Cane (14 page)

Kabnis: Oh, th hell you say.

Halsey: Well, son, seeing that I’m th kindhearted father, I’ll give y chance t open your eyes. But up y get when I come down.

He mounts the steps to the work-shop and starts a fire in the hearth. In the yard he finds some chunks of coal which he brings in and throws on the fire. He puts a kettle on to boil. The wagon draws him. He lifts an oak-beam, fingers it, and becomes abstracted. Then comes to himself and places the beam upon the work-bench. He looks over some newly cut wooden spokes. He goes to the fire and pokes it. The coals are red-hot. With a pair of long prongs he picks them up and places them in a thick iron bucket. This he carries downstairs. Outside, darkness has given way to the impalpable grayness of dawn. This early morning light, seeping through the four barred cellar windows, is the color of the stony walls. It seems to be an emanation from them. Halsey’s coals throw out a rich warm glow. He sets them on the floor, a safe distance from the beds.

Halsey: No foolin now. Come. Up with you.

Other than a soft rustling, there is no sound as the girls slip into their clothes. Kabnis still lies in bed.

Stella (to Halsey): Reckon y could spare us a light?

Halsey strikes a match, lights a cigarette, and then bends over and touches flame to the two candles on the table between the beds. Kabnis asks for a cigarette. Halsey hands him his and takes a fresh one for himself. The girls, before the mirror, are doing up their hair. It is bushy hair that has gone through some straightening process. Character, however, has not all been ironed out. As they kneel there, heavy-eyed and dusky, and throwing grotesque moving shadows on the wall, they are two princesses in Africa going through the early-morning ablutions of their pagan prayers. Finished, they come forward to stretch their hands and warm them over the glowing coals. Red dusk of a Georgia sunset, their heavy, coal-lit faces…Kabnis suddenly recalls something.

Kabnis: Th old man talked last night.

Stella: And so did you.

Halsey: In your dreams.

Kabnis: I tell y, he did. I know what I’m talkin about. I’ll tell y what he said. Wait now, lemme see.

Halsey: Look out, brother, th old man’ll be getting int you by way o dreams. Come, Stel, ready? Cora? Coffee an eggs f both of you.

Halsey goes upstairs.

Stella: Gettin generous, aint he?

She blows the candles out. Says nothing to Kabnis. Then she and Cora follow after Halsey. Kabnis, left to himself, tries to rise. He has slept in his robe. His robe trips him. Finally, he manages to stand up. He starts across the floor. Half-way to the old man, he falls and lies quite still. Perhaps an hour passes. Light of a new sun is about to filter through the windows. Kabnis slowly rises to support upon his elbows. He looks hard, and internally gathers himself together. The side face of Father John is in the direct line of his eyes. He scowls at him. No one is around. Words gush from Kabnis.

Kabnis: You sit there like a black hound spiked to an ivory pedestal. An all night long I heard you murmurin that devilish word. They thought I didnt hear y, but I did. Mumblin, feedin that ornery thing thats livin on my insides. Father John. Father of Satan, more likely. What does it mean t you? Youre dead already. Death. What does it mean t you? To you who died way back there in th ’sixties. What are y throwin it in my throat for? Whats it goin t get y? A good smashin in th mouth, thats what. My fist’ll sink int y black mush face clear t y guts—if y got any. Dont believe y have. Never seen signs of none. Death. Death. Sin an Death. All night long y mumbled death. (He forgets the old man as his mind begins to play with the word and its associations.) Death…these clammy floors…just like th place they used t stow away th worn-out, no-count niggers in th days of slavery…that was long ago; not so long ago…no windows (he rises higher on his elbows to verify this assertion. He looks around, and, seeing no one but the old man, calls.) Halsey! Halsey! Gone an left me. Just like a nigger. I thought he was a nigger all th time. Now I know it. Ditch y when it comes right down t it. Damn him anyway. Godam him. (He looks and re-sees the old man.) Eh, you? T hell with you too. What do I care whether you can see or hear? You know what hell is cause youve been there. Its a feelin an its ragin in my soul in a way that’ll pop out of me an run you through, an scorch y, an burn an rip your soul. Your soul. Ha. Nigger soul. A gin soul that gets drunk on a preacher’s words. An screams. An shouts. God Almighty, how I hate that shoutin. Where’s th beauty in that? Gives a buzzard a windpipe an I’ll bet a dollar t a dime th buzzard ud beat y to it. Aint surprisin th white folks hate y so. When you had eyes, did you ever see th beauty of th world? Tell me that. Th hell y did. Now dont tell me. I know y didnt. You couldnt have. Oh, I’m drunk an just as good as dead, but no eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight. You aint got no sight. If you had, drunk as I am, I hope Christ will kill me if I couldnt see it. Your eyes are dull and watery, like fish eyes. Fish eyes are dead eyes. Youre an old man, a dead fish man, an black at that. Theyve put y here t die, damn fool y are not t know it. Do y know how many feet youre under ground? I’ll tell y. Twenty. An do y think you’ll ever see th light of day again, even if you wasnt blind? Do y think youre out of slavery? Huh? Youre where they used t throw th worked-out, no-count slaves. On a damp clammy floor of a dark scum-hole. An they called that an infirmary. Th sons-a…. Why I can already see you toppled off that stool an stretched out on th floor beside me—not beside me, damn you, by yourself, with th flies buzzin an lickin God knows what they’d find on a dirty, black, foul-breathed mouth like yours…

