A Look at Cane

In terms of books that turn your mind upside down and make you think about aspects of life you would have otherwise ignored, Jean Toomer accomplishes this and more in his creative and complicated book Cane. To start, there is no simplicity within the novel, no structure that the book follows, and most certainly there is no other author that has created a book so riddled with characters and stories and lives all narrated under one person. Jean Toomer weaves words within the pages until they form a complex web full of mystery, wonder, horror, enthrallment, and gut-trenching realization. Cane is a novel full of many stories and poems of many characters and lives and of many points of view of what it is like to live in southern Georgia as both a black person and a white person, then later what it is like to live in Washington D.C. as so. Toomer challenges the very ideas of racism and the arguments of what it means to be black or white, and while doing so also makes a clear distinction between how women as well as men are both portrayed and meant to act as. Such examples of Toomer's creative outlook of southern life can be seen through his first two short stories about Karintha and Becky. Karintha, a young black woman, is prized and beloved by all the men for her beauty. Late one night in the woods hidden from any prying eyes she bears a child on a bed of pine needles, and through no spoken word it is understood that the child was a still born or Karintha killed the child. The townsfolk do not speak of the atrocity, they only sing songs about it and this is all brought to light through Toomer's careful way of words. Words are powerful things. They can enthrall people, and sometimes, with authors like Toomer, they can rebel. The words can be carefully veiled so that through secret lines and pretty words like a deadly gift wrapped in a bow, writers ensnare the readers and make them see things they never seen before. Toomer makes people read Karintha's story and see what life was like in a southern town, then compares it with Becky who is a white woman who has two black children and a whole town that hurls spiteful words at her. Through unspoken words of Karintha's story and hateful shouts in Becky's story, readers catch glimpses of the true world, the world we live in now that even to today bears marks of the truth in those pages. Cane is a complex read, not to be taken lightly and not to be seen as anything other than a work of beautiful art, not painted, but written.

-Rebecca Wood

Sources: The picture I took and the critic was also of my own