Toomer\'s Cane Toomer\'s Beauty What

Toomer's Cane

Toomer's Beauty

What kind of beauty does Toomer see in the South? How does he make this beauty come alive? Why is it important to him?

Toomer's stories in Cane are hardly beautiful. They are stories of anger, pain, and despair. The black experience and social conditions in the South after reconstruction, which he portrays are disturbing. Despite the injustices and the pain, however, the reader is left with a sense of haunting beauty. Toomer sees beauty everywhere and uses it as a backdrop which points to the great contrast between the beauty of life and the ugliness of racism. He sees beauty in the agricultural way of life, in nature, and in the soul of the black people.

Farming as a way of life for ordinary Americans is all but gone now. The demise of the farm was beginning to happen in the 1920s when Cane was first published. Industrialism and the growth of agribusiness has pushed farmers out of business. Toomer shows it was a life of hard work, fresh air, friendly animals, good food, and people you could get to know well. Toomer's frequent use of the sun as a metaphor reflects the farmer's relationship to the sun as either friend or foe. In "Karintha" Toomer describes that lovely moment when the day's hard work is done and the evening about to begin: "At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice [Karintha's], high-pitched, shrill, would put one's ears to itching" p. 3). Karintha has a kind of magic about her that attracts men to her. But Toomer suggests that some sort of sexual abuse has taken place that has marked her psychologically. Thus, a contrast is wrought between Karintha the woman who "carries beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (p. 4) and the inner woman whom men can never know: "Karintha is a woman. Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon" (p. 4).

In "Becky" nature is a backdrop for the story of a white woman "who had two Negro sons" (p. 7). For this crime she is ostracized by the entire community, both black and white. People despise her so much that even the trees express their disapproval: "The pines whispered to Jesus" (p. 7). The railroad boss gives her a strip of land between the tracks and the road to build a "single room" that "held down the earth," (which shook when the trains went past). Becky never comes out of her house again. She makes herself so invisible, many people believe she may be dead. Then, one Sunday when "There was no wind. The autumn sun, the bell from Ebenezer Church, listless and heavy. Even the pines were stale, sticky..." (p. 8), Becky's house falls down on her. The house is a symbol of her consciousness, alienated and alone, possibly self-hating, and she dies from its complete collapse.

The strength of the black people is beautiful too. "Carma," for example, "in overalls, and strong as any man, stands behind the old brown mule, diving the wagon home...the sun which has been slanting over her shoulder, shoots primitive rockets into her mangrove-gloomed, yellow flower face" (p. 12). Another example of beauty can be found in Fern's stoic bearing of sadness, her withdrawal into an inner world that cannot be touched by any man, though many want to. Esther's effort to get a life for herself is pathetic and beautiful at the same time, showing eternal hope in the human spirit for something better. Even poor Tom in "Blood-Burning Moon," the ugliest of all the stories, has a noble sense of dignity about him when he is lynched and burned alive:

No words. A stake was sunk into the ground. Rotting floor boards piled around it. kerosene poured on the rotting floor boards. Tom bound to the stake, His breast was bare. Nails' scratches let little lines of blood trickle down and mat into the hair. His face, his eyes were set and stony. Except for irregular breathing, one would have thought him already dead" (p. 36).