82 pages • 2 hours read
Jean ToomerCane
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1923A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 1, Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Cotton Song”
“Cotton Song” is the longest poem thus far in Cane, with five stanzas, each with four lines. As its title connotes, it is a song featuring a refrain (or “chorus”) saying that “God’s body got a soul” and encouraging listeners and fellow singers to “come, brother, roll, roll!” (11). The song blends Christian religious themes (such as God, Judgment Day, “weary sinners”) with work commands (like “roll away!” and “let’s lift it”). “Cotton Song” is modeled after the work songs typically sung by the enslaved in the American South while they worked on plantations, as well as by rural sharecroppers and field workers in the post-emancipation period. The “Cotton Song,” then, is written as though sung by men working on a cotton plantation.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “Carma”
Like many other short story chapters, “Carma” begins with an epigraph. This epigraph describes wind blowing through sorghum cane stalks. The sound is likened to talk and singing. The story begins with Carma, a Black woman in overalls heading home on a dust road with a mule and wagon. Carma is “strong as any man” (13). The narrator steps out to watch her pass by. She turns to look at him and then continues going.
A parenthetical passage interrupts the narrative. That passage describes the golden sun and the dry forest. Beyond the forest is the sawmill, where work has just finished for the day. A series of seemingly random things are happening at this time—a Black boy rides a mule, a train “chug-chug[s],” the “repair gang” heads toward home, a girl sings loudly in her yard, the sun sets, and lights turn on. Another woman is dancing in the forest, and Toomer mentions things related to spiritual practices from the African continent (“juju men, greegree, witch-doctors”) (13). A dog named Foxie barks at the moon.
After this section, the epigraph is reproduced. Then, Toomer returns to the narrative. Carma’s husband, Bane, works with a contractor and is away for so long that Carma is regularly unfaithful. One day when they are arguing about this, she grabs a gun and runs into the canebrake across the road. Bane loses her but hears the gun go off. He gathers men to search for her among the cane. When they find her body, they bring her inside and search her body for a gunshot wound. There is no wound, and when she opens her eyes, Bane realizes that she has deceived him again. Furious, he attacks the men with him. This violent outburst gets him sent to the chain gang, where prisoners are put to hard labor. The story ends with the epigraph repeated a final time.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Song of the Son”
“Song of the Son” is a poem/song with five stanzas. Each stanza has five lines except for the final two, which have four lines. The five-line stanzas follow an ABBAA rhyme scheme. The penultimate stanza has a rhyme scheme of ABBA, and the final one, simply AAAA.
Stanza 1 commands the listener to “pour that parting soul in song” (15) into the night air for it to echo through the valley. Stanza 2 addresses the “land and soil,” saying that the speaker has returned “thy son” to them in time. Stanza 3 explains that the return is “in time” because the sun has not entirely gone down yet. There is still time to catch the soil’s “plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone” (15). Stanza 4 addresses “Negro slaves” and describes how ripe plums are picked, but one is saved for the speaker to eat. Stanza 5 describes an endless song, repeating in the second and final lines, “Caroling softly souls of slavery” (16).
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Georgia Dusk”
“Georgia Dusk” is a poem with seven stanzas, each with four lines. Every stanza follows an ABBA rhyme scheme. In Stanza 1, the sky is personified as too lazy to “pursue the setting sun” (17), instead darkening passively. Stanza 2 describes a gathering of men with their dogs under the moonlight, singing folk songs together. Stanza 3 describes the silence where tools of labor once made sound—signs that the workday is done. In the following stanza, smoke rises from a sawdust pile and “curls up” in the forest where trees have burned down. Meanwhile, in Stanza 5, the men continue singing together in the swamp. Stanza 6 tells the reader that “[t]heir voices rise,” along with the musicality of pine trees like guitars and the “chorus of the cane” (18). The final stanza addresses the singers, whose songs float “above the sacred whisper of the pines” (18).
