Cane. Jean Toomer

got there. Working with a contractor, he was away most of the time. She had others. No one blames her for that. He returned one day and hung around the town where he picked up week-old boasts and rumors . . . Bane accused her. She denied. He couldnt see that she was becoming hysterical. He would have liked to take his fists and beat her. Who was strong as a man. Stronger. Words, like corkscrews, wormed to her strength. It fizzled out. Grabbing a gun, she rushed from the house and plunged across the road into a canebrake . . . There, in quarter heaven shone the crescent moon . . . Bane was afraid to follow till he heard the gun go off. Then he wasted half an hour gathering the neighbor men. They met in the road where lamp-light showed tracks dissolving in the loose earth about the cane. The search began. Moths flickered the lamps. They put them out. Really, because she still might be live enough to shoot. Time and space have no meaning in a canefield. No more than the interminable stalks . . . Some one stumbled over her. A cry went up. From the road, one would have thought that they were cornering a rabbit or a skunk . . . It is difficult carrying dead weight through cane. They placed her on the sofa. A curious, nosey somebody looked for the wound. This fussing with her clothes aroused her. Her eyes were weak and pitiable for so strong a woman. Slowly, then like a flash, Bane came to know that the shot she fired, with averted head, was aimed to whistle like a dying hornet through the cane. Twice deceived, and one deception proved the other. His head went off. Slashed one of the men who’d helped, the man who’d stumbled over her. Now he’s in the gang. Who was her husband. Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I have told it is the crudest melodrama?

      Wind is in the cane. Come along.

      Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,

      Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,

      Wind is in the cane. Come along.

      Song of the Son

      Pour O pour that parting soul in song,

      O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,

      Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,

      And let the valley carry it along.

      And let the valley carry it along.

      O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,

      So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,

      Now just before an epoch’s sun declines

      Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,

      Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

      In time, for though the sun is setting on

      A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;

      Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet

      To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,

      Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

      O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,

      Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,

      Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare

      One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

      An everlasting song, a singing tree,

      Caroling softly souls of slavery,

      What they were, and what they are to me,

      Caroling softly souls of slavery.

      Georgia Dusk

      The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue

      The setting sun, too indolent to hold

      A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,

      Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

      A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,

      An orgy for some genius of the South

      With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,

      Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

      The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,

      And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,

      Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill

      Their early promise of a bumper crop.

      Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile

      Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low

      Where only chips and stumps are left to show

      The solid proof of former domicile.

      Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,

      Race memories of king and caravan,

      High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,

      Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

      Their voices rise . . . the pine trees are guitars,

      Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . . .

      Their voices rise . . . the chorus of the cane

      Is caroling a vesper to the stars . . .

      O singers, resinous and soft your songs

      Above the sacred whisper of the pines,

      Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,

      Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

      Fern

      FACE flowed into her eyes. Flowed in soft cream foam and plaintive ripples, in such a way that wherever your glance may momentarily have rested, it immediately thereafter wavered in the direction of her eyes. The soft suggestion of down slightly darkened, like the shadow of a bird’s wing might, the creamy brown color of her upper lip. Why, after noticing it, you sought her eyes, I cannot tell you. Her nose was aquiline, Semitic. If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta. They were strange eyes. In this, 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. When a woman seeks, you will have observed, her eyes deny. Fern’s eyes desired nothing that you could give her; there was no reason why they should withhold. Men saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern’s eyes said to them that she was easy. When she was young, a few men took her, but got no joy from it. And then, once done, they felt bound to her (quite unlike their hit and run with other girls), felt as though it would take them a lifetime to fulfill an obligation which they could find no name for. They became attached to her, and hungered after finding the barest trace of what she might desire. As she grew up, new men who came to town felt as almost everyone did who ever saw her: that they would not be denied. Men were everlastingly bringing her their bodies. Something inside of her got tired of them, I guess, for I am certain that for the life of her she could not tell why or how she began to turn them off. A man in fever is no trifling thing to send away. They began to leave her, baffled and ashamed, yet vowing to themselves that some day they would do some fine thing for her: send her candy every week and not let her know whom it came from, watch out for her wedding-day and give her a magnificent something with no name on it, buy a house and deed it to her, rescue her from some unworthy fellow who had tricked her into marrying him. As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman. She did not deny them, yet the fact was that they were denied. A sort of superstition crept into their consciousness of her being somehow above them. Being above them meant that she was not to be approached by anyone. She became a virgin. Now a virgin in a small southern town is by no means the usual thing, if you will believe me. That the sexes were made to mate is the practice of the South. Particularly, black folks were made to mate. And it is black folks whom I have been talking about thus far. What white men thought