Toomer's Cane: "Face" and "Cotton Song"

"Face" is a fairly melodramatic portrait-poem, thematically suited to follow "Becky" for a few reasons that immediately suggest themselves:

• it purports to construct a face, and Becky's is a face we never really look into deeply--we are given only that initial glance when we are told what the white folks' words do to her
• it is obviously about deep suffering
• the last line, "nearly ripe for worms," links "Face" to "Becky" through the theme of death

So far, I can't detect subtler means by which these two pieces articulate each other, but that does not mean they aren't there. They may emerge with greater, more careful attention.

What interests me about this poem is the way its title, "Face," seems to promise a kind of concrete description that it refuses to deliver on. The face in question, presumably that of an older black woman, is constructed entirely of metaphors, so that the person is reconstructed in terms of images of the natural world. In fact, until the final four lines describing her muscles, the poem lingers on her facial features; hair, brows and eyes are portrayed through water-related qualities like "streams," "ripples," "mist" and condensation, emphasizing flow to such an extent that the features threaten to slide right off the face. It is only when he gets to the "channeled" muscles that the speaker settles upon a solid image for comparison--they are "cluster grapes of sorrow/ purple in the evening sun/ nearly ripe for worms" (8).

Since manual labor channeled out those muscles, this image leads us right into the next poem, "Cotton Song," though the soft bales of cotton upon which "Weary sinner's bare feet trod,/ Softly, softly to the throne of God" bear a marked and ironic contrast to the "Face" subjects taut, grape-like clusters of muscle. Like Hurston in Mules and Men, Toomer frames this work song rather than transcribing it word-for-word. We discover that the first stanza (Come, brother, come. Lets lift it;/ Come now, hewit! roll away!/ Shackles fall upon the Judgment Day/ But lets not wait for it" [9]) is an interpretation when we arrive at the last line of stanza three, which carries over into the fourth stanza as an extended quotation, Toomer's attempt to transcribe dialect: "We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!/ Nassur; nassur,/ Hump./ Eoho, eoho, roll away!/ We aint agwine t wait until the Judgment Day." The interpretation could be read, perhaps, as a translation, pinning down the sounds and rhythmic repetitions and ascribing ostensible content to them. Yet the crucial question remains unanswered--what aren't the singers going to wait until Judgment Day to do? Move the bales? Work? Those are the implied answers, but the song gestures toward a double layer of meaning, a subtext at work beneath the words of the song, that transcription, translation and interpretation only further obscure.

Equally opaque is what might be taken to be the poem's refrain, "God's body's got a soul,/ Bodies like to roll the soul,/ Cant blame God if we don't roll,/ Come, brother, roll! roll!" Presumably, what's being rolled is the cotton bale, but does it follow that the cotton bale is the "soul" of "God's body"? What is "God's body"? The earth? Is Toomer evoking the another kind of regionally inflected aural echo here, "soil" for "soul"? If so, would the world "roil" echo over "roll"?

On Toomer's Cane: "Becky"

Becky was the white woman who had two Negro sons. She's dead; they've gone away. The pines whisper to Jesus. The Bible flaps its leaves with an aimless rustle on her mound.

So begins, and so ends, the "Becky" sketch, which centers on a kind of degraded Mater Dolorosa who dwells in a fallen world where the inhabitants, both black and white, cannot appropriately decipher her; rather, they project meanings onto her until they can no longer even see her. Like Karintha, she comes to carry a meaning that she does not "naturally" bear. Perhaps for this reason, like Karintha, she somehow evades being captured by the eye of observers both hungry and frightened--and ultimately unable--to see her. But whereas Karintha embodies something desirable that always seems to be just out of reach, Becky's is more of a haunting presence, ghostly and vaguely accusatory of the communities that have cast her out.