Some one is coming down the stairs. Carrie, bringing food for the old man. She is lovely in her fresh energy of the morning, in the calm untested confidence and nascent maternity which rise from the purpose of her present mission. She walks to within a few paces of Kabnis.

Carrie K.: Brother says come up now, brother Ralph.

Kabnis: Brother doesnt know what he’s talkin bout.

Carrie K.: Yes he does, Ralph. He needs you on th wagon.

Kabnis: He wants me on th wagon, eh? Does he think some wooden thing can lift me up? Ask him that.

Carrie K.: He told me t help y.

Kabnis: An how would you help me, child, dear sweet little sister?

She moves forward as if to aid him.

Carrie K.: I’m not a child, as I’ve more than once told you, brother Ralph, an as I’ll show you now.

Kabnis: Wait, Carrie. No, thats right. Youre not a child. But twont do t lift me bodily. You dont understand. But its th soul of me that needs th risin.

Carrie K.: Youre a bad brother an just wont listen t me when I’m tellin y t go t church.

Kabnis doesnt hear her. He breaks down and talks to himself.

Kabnis: Great God Almighty, a soul like mine cant pin itself onto a wagon wheel an satisfy itself in spinnin round. Iron prongs an hickory sticks, an God knows what all…all right for Halsey…use him. Me? I get my life down in this scum-hole. Th old man an me—

Carrie K.: Has he been talkin?

Kabnis: Huh? Who? Him? No. Dont need to. I talk. An when I really talk, it pays th best of them t listen. Th old man is a good listener. He’s deaf; but he’s a good listener. An I can talk t him. Tell him anything.

Carrie K.: He’s deaf an blind, but I reckon he hears, an sees too, from th things I’ve heard.

Kabnis: No. Cant. Cant I tell you. How’s he do it?

Carrie K.: Dunno, except I’ve heard that th souls of old folks have a way of seein things.

Kabnis: An I’ve heard them call that superstition.

The old man begins to shake his head slowly. Carrie and Kabnis watch him, anxiously. He mumbles. With a grave motion his head nods up and down. And then, on one of the down-swings—

Father John (remarkably clear and with great conviction): Sin.

He repeats this word several times, always on the downward nodding. Surprised, indignant, Kabnis forgets that Carrie is with him.

Kabnis: Sin! Shut up. What do you know about sin, you old black bastard. Shut up, an stop that swayin an noddin your head.

Father John: Sin.

Kabnis tries to get up.

Kabnis: Didnt I tell y t shut up?

Carrie steps forward to help him. Kabnis is violently shocked at her touch. He springs back.

Kabnis: Carrie! What…how…Baby, you shouldnt be down here. Ralph says things. Doesnt mean to. But Carrie, he doesnt know what he’s talkin about. Couldnt know. It was only a preacher’s sin they knew in those old days, an that wasnt sin at all. Mind me, th only sin is whats done against th soul. Th whole world is a conspiracy t sin, especially in America, an against me. I’m th victim of their sin. I’m what sin is. Does he look like me? Have you ever heard him say th things youve heard me say? He couldnt if he had th Holy Ghost t help him. Dont look shocked, little sweetheart, you hurt me.

Father John: Sin.

Kabnis: Aw, shut up, old man.

Carrie K.: Leave him be. He wants t say somethin. (She turns to the old man.) What is it, Father?

Kabnis: Whatsha talkin t that old deaf man for? Come away from him.

Carrie K.: What is it, Father?

The old man’s lips begin to work. Words are formed incoherently. Finally, he manages to articulate—

Father John: Th sin whats fixed…(Hesitates.)

Carrie K. (restraining a comment from Kabnis): Go on, Father.

