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
Afterword
“Song of the Son”:
The Emergence and Passing of Jean Toomer
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.
I did not wish to “rise above”
or “move beyond” my race. I wished
to contemplate who I was beyond
my body, this container of flesh.
I made up a language in which to exist.
I wondered what God breathed into me.
I wondered who I was beyond
this complicated, milk-skinned, genital-ed body.
I exercised it, watched it change and grow.
I spun like a dervish to see what would happen. Oh,
to be a Negro is — is?—
to be a Negro, is. To be.
(Jean Toomer)
“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.