If the reader can be said to get an image of Becky at all, it would be in the second paragraph, just after the opening lines that we will later recognize as a kind of refrain or highly inadequate response to the call, "What happened to Becky?" However, it quickly becomes clear that whatever vague "sketch" of Becky that we get is itself a kind of flawed, limited response to a call to which the called-upon cannot or will not provide an answer. The unattributed call, a collective one emanating from the community as a whole: "Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her?" (5). The response of the "white folks' mouths": "Damn buck nigger." Her response: Silence ("She wouldn't tell"). The secondary response of the "white-folks' mouths": "God-forsaken, insane white shameless wench." Though mere words, these epithets have a transformative effect on Becky; we are told that her "eyes were sunken, her neck stringy, her breasts fallen, till then. Taking their words, they filled her, like a bubble rising--then she broke. Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring. . ." (5). Toomer's use of imagery here is deserves close attention, as Becky's appearance before "the white folks' mouths" started talking suggests barrenness, not fertility. The passage is phrased such that the life in Becky's womb seems to arise despite the inhospitable soil in which it was planted (hence providing a thematic connection with "November Cotton Flower"). Furthermore, the words directed toward her almost seem to impregnate her themselves, "fill[ing] her" in a defiled, profane parallel to Jesus of Nazareth's conception, via Mary's ear, by the Word of God.

After the ellipsis that follows this initial "description," the same call is taken up by "the black folks' mouths" (5). "Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks' mouths. She wouldn't tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths" (5). If anything unites the two social collectives, white and black, that make up this community, it's their mutual desire to exclude Becky from their ranks, to cast her out like so many witches, scapegoats or outlaw women before her. That, and their private, anonymous, individual attempts to help her.

The birth of her first child results in Becky's ejection by the white folks, who would "have no more to do with her," and subsequent rejection by the black folks, who "joined hands to cast her out" like some kind of contaminating demon (5). In a move characteristic of Toomer, though, these forceful actions are undercut by the ellipsis that follows that casting out, and inconclusive pause that dwindles into a sentence that we might recognize from the sketch's opening strains: "The pines whispered to Jesus" (5). These words, seemingly random and misplaced, effect a kind of reversal; whatever the pines whispered to Jesus, Jesus apparently intervenes on Becky's behalf, inspiring both black and white folks to secretly yet generously "do for" Becky and her son. The railroad boss gives her the little bit of land between the railroad and the road. The lumber and brick man anonymously donates the materials for a cabin, and Lonnie Deacon creeps out in the dead of night to build the cabin for her, the construction of which is communicated through a snatch of hymn or prayer: "A single room held down to earth. . . O fly away to Jesus. . . by a leaning chimney" (5).

"O fly away to Jesus" calls the reader's mind, if not her ear, back to Karintha and the song "someone" made up when she returned home from the forest and the smoke from the sawdust piles hung thick and heavy. Smoke, presumably suggested by the chimney from which it rises, cues this refrain or response, communicating an elusive, "fly-away" (or fugitive) message to the Lord just as the pine trees seem to in their whispers--messages whose content remains always just out of reach of the text's and, consequently, the reader's full apprehension.

The next paragraph destroys the seemingly timeless, almost mythic sense of location that Toomer has constructed in the sketch by dropping the reader into the constant noise and bustle that surround Becky's little cabin. While quite literally situated in society's margins, on "ground islandized between the road and railroad track" (5), Becky's home provides an ideal vantage point from which to register the seismic shifts modernity was bringing about in the agrarian South. Six trains a day shake the cabin to its foundations; cars and buggies pass constantly back and forth along the road (it is interesting to note that Toomer characterizes both track and road as kinds of "rivers" with flows and eddies comprised of people). Many of the passengers could well be leaving Georgia for good, or for a long, long time, chasing down a better life in the North, part of the Great Migration. Yet it seems that all who pass Becky's cabin perform private acts of secret kindness--scribbled prayers, food, "sometimes snuff. . . O thank y Jesus" (5). Yet "[n]o one ever saw her" (5). One could almost read these as furtive offerings to a ghost, results of a perverse kind of faith. But faith in what? The answer to that question, perhaps the key to figuring out the various mysteries of this sketch, is, like Karintha, both overdetermined and impossible to pin down.