Father John:…upon th white folks—

Kabnis: Suppose youre talkin about that bastard race thats roamin round th country. It looks like sin, if thats what y mean. Give us somethin new an up t date.

Father John:—f tellin Jesus—lies. O th sin th white folks ’mitted when they made th Bible lie.

Boom. Boom. BOOM! Thuds on the floor above. The old man sinks back into his stony silence. Carrie is wet-eyed. Kabnis, contemptuous.

Kabnis: So thats your sin. All these years t tell us that th white folks made th Bible lie. Well, I’ll be damned. Lewis ought t have been here. You old black fakir—

Carrie K.: Brother Ralph, is that your best Amen?

She turns him to her and takes his hot cheeks in her firm cool hands. Her palms draw the fever out. With its passing, Kabnis crumples. He sinks to his knees before her, ashamed, exhausted. His eyes squeeze tight. Carrie presses his face tenderly against her. The suffocation of her fresh starched dress feels good to him. Carrie is about to lift her hands in prayer, when Halsey, at the head of the stairs, calls down.

Halsey: Well, well. Whats up? Aint you ever comin? Come on. Whats up down there? Take you all mornin t sleep off a pint? Youre weakenin, man, youre weakenin. Th axle an th beam’s all ready waitin f y. Come on.

Kabnis rises and is going doggedly towards the steps. Carrie notices his robe. She catches up to him, points to it, and helps him take it off. He hangs it, with an exaggerated ceremony, on its nail in the corner. He looks down on the tousled beds. His lips curl bitterly. Turning, he stumbles over the bucket of dead coals. He savagely jerks it from the floor. And then, seeing Carrie’s eyes upon him, he swings the pail carelessly and with eyes downcast and swollen, trudges upstairs to the work-shop. Carrie’s gaze follows him till he is gone. Then she goes to the old man and slips to her knees before him. Her lips murmur, “Jesus, come.”

Light streaks through the iron-barred cellar window. Within its soft circle, the figures of Carrie and Father John.

Outside, the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams the sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town.

THE END

“Song of the Son”:

The Emergence and Passing of Jean Toomer

by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

In memoriam

To Charles T. Davis, beloved teacher, mentor, and pioneering scholar in African American Studies who set the highest standards for us and who generously prepared a way for us in the academy.

and

To Ingrid Saunders Jones, teacher, bibliophile, race woman, and leader in global commerce who nurtures and actualizes the dreams of so many.

—Elizabeth Alexander

“THE SETTING WAS
crude in a way,” Jean Toomer would recall of the rural Georgia landscape that inspired him to write
Cane
, “but strangely rich and beautiful. I began feeling its effects despite my state, or, perhaps, just because of it. There was a valley, the valley of ‘Cane,’ with smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night.” And in that valley, Toomer encountered, perhaps for the first time, the spirituals, the traditional music of the African American sacred vernacular: “A family of back-country Negroes had only recently moved into a shack not too far away. They sang. And this was the first time I’d ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful.”
¹
In this lyrical remembrance of things all-too-soon to pass, Toomer suggests something of the beauty and poignancy of a landscape, a people, and an art form in transition in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a moment he would render in a loving yet searching experimental form, in the single work that would define his career and his legacy as a writer.
Cane
, a compelling, haunting amalgam of fiction, poetry, and drama unified formally and thematically and replete with leitmotifs, would elevate Toomer, virtually overnight, to the status of a canonical writer in two branches of American modernism: the writers and critics who compose the New Critics and the “Lost Generation,” and those who compose the New Negro movement or the Harlem Renaissance. Toomer was an important, admired, influential figure in both of these articulations of high American modernism, which reached their zenith in the 1920s and which unfolded downtown and uptown, respectively, in New York City.

The man who would startle his small but enthusiastic readership with the originality of
Cane
entered the cultural world of the Lost Generation downtown in Greenwich Village primarily through his close friend, the writer and critic, Waldo Frank. Uptown, simultaneously, Toomer was emerging as one of the New Negro writers of the Harlem Renaissance, chiefly through the stewardship of its erstwhile “dean,” Alain Locke, who edited the movement’s signature manifesto,
The New Negro
, in 1925. In the two or three years preceding the publication of
Cane
in 1923, Toomer—perhaps more than any other black writer—moved seemingly effortlessly between these two cultural worlds. Both movements were shaped by their own vibrant and defiant theories of language, art, culture, and history, some of which they shared, some of which they did not. But both, in their ways, challenged, to an unprecedented degree, conventional American definitions of race and social strictures defined by the so-called color line. In so very many ways, these two movements were mutually constitutive, Janus faces of a larger, unfolding concept of American modernism, although they have been frequently and mistakenly cast as discrete, isolated formations in American literature and culture.
²

Jean Toomer, circa 1932. Jean Toomer Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke and Rare Book Manuscript Library.

