagement with the here and now, however, are certain barely veiled references to recent episodes of Georgia racial violence in "Kabnis."

In conversation with Layman and Halsey, Kabnis learns of the lynching of one "Mame Lamkins," who was killed for "tr[ying] t hide her husband when they was after him." Layman recounts her death:

She was in th family-way, Mame Lamkins was. They killed her in th street, an some white man seein th risin in her stomach as she lay there soppy in her blood like any cow, took an ripped her belly open, an the kid fell out. It was living; but a nigger baby aint supposed t live. So he jabbed his knife in it an stuck it t a tree. An then they all went away. (90).

This grotesque narrative contains only minor variations on the description of the 1918 lynching of Mary Turner in Valdosta, Georgia, included in the NAACP's 1919 publication Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. In retaliation for the murder of a white farmer by a black debt peon, Sidney Johnson, a white mob engaged in a hunt and lynched at least eleven other blacks before killing Johnson in a shootout. According to NAACP investigator Walter White, Mary Turner, after trying to protect her husband from the mob, died in the following manner:

Mary Turner was pregnant and was hung by her feet. Gasoline was thrown on her clothing and it was set on fire. Her body was cut open and her infant fell to the ground with a little cry, to be crushed to death by the heel of one of the white men present. The mother's body was then riddled with bullets. (Morton 26)

After the killings, White notes, "more than 500 Negroes left the vicinity of Valdosta, leaving hundreds of acres of untilled land behind them" (27).

Toomer almost certainly knew of the Mary Turner murder before his trip to Sparta. It had been widely denounced in the liberal-to-left press as well as in all the major black journals of the day; the Crisis, which had printed White's report in its entirety in 1918, continually reverted to the Turner case as an archetypal instance of Southern barbarism (see White, "Work"). Angelina Grimke and Carrie Clifford, both associated with the writers group based in Washington, D.C., in which Toomer participated beginning in January 1921, had written stories and poems treating the incident (Grimke; Clifford; Ronald Johnson; Hull; Hutchinson). Moreover, Toomer may well have read the 1919 NAACP volume, since the writers group was undertaking "an historical study of slavery and the Negro, emphasizing the great economic and cultural forces which have largely determined them" (Toomer to Alain Locke, 26 Jan. 1921, Papers, Box 164-90, F. 12). While Toomer changed Mary Turner's name to Mame Lamkins, his description of her death and that of her unborn child clearly refers to a case that had attracted attention because of its particular ferocity and inhumanity.(6)