Still, that faith--buried, unspoken, private--provides what we might call the sketch's countercurrent, an energy that resists the forward-moving propulsion of progress, a mute knowledge that underlies, contradicts and subverts what appears to be the town's dominant, public mode of being. Five years after Becky had her first child, another came along. The whole town knew this, but said nothing, "for the part of man that says things to the likes of that had told itself that if there was a Becky, that Becky now was dead" (6). Countering the "part of man that says things," however, is "the part that prayed," presumably the unconscious, collective, unracinated source of the unattributed snatches of hymn or prayer that punctuate the piece, beseeching the pines and the smoke to communicate some message to Jesus (6). Perhaps we have this praying part to thank for the town's apparent change of heart with regard to Becky's boys:

They'd beat and cut a man who meant nothing at all in mentioning that they lived along the road. White or colored? No one knew, and least of all themselves. They drifted around from job to job. We, who had cast their mother out because of them, could we take them in? They answered black and white folks by shooting up two men and leaving town. "Godam the white folks; godam the niggers," they shouted as they left town (6).

Once the boys departed, the only evidence of Becky's continued existence was the "thin wraith of smoke" from her leaning chimney. People begin to take her food again, but quit because they are afraid--too see her ghost if she is indeed dead, but even more so to see what she has become if still alive. We cannot know, thanks to the sketch's idiosyncratic "time signature,"  how much time is compressed in the jump between the fourth and final paragraph of this piece; what we do know is that eventually, finally, someone sees into "the Becky cabin" (6). This paragraph marks Cane's second transition into first person narration (the first would be the speaker in "Reapers"), where suddenly there is an "our" and an "I," neither of which are racially identified. The "we" is made up of at least two boys, Barlo and the speaker, members of a congregation of some church or other, headed home from visiting another ministry. The "I" gives us private insight into the effects of the "Fall of the House of Usher"-like scene that unfolds as the speaker and his companions pass Becky's home:

Goose-flesh came on my skin though there was neither chill nor wind. Eyes left their sockets for the cabin. Ears burned and throbbed. Uncanny eclipse! fear closed my mind. We were just about to pass. . . Pines shout to Jesus. . . the ground trembled as a ghost train rumbled by. The chimney fell into the cabin. Its thud was like a hollow report, ages having passed since it went off. Barlo and I were pulled out of our seats. Dragged to the door that had swung open. Through the dust we saw the bricks in a mound upon the floor. Becky, if she was there, lay under them. I thought I heard a groan. Barlo, mumbling something, threw his Bible on the pile. (No one has ever touched it.) Somehow we got away. My buggy was still on the road. The last thing that I remember was whipping Dan like fury; I remember nothing after that--that is, until I reached town and folks crowded round to get the true word of it (6-7).

"Uncanny eclipse" indeed! This passage appears out of nowhere, to eclipse Becky's stories and all its complexities with "the true word of it," which is presumably the inscrutable four-sentence refrain that both opens and closes that sketch, providing artificial closure at best. What Barlo and the speaker experience generates no answers, only questions: Who are these two  boys? When are these two boys? Why choose these two boys? Are they connected at all to Becky's two vanished sons? What are we to make of force that deprives these boys of agency, pulling them from their seats? How are we to read the crumbling of Becky's house--as a sign that whatever it and she represented has been destroyed by progress? As a further retreat of her legibility as a sign? Or simply as an indictment of the ignorance and casual cruelty of those who banished and pretended to forget her? Why didn't they help her?"

Ultimately, none of these questions can be answered conclusively. Perhaps these boys, heirs of Becky's lost sons, are called to bear witness to an event or a presence beyond their ken. Perhaps Becky herself represents no more than a missed opportunity--a message badly misread, a possibility tragically foreclosed upon. For Becky, after all, erodes the divisions between "white folks" and "black folks," both on a public level (both groups denounce her in similar terms and cast her from their ranks) and on a private one (the races of those who help her are never disclosed; no one race sends forth the prayers)--despite the fact that her banishment results from a determination to keep those boundaries in place. Given Toomer's interest in the "New American" subject, one who represents a mixture of races, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that Becky's boys were an example of what can happen when rejection and ostracization twists and embitters the soul. Perhaps the two boys (or two men?) called to witness the fall of Becky's cabin were candidates for bringing back another kind of message, the one that lay beneath the surface details of Becky's life. Yet they can tell us nothing. The "true word of it," the last words of the sketch, epitaph-like, simply repeat the first, with no variation. We get the barest of facts followed by depictions of failed communicative acts--pines that whisper, a Bible flapping its leaves "with an aimless rustle"--letting us know that something is being said, but that we are not in a position to receive or interpret the message.