Raised as an African American but, to most observers, racially indeterminate, Toomer embodied in his person, in his disposition, and in his art many of the signal elements—hybridity, alienation, fragmentation, dislocation, migration, fluidity, experimentation—that define American modernism, and that he would so imaginatively address in
Cane
. Throughout his life, Toomer displayed a marked ambivalence toward his Negro ancestry, addressing it—or erasing it—again and again in his posthumously published autobiographical writings. The relation of this deep and abiding ambivalence to the various forms of fragmentation that wind their way through
Cane
has intrigued critics virtually since
Cane
was published in 1923. Indeed, one could say that the great theme of
Cane
is fragmentation itself, rendered through close and careful encounters between blacks and blacks, and blacks and whites, in an almost mythic, transitional, pre-Jazz Age, Jim Crow rural South. Toomer tells us that the impact of the southern agrarian setting upon his northern, urbane sensibility was dramatic, referring to the psychological and emotional “state” created by his first encounters with southern black culture in the town of Sparta, Georgia. Put another way, Toomer is describing the particular structures of feeling and thought generated when he encountered a region of the country that fundamentally shaped his parents and grandparents, a region about which he would grow increasingly ambivalent almost as soon as, if not before, he published
Cane.

Jean Toomer was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C., the first and only child of Nina Pinchback and Nathan Toomer, both African Americans. Toomer’s name at birth was the source of some controversy in a family that, from the start, seems to have been totally devoted to him. This controversy is, in its way, emblematic of what would become Toomer’s own preoccupation with naming and self-definition, with determining what to call himself and how to define himself ethnically, and with exercising control over his public image in a society that favored the shorthand of labels, especially when defining a person’s color or race.

Toomer’s middle name, Pinchback, linked him directly to his grandfather, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (1837–1921), the husband of Nina Emily Hethorn, with whom he had four children. P. B. S. Pinchback (as he was known) was the son of Major William Pinchback, a white Virginia planter, and Eliza Stewart, a mulatto slave, and the brother of an undetermined number of siblings, some of whom disappeared into the white world. Born a free Negro in Macon, Georgia, in 1837, Pinchback was a captain in the second regiment of Louisiana’s Native Guard, the black soldiers in the white army who fought on the side of the Union during the Civil War, from October 1862 to September 1863. As the only “cullid officer” at Fort Pike, he served as the spokesman for his fellow black officers who were unrelenting in their protest of the discrimination experienced by the black enlisted men under their command in the Union Army.
³
Pinchback would become, during Reconstruction, the first black lieutenant governor of Louisiana. For thirty-five days in December 1872 to January 1873, he even served as the Acting Governor.
⁴
Pinchback’s “brief tenure as acting governor was the political high-water mark for Louisiana blacks during the nineteenth century.”
⁵
A colorful and imperial figure who was sometimes mistaken for Andrew Carnegie, Pinchback derived his wealth from lucrative investments and political appointments, and derived his influence and standing within the deeply stratified society of Washington, D.C., to which he moved after his political career ended in Louisiana, from his historic achievements in office, and his light-skin privilege, often a visible marker of class.

The grandson would recount with some pride the grandfather’s improbable, dramatic rise to power in the corrupting, byzantine, and multicultural world of the Pelican State, speculating that his motives for becoming a public servant were perhaps not entirely altruistic, even suggesting, incredulously, that Pinchback may have been a white man who only passed for black to facilitate his chances of being elected in Reconstruction Louisiana: “Then, the war ended and the black men freed and enfranchised, came Pinchback’s opportunity in the political arena. He claimed he had Negro blood, linked himself with the cause of the Negro, and rose to power. How much he was an opportunist, how much he was in sincere sympathy with the freedmen, is a matter which need not concern us here…it would be interesting if we knew what Pinchback himself believed about his racial heredity. Did he believe he had some Negro blood? Did he not? I do not know. What I do know is this—his belief or disbelief would have had no necessary relation to the facts—and this holds true as regards his Scotch-Welsh-German and other bloods also.”
⁶

Nowhere, to our knowledge, was Pinchback ever ambivalent about being a Negro, even if, as W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote of him, to “all intents and purposes…[he] was an educated well-to-do congenial white man with but a few drops of Negro blood,” as fair as, say, the novelist Charles W. Chesnutt or the civil rights leader Walter White.
⁷
In fact, elsewhere in his writings, when discussing why he attended an all-black elementary school, Henry Highland Garnet, in Washington, Toomer contradicts himself about Pinchback’s racial identity: “For Pinckney Benston Stewart Pinchback to send his grandson to a white school, no, that will not do. It might look as if he were going back on his race and wanting me to be white.”
⁸
Toomer is being disingenuous here, however; schools in Washington, D.C., were rigorously segregated; Pinchback would have had no choice, even if, as does not appear to be the case, he had sought to educate his grandson across the color line. Clearly the issue of his grandfather’s ethnic ancestry was a vexed one for Toomer, one crucial for him to position and reposition as he sought to redefine his own racial identity.

