Cane by Jean Toomer (100 best novels of all time .TXT) 📕
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Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer.
Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer conceived Cane as a mosaic of intricately connected vignettes, poems, stories, songs, and even play-like dialogues. Drawing on both modernist poetry and African-American spirituals, Toomer imbues each form with a lyrical and often experimental sensibility.
The work is structured in three distinct but unnamed parts. The first is set in rural Georgia and focuses on the lives of women and the men who desire them. The second part moves to the urban enclaves of the North in the years following the Great Migration. The third and final part returns to the rural South and explores the interactions between African-Americans from the North and those living in the South.
Although sales languished in the later years of Toomer’s life, the book was reissued after his death and rediscovered by a new generation of American writers. Alice Walker described Cane as one of the most important books in her own development as a writer: “I love it passionately, could not possibly exist without it.”
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- Author: Jean Toomer
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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 workshop. 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 treetops 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.
ColophonCane
was published in 1923 by
Jean Toomer.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Zoey Leigh Peterson,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2019 by
Tim Lindell, Robert Tonsing, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
HathiTrust Digital Library.
The cover page is adapted from
Still Life with Grapes,
a painting completed between 1838–1917 by
Carducius Plantagenet Ream.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
April 11, 2021, 6:34 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/jean-toomer/cane.
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