On Toomer's Cane: "Reapers" and "November Cotton Flower"

Despite the cheerful Van Gogh I've chosen to illustrate this post with, I find Toomer's "Reapers," the poem that directly follows "Karintha" in Cane, to be a very foreboding, frightening poem. While I will be the first to admit that I am no genius when it comes to analyzing poetry,  I'll go out on a limb here an say that what connects "Reapers" to "Karintha," aside from its thematic foregrounding of the "fall" (be it a fall from grace or simply the season) and the sense they both create of something drawing to a close, is the concept of containment. Though the strategies may be different, Toomer formally enacts the futile energy that must be expended to restrain energies that will not be subdued.

At first gloss, "Reapers" comes across as a fairly innocuous, picturesque poem; this quality goes far toward explaining why it is so often anthologized, and so often poorly taught (as it was to me, both in grade school and in high school). This is all the more surprising when one considers the number of startling and/or densely allusive images simmering in the lines. The title of the poem itself is a noun with a commonly recognized double meaning--"reaper" can mean a person (or a machine, as in line 5) who harvests crops or, in the proper sense, can be short for the Grim Reaper. Those who harvest the fruits from the seeds of injustice, or revolutionaries, can be said to unite these two meanings in one image. Read under this impression, the poem's content reads as relentless and threatening. The repetition of the sibilant "s" recreates an aural sense of the scythes' blades cutting down stalks of wheat as the "black reapers" sharpen their tools and "start their silent swinging," like an army mowing down its opposition. The "black horses" that drive the mower do not stop when the blades slice through a "startled, squealing" rat. The speaker, sounding prophetic, describes how the "blade,/ Blood-stained, continue[s] cutting weeds and shade" (3). The overall feeling that the poem evokes is one of upcoming, inevitable, unstoppable revolution at the hands of black workers who wish to wipe out current power structures in order to usher in a more socially just world.

Close attention to the words, images and sounds of the poem makes it hard to miss its aura of looming threat, so why do people so often miss it? My guess is that the poem's strategies of containment--meant, as I understand them, to formally enact that energy required to restrain the energies that fuel the content--work too well. The poem could not be more conventionally composed: 8 lines arranged in heroic couplets arranged AABBCCDD. All lines, save one, strictly follow iambic pentameter and all couplets, save one, are end-stopped. The second line--the one in which the sharpening of scythes is completed and the hones are about to be placed in pockets--is the only second line of a couplet in which the content spills over, enjambs, into the next line; it is also the only one that, depending on how you pronounce the word "sharpening," expands to eleven syllables instead of confining itself to the pentameter. After that line, however, all couplets end-stop, and no lines are enjambed. It's almost as though the form let the content get out of hand and then had to restrain it; a brief examination of the rhyme scheme reinforces this impression. As noted above, the rhyme scheme appears to follow the most traditional of heroic couplet progressions, AABBCCDD. Yet the A rhymes, "stones" and "hones," could easily be considered slant rhymed with the B rhymes, "done" and "one"--especially given the inflections given to these words by certain regional accents (a rural Georgian accent comes to mind). The same goes for the C rhymes, "weeds" and "bleeds," with the D rhymes, "blade" and "shade." Such dense rhymes at the end of the lines, like corks in so many stoppers, conveys an intense repression, one that, while it is successful in keeping the revolutionary energy in the poem conveyed for now, seems destined to fail.

It's worth considering, as we continue with this analysis of Cane, whether more could be made of the regional accents on the slant rhymes discussed above. I'd also like to look into how "Reapers," as a joint with "Karintha," moves the text along--what does the joint articulate?

Transitioning into "November Cotton Flower," then, we might extend this consideration of joints and articulation to this poem, its connection and decalage with "Reapers" and "Karintha," as well as the haunting "Becky," which immediately follows it.