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “Fern”
Fernie May “Fern” Rosen is a beautiful, Black woman with an “aquiline” nose and captivating eyes. Her eyes seem to desire nothing and withhold nothing, making men think she is easy to sleep with. After they do so, they become inexplicably attached to Fern. The men could not make sense of her lack of desire and would go away wanting to find ways to please her. Something about Fern eventually denies the men, and they soon stop approaching her. Now untouched, Fern “[becomes] a virgin,” which is unusual because everyone has sex in the South. Most days, Fern can be seen resting against her porch. She is listless, gazing out at the sunset, a distant cabin, or a train search light.
The first time the narrator sees Fern from afar, she is on her porch. The narrator, who is from the North, is spellbound by Fern and her eyes. The shape of her nose makes him “[feel] as if I heard a Jewish cantor sing” (21). Like the men before him, he dreams of doing something for her. He is certain that Fern is better off in Georgia than in any Northern city. He wonders what he could offer her and asks the reader (“I ask you, friend”) (22) what they might do if they see Fern as they pass by on a train. One evening he stops by to say hello and invites Fern on a walk. She asks, “Doesn’t it make you mad?” which the narrator interprets as being about gossip and the world. They sit under a sweet-gum tree. The narrator’s mind wanders again, and when his thoughts return, he realizes he is now holding Fern. Likewise, her eyes are holding him. He does something unspecified, causing Fern to rush away. She falls to her knees, swaying, shaking her hands, and crying out. As the sun is setting, she sings in a broken voice. When the narrator rushes to her, she collapses. The men in town feel protective of Fern, and they later resent the narrator for the incident. Soon the narrator takes a train back North and sees Fern through the window. He never had an opportunity to do something for her, but he asks the reader what they might do for her, mentioning that Fern is still living.
Part 1, Chapters 6-10 Analysis
Toomer is interested in showcasing the American Southern landscape and elements of nature as they interact with rural life. “Georgia Dusk” is a prime example of this, where Toomer discusses, for instance, the celestial bodies of the sun and the moon in the sky. This poem, as well as many preceding chapters (such as “Karintha,” “Carma,” and “Fern”), features the setting sun as imagery and metaphor. The sunset naturally paints a beautiful image in the reader’s mind and allows Toomer to meditate on labor and the end of the workday, as well as the way folks come together at night to sing and gather. In the poem, on the level of the literary, nature and other inanimate elements are personified—the sky is lazy, the sawmill blows, the smoke curls itself up, the pine needles strum, and the pines whisper. On a more literal level, people, nature, and animals are brought together—the men are with the barking hounds, singing, barbecuing, and walking through the swamp. “Georgia Dusk” describes the close relationship between the natural world and the rural Southerners on which Toomer focuses. The poem illuminates how the people are heavily reliant on crops, good rain, the rhythms of the seasons, and the rising and setting of the sun.
Cane often brings in the theme of labor, especially agricultural labor, given Toomer himself spent a year in an agricultural program at the University of Wisconsin. While Cane attends to labor, its investment in the moment of sunset demonstrates greater attention to when labor comes to an end. In “Song of the Son,” Toomer plays with the double sonic meaning of son/sun. On the one hand, the speaker says it has returned the land and soil’s son to them. Yet the song also offers imagery of dusk—“the sun setting on” (16)—where the setting sun would also appear to be returning to the land as it descends below the horizon.
Chapters 6-10 feature two songs—“Cotton Song” and “Song of the Sun.” The first is a lively work song, while the second is about nature and has a wistful, almost sorrowful tone. Both songs hearken back to a long Southern African American tradition of collective singing and sorrowful songs. They evoke, for example, a scene in the 19th-century slave narrative Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) where the author describes the collective singing of fellow enslaved people when they were selected to go to The Great House Farm to collect their monthly allowance. In his famous chiasmus structure, Douglass wrote, “[T]hey would sometimes saying the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone” (Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Penguin Books, 2014, p. 26). The songs—improvised and communal—communicated the mix of joy and pain that the people felt. Years later, in 1903, sociologist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois writes about “The Sorrow Songs,” Black folk songs originating in the South but drawing on an older African tradition. Du Bois writes, “the Negro folk-song […] stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas” (Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Dover Publications Inc., 1994, p. 156). In Cane, 20 years later, Toomer uses folk songs to set the stage of the American South, giving the novel a communal feel and speaking on the complex historical relationship between African Americans and agricultural labor.