And a large part of his strategy of strongly implying that his grandfather most probably was “passing for black” was rooted in Toomer’s desire to paint the roots of this branch of his family tree white; to do so, he had to stress that Pinchback was the political opportunist par excellence: “I say he [Pinchback] was an adventurer. I think he was. I doubt that he saw himself bearing a mission to secure and maintain the rights of the freedmen.”
⁹
His grandfather, moreover, Toomer reasoned, saw in the Louisiana of Reconstruction a certain fluidity of identity that allowed for an unprecedented amount of social mobility: “More than anything else Pinchback saw himself as a winner of a dangerous game. He liked to play the game. He liked to win. This—the reconstruction situation in Louisiana—was the chance his personal ambition had been waiting for. He was not a reformer. He was not primarily a fighter for a general human cause. He was, or was soon to become, a politician—but far more picturesque, courageous, and able than the majority of the men who bear that name.”
¹⁰
If his grandfather had been a white man who passed for black, perhaps his grandson could be a black man who could pass for white. Despite Toomer’s highly dubious claim about his grandfather’s racial identity, his assessment of his grandfather’s career in politics is all the more compelling for being critical and unsentimental. Clearly, P. B. S. Pinchback was a man who inspired a great degree of awe, in Toomer and in just about everyone else: “For myself—I was fascinated by him. His goings and comings were the big events in the house…No one could speak to me and make me laugh and get me excited the way he could. He made me feel I was having a part in everything he did. Sometimes he would take me downtown with him and I might even have lunch with ‘the men,’ who made much to-do over me, giving me the feeling that I was the scion of a great family.”
¹¹
This was my grandfather as I knew him,” Toomer writes with fond admiration. “I saw him as a dashing commanding figure, the centre of an unknown but exciting world. He created an atmosphere which thrilled me; and there is no doubt that his image, and the picture and sense of his life, were deeply impressed upon me, later to function as an unconscious ideal for myself, for how I wished to look and be; and also to serve as standards by means of which I measured men and life.”
¹²

Toomer’s loving portrait of his grandfather as a bold and questing Victorian patriarch, however, is complicated by the fact that as he grew into adulthood, he was often at war with Pinchback, who grew increasingly bewildered and disappointed by his scion’s seeming lack of purpose and direction. “Not till I was seven could I rule my mother and grandmother,” Toomer tells us; but “Not till I was twenty-seven did I finally conquer my grandfather.”
¹³
While his relationship with Pinchback would become increasingly fraught, Toomer, nevertheless, dutifully and lovingly cared for his grandfather in the final weeks of his life, immediately following his pivotal sojourn in Georgia. “Once again in Washington I had my grandfather brought back from the hospital. His condition there was too pitiable for me to bear. He touched my heart so strongly that I resolved to care for him till the very end. And this I did.”
¹⁴
Precisely as Pinchback’s health declined, Toomer found his voice as an artist: “He sank very rapidly. All during December I nursed him; and, at the same time, I wrote the materials of
Cane
. In these last days he seemed to know just what I meant to him. I knew and realized all he had done for me.”
¹⁵

In the small apartment he also shared with his resilient, long-suffering grandmother, Toomer and Pinchback reconciled in the days before his death, precisely as he was completing the powerful, final, haunting section of his first book: “Our almost life-long struggle and contest was finished, and all my love and gratitude for the once so forceful and dominant but now so broken and tragic man came to the fore. He died the day after I had finished the first draft of ‘Kabnis,’ the long semi-dramatic closing-piece of Cane.”
¹⁶
Toomer would write to Waldo Frank that “Kabnis is
Me
,” one of his last admissions of his awareness of the primacy of his own Negro ancestry in the shaping of his cultural and ethnic identity. But it is altogether reasonable to speculate that the powerful, quasi-mythic encounter at
Kabnis
’s conclusion—between the northern, mulatto would-be intellectual and old, black Father John, the haunting figure of the slave past—was informed by this final, intense encounter and reconciliation between Toomer and Pinchback himself.