I wish I had more to say about "November Cotton Flower," whose title both recalls the preacher's description of Karintha's presumed innocence (thereby inviting us to abstract the titular image and not take it too literally) and suggests an image from a much later novel, the iconic geranium that Ruthie finds during the flood that closes Grapes of Wrath (1939). Like "Reapers," "November Cotton Flower" is composed of heroic couplets, with a mostly regular rhyme scheme of AABBCCDD EEFFGG (FF displays some variation, which I will expand on below). In all but its rhyme scheme, however, the poem reads like a Shakespearian sonnet--three quatrains developing a certain tone and theme, followed by a couplet that undercuts or reverses them.  As in the pieces that precede it, the tone of this poem is initially autumnal, with the first eight lines describing a late fall/early winter scene of intense barrenness and drought. No warmth can find its way into the strange desert of this scene, which is described in such terms as "cold," "rusty," "old," "vanishing," "pinched," "slow," and "dead." Even the area's birds, those erstwhile symbols of hope, cannot survive; seeking water, they perish "[i]n wells a hundred feet below the ground" (line 8). If "Karintha" and "Reapers" gestured toward a way of life that, disappearing, slips through the narrator's/speaker's fingers even as he struggles to capture it, this poem appears to indicate that life itself, as opposed to a way of living it, is being sucked away by the greedy, thirsty soil.

Then, suddenly, in the ninth line of the poem, that old greedy soil (which, in later pieces, will be used almost as a homonym for "soul") yields its bounty: a "flower" with the power to startle, new life that promptly "assumed/ Significance" in the eyes of the "Old folks." The folk wisdom that often goes under the heading of "Superstition" reads the flower as "Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear/ Beauty so sudden for that time of year" (lines 13-14). Flowers have long served as symbols of hope, particularly those that spring out of the desert or out of lifelessness; superstition, holding its breath, would not be remiss in personifying it (lines 11 and 12 are the only lines not written in perfect pentameter, coming in at nine-bated-breath-syllables apiece; they are also the only lines in which the rhyme [saw/before] appears to be slant, unless [as in "Reapers"] read aloud with a regional accent). In the case of this flower, the reader, too, has, via the whiff of Karintha carried over via the poem's title, been invited to participate in the purported superstition and "read" the flower in this way, too. However, as "Karintha, carrying beauty" taught us in the sketch devoted to her, that which we take to signify "beauty" usually fails, when examined directly and frankly, to live up to the task. The cotton flower, the fruit of so much lost life and struggle, is at the very best an ambiguous symbol. As is Georgia cotton itself, steeped in so much hate-fueled blood.

Working with Jean Toomer's Cane: "Karintha"

"Karintha"

Given the complex stylistic arrangement of the pieces--one might even call them movements--in Toomer's Cane, perhaps it's only natural that the first question provoked by the opening sketch, “Karintha,” should be, "Why does Toomer choose to begin his book with this particular piece, describing this particular woman and this particular set of actions in this particular way?" Of course, the first question, like so many other first questions that have come before, can only be answered after many others, usually generated by the first, have been addressed. And for me, the ideas sparked by one follow-up question in particular are critical to solving the problem posed by the first: "Does Toomer mean the name 'Karintha' to be a deliberate homophonic echo of 'Corinthians'?” In other words, does Toomer wish to evoke, by aural association, a thematic connection with the most famous reading in that book of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13? If so, what might we bring into 'Karintha' by way of 1 Corinthians 13 that enhances or expands our understanding of the former?
It is my hunch that Toomer took for granted that his audience would be exceedingly biblically literate, and, by way of this kind of slant homophone, meant to trigger this other text as a kind of ghostly twin to the text at hand that gestures beyond it, both informing and expanding--even, perhaps, misleading us as to--its significance (could we argue this is some form of prosopoeia?). To that end, and at the risk of being both trite and excessive, I'd like to reproduce the entirety of this famous passage with my "Karintha"- and Cane-related commentary below:

1 Corinthians 13:1-13
 
13:1: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It is not difficult to see how this opening line ties into Toomer's project in Cane as a whole. The novel's "plot"--if it can indeed be called a novel and if it indeed could be said to have a plot (these are admittedly big "if's")--falls into the "quest" category. The dominant, or at the very least overarching, "quest" in the text is the artistic one--that is, one of Cane's chief driving forces is the desire to speak in the tongues of men and of angels--a desire that is too often thwarted by inarticulacy. That being said, when articulacy fails in Cane, the resultant noises, be they gongs or clanging cymbals, often have the power both to communicate that which is beyond articulation and to gesture toward a system of articulation running counter to, outside of or beyond the confines of our grammatical constructs.On one level, the text seems to be simultaneously trying to tap into the communicative power of music--to claim it for the word--and trying to structure itself along the lines of a symphony, to imitate musical composition in words.  

13:2: And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If the quest to speak in the tongues of angels propels this novel, so, too, does the quest for a kind of healing and redemptive knowledge. The text is full of mysteries all insoluble (often symbolized by women such as Karintha, as is the South itself), degraded prophets whose messages are either indecipherable or so seemingly simple as to be overlooked, and young men brimming with faith that they can conquer all, know all, obtain the object of their collective desire. The unglossed lines below could be said to offer a veritable compendium of the qualities of such young men, especially Ralph Kabnis, defined in opposition to those attributed to love.

13:3: If I give away everything I own, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I receive no benefit.
13:4: Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not puffed up.  
13:5: It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful.  
13:6: It is not glad about injustice, but rejoices in the truth. 

13:7: It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Such a presence, such an entity, or such an ideal is what is sought in Cane, something beyond fragmentation, brokenness, impermanence and contingency that can endure and bear up under all conditions. The underlying hope in Cane is that Art can be this presence, ideal, entity--that the appropriate intercourse between soul and mind might yield such an Art (or such an artist? or such a man?) and bring it forth into the world to heal it. This Messianic theme saturates Cane, but in an oddly elegiac, foreclosed way.  Things sought are not found in the world that Toomer creates; as in the myth of Orpheus, lost objects are not retrieved, and longed-for unions (or re-uniuons) do not take place. Pregnancies are not fruitful and hoped-for acts of consummation are usually thwarted or abortive. Some kind of life waits to be born, but the overall impression is that of stillbirth.

13:8: Love never ends. But if there are prophecies, they will be set aside; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be set aside. 
13:9: For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, 
13:10: but when what is perfect comes, the partial will be set aside. 

13:11: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways.  The "will's" in the lines above do not come to pass in Cane, nor does "adulthood" arrive for those who could be considered protagonists of short stories (vs. the subjects of sketches--the subjects of sketches, as subjects, by nature of their treatment should be beyond change, as a "sketch" is meant to picture someone as s/he is in that moment, holding them there... but the subjects of Toomer's sketches often refuse to stand still... They demonstrate a kind of restlessness, a certain intractability. As for his short stories' protagonists, they, too, are recalcitrant, refusing to change or grow as protagonists are expected to do. Plots lack expected resolution. The resultant stories often feel inconclusive, partial, reliant on the other parts of the text to produce meaning even as the text as a whole resists coherence and totalization.

13:12: For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. One of the tragedies that plague both the protagonists of the short stories and the narrator who struggles with the sketches is summed up here, in this partial ability to see, know, understand and portray. Toomer’s strategy to overcome this partiality is that of evocation, supplement.

13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. One question that can be asked of almost every piece in Cane is, "Is there evidence of faith in this? Is there evidence of hope? Is there evidence of love?" However, the trouble with this line of questioning is that love is such a troublesome term. You have faith and hope in abstractions, but love requires (or seems to require) an "of"; love appears to demand an object that one can possess and know. Perhaps the entire point of this much-beloved Corinthians passage is that love is like faith and hope in being something we place in something else, as opposed to something that requires an object--that it, unlike desire, is object-less. Could we call Cane a novel without an object, just as we call Banjo a novel without a plot? I think an argument could be made, in that it is a novel of anticipation of what never comes to pass... not just a novel of thwarted expectation, where what is expected simply never happens, but one that foregrounds the process of trying to bring forth that which is just beyond articulation, and somehow succeeding without ever articulating or making that "something" concrete--without, that is, actually succeeding. This novel succeeds in producing absence. It delivers absence; it could even be said to serve as a midwife to absence, aporia.
  
