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"?