Now that we’ve put spent some time exploring the absent text (and, I think it’s safe to say, have seen the extent to which Corinthians does indeed hover over, as evocation and absence, both the opening sketch and the fiction as a whole), we can take a closer look at the text that is present. "Karintha" is a compelling example of a sketch in which the subject refuses to sit still, to be pinned down or made to signify in any one way. And that is tough to do, given all the energies that are channeled into obtaining and defining her. Even as a child, "men had always wanted her," and the distant narrator, somehow omniscient and terribly limited, informs us that "[t]his interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her" (1).  As a woman, Karintha, though "married many times," still carries "beauty," and an aura of an innocence that she never actually possessed, even as a child. She inspires men to "do":

Young men run stills to make her money. Young men go to big cities and run on the road. Young men go away to college. They all want to bring her money. These are the same young men who thought that all they had to do was to count time (2, italics mine).

Like any ideal that inspires men to "do" so that they might possess the embodiment of that ideal for themselves, Karintha is made to function as a symbol both overdetermined and completely undefinable. The stanza of song that introduces the sketch--a blues stanza that is repeated three times in the piece--describes her as having skin "like dusk on the eastern horizon/ ...When the sun goes down." From the outset, then, we are clued into the fact that whatever Karintha is meant to signify is elusive, fugitive. Perpetually appearing to reflect the light of something that has just disappeared, something that, like the sun slipping down beyond the Western horizon, is always only slightly beyond our reach, she generates a feeling of almost-ness, a sense of very slight belatedness that is not without a tinge of hopefulness (and it is this tinge that keeps us chasing, after all, not realizing we are pursuing a mere reflection). The ellipsis that begins the fourth line of the stanza simply emphasizes her slipperiness, her not-thereness. (It is worth noting that it is only in the second repetition of what we might call this blues refrain, used to mark Karintha's transition from a little girl who had played "'home' with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding" (1) to a woman who had been “married many times” and presumably “known” sexually by many different men, that the ellipsis is eliminated, and the lines themselves are abbreviated, clipped, more confident, and lacking in the oddly wistful enjambment in the final two lines: “Her skin is like dusk,/ O cant you see it,/ Her skin is like dusk,/ When the sun goes down.” I see these alterations as reflecting the illusions of possession, containment and knowledge--the fundamental misapprehensions--that accompany any liaison with Karintha.)

The men who populate the sketch insist on projecting onto Karintha ideals of beauty and innocence (“Even the preacher, who caught her at mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower” [1]), persistently trying, and perpetually failing, to contain her. Oddly enough, however, Karintha’s fugitive, unruly qualities actually seem to be what make her so attractive in the first place. We are told that

Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn't see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in the light... Karina's running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road. At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one's ears to itching (1).

Again, Karintha is described in terms of just-missedness and incomprehension, like what one might see out of the corner of the eye as a bird takes off, or what one can hear in bird-song (as opposed to in the lyrics of a supper-getting-ready song). The overall impression she leaves in her wake is one of flight and wingedness, of being just beyond apprehension in all senses of the word, but in a sense that is somehow inspiring, even vitalizing. In the sensibility that informs black life in the depressed agrarian South at the time Toomer was writing Cane, any entity that could not be apprehended, trapped, snared or pinned down would likely have been an inherently hopeful, attractive figure.

The text of the sketch itself engages in the drive to capture, contain and define Karintha, utilizing multiple formal strategies in its attempt to do so. The first of these is the use of epithet: throughout the scant, two-page sketch, Karintha is thrice referred to, with slight variation, as she "who carries" or is "carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down" (2). Like Homeric epithets, these phrases seem designed to summon her presence but can only serve to mark it metaphorically, ornamenting the name without substantively evoking the presence, shedding (reflected) light on the deified, abstract qualities that characterize her role in this community. Similarly, the narrator tries to place her by repeating the simple, declarative sentence, "Karintha is a woman." The basic structure of this sentence appears to set up an easy equation, but, constructed with two variations on a subject positioned on either side of an "is," it can't help but draw attention to its latent metaphorical properties; the equation is overloaded and cannot do the work of containment it's meant to. The line's repetition also attests to the strain; it appears four times on the second page of the sketch. Strung back to back, the lines could be said to resemble a blues stanza: "Karintha is a woman./ Karintha is a woman./ But Karintha is a woman, and she has a had a child./ Karintha is a woman" (2).  

Due to its marked difference from the other three repetitions, the third one, of course, draws the reader's attention. The presence of the conjunction "but" introduces the condition of impossibility: the young men thought all they had to do to catch her was to "count time," BUT "she is a woman, and she has had a child" (2).  This child, mentioned so matter-of-factly, almost casually, nevertheless functions obscurely, brought into view in order to all but disappear into the text:

 A child fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest. Pine-needles are smooth and sweet. They are elastic to the feet of rabbits. . . A sawmill was nearby. Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered. It is a year before one completely burns. It is a year before one completely burns. Meanwhile, the smoke curls up and hangs in odd wraiths about the trees, curls up, and spreads itself over the valleys. . . Weeks after Karintha returned home the smoke was so heavy you tasted it in water. Some one made a song:

Smoke is on the hills. Rise up.

Smoke is on the hills, O rise

And take my soul to Jesus (2).

The mention of the "child" falling out of her womb onto the forest floor marks Karintha's brief disappearance "behind the veil" of the text; she slips out of the reach of the words on the page, and these in turn can, for the span of a few sentences, neither proceed according to narrative logic nor cohere around subject matter, no matter how vague that matter might have been. The narrative voice seems to be at a loss for awhile--not for words, but for how to organize them. First the logic appears to be associative, as we are led (or distracted?) from the child's bed of pine-needles to some facts about pine-needles. Then we are moved, via ellipsis, into a subject that has no visible connection to the child and only a weakly associative connection to pine-needles, a sawmill and its sawdust pile that burns slowly, populating the forest with ghostly presences ("wraiths") before spreading across the Georgian landscape. Ellipsis then carries us to Karintha's return, where we are again presented with details that have no immediately discernible causal connection to the child's birth--the heaviness of the smoke, the anonymously composed song-response to the smoke-call.

Presumably, the perceptive reader can put two and two together, and supply for herself the material that the text itself refuses to yield. We can infer, for example, that Karintha has had her child (phrasing the birth so that the child, as the subject "fall[s] out of her womb," strips Karintha of any agency or complicity suggested by expressions such as, "the mother gave birth," or "delivered the child," or "brought the child into the world) and gotten rid of it, presumably by burning it on the sawdust pile (the adjective "pyramidal" gives the pile an archetypal, bier-like quality). Still, our best guess here remains, at the end of the day, a guess; Karintha, her motives and her actions remain inscrutable, illegible. All we know for certain is that upon her return, the child is never mentioned again. Textually, it is reproduced for us only as absence--as wraithlike smoke and the song that asks the smoke to deliver a soul to Jesus.  

"Karintha" inaugurates Cane's preoccupation with failed unions and immersion. By foregrounding the inability to see and know everything, the narrator exposes the limits of his view; as detached observer, he cannot fully merge with his subject matter. This incapacity is intricately, though obscurely, bound up in Karintha's seeming lack of interest in bringing forth the life within her womb, as well as her refusal to bring the child out of the forest. Of his time in Sparta, Georgia, the site that would become the setting for Cane, Toomer said:

[This] was the first time I'd ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals. They were very rich and sad and joyous and beautiful. But I learned that the Negroes of the town objected to them. They called them "shouting." They had victrolas and player-pianos. So, I realized with deep regret that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes the trend also was towards the small town and then towards the city--and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end (xxii).

In light of this comment, one cannot help read Karintha's child as embodying that endangered folk-spirit, but the narrator's making visible of his crisis of representation point to another, related anxiety--that of the artist who fears that his connection to that spirit is too tenuous to allow for a resuscitation, preservation or evocation of that spirit. I think that it is on account of this anxiety that Toomer composes Cane in the way he does, and I think it would be enormously fruitful to compare the way he formally presents these materials from what he perceived to be a dying way of life with Hurston's presentation of the same in Mules and Men.