The Scent of Boiling Cane

...Jean Toomer was a fine, many-shaded writer and a man of sensibility, but he was somber...

...Toomer's book shook up the method, refined the mood and, what was most important, complicated the psychology of most Negro fiction that followed it...

...In the imaginary world he made, wordy guys always finish last and direct, simple people always treat them with condescension...

...It may have been in Jean Toomer's disposition to see opposite sides of reality at the same time—or perhaps his peculiar situation drove him to it...

...In the '60s, no matter how intense our political and economic interracial conflicts may be, a lot of such silliness about personal relations is leaving us...

...The ordinary strangeness of being a Negro was compounded by his being nearly white, possibly "lemon-colored," as he called one of his characters...

...It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road...

...The Negro Digest has currently raised a discussion as to whether there is or ought to be such a thing as a "black esthetic," but we are sure, when we read Toomer, that it is the period esthetic that will hold artists in the more tenacious clasp...

...But Toomer was not so much interested in city life as in the attraction of the urban intellectual to the countryside, the desire to be a worker in the cane-drenched fields of the South instead of a man of words in a "whitewashed" Northern metropolis...

...Du Bois included in his "Talented Tenth" were abolition, the constrictions imposed by caste, some form of protest against the condition of Negro Man, and somewhat more enterprisingly, the pernicious effects of Northern cities on untrained rural Negroes...

...He is Paul in "Bona and Paul," who needs to know a girl before he can love her...

...Before the '20s, the great part of Negro writing addressed itself to a white audience, and indeed as recently as the scorching admonitions of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, it was white men who were being asked to listen...

...In a film like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, we have sufficiently relaxed to let the frivolous and universal pleasure principle enter into the prospect of intermarriage: The Problem, though still looming, is relegated to the mentalities of the adjusting older generation, and the young couple, at least, are visibly enjoying one another...

...He wants in each case to convey the many-layered quality of Negro life, and to insist (as if he were answering the demands Ralph Ellison has made for Negro writers so many years later) on the physical pleasure and beauty, even in discomfort, of the Negro's world...

...Several of the stories in Cane are about sex between blacks and whites, and the atmosphere of terror and fascination that hangs over this occurrence...

...All over the world, postwar writers were expressing their dislike for the culture of cities, their admiration for natural man, and we can recognize Toomer's affinity to Eugene O'Neill in The Emperor Jones or to John Dos Passos' poems about bucolic Spain in Rosinante to the Road Again...

...So it is all the more remarkable that as far back as 1923, Jean Toomer wrote, not even to a definably Negro audience, but simply to suit himself...

...On Washington's Seventh Street, where money burns the pockets and men sink under a river of property, Toomer's pitch is very high: "Mr...

...Even the poultry is hostile...

...That is to say, they dealt almost entirely with group complaints...

...This passage is from one of his best stories, "Box Seat," which describes a prudish, other-directed urban woman, always perched in the view of the audience and more nervous about her landlady's opinions than her lover's needs...

...The key to Toomer is his uneasy position between two worlds (more of temperament than of color...

...The dwarf steps forward, diffident...

...It is uncommon, against the notion of the Negro in that day and even in ours, to come across the figure of Esther, a repressed Negro woman who has no sex life except her fantasy of loving a magnificent black itinerant preacher she admired as a child...

...So in a sense Toomer continues and simultaneously denies the stereotype of the instinctual Negro...

...Karintha's running was a whir...

...The '20s was a period of mass migration of Negroes to the cities and the new writers like Langston Hughes, Countec Cullen and Claude McKay were themselves turning New York's Harlem into their cultural center...

...Hate pops from his eyes and crackles like a brittle heat about the box...

...WRITERS&WRITING The Scent of Boiling Cane By Isa Kapp In one of the stories in Cane (University Place Press, 239 pp., $6.00), the partly autobiographical narrator sits on a high hill overlooking Washington, D.C., and remembers a conversation with an indolent old girlfriend he has not seen in a long time: "I traced my development from the early days up to the present time, the phase in which I could understand her...

...Toomer's story, "Bona and Paul," is also strikingly reminiscent in style and tone of Dos Passos' early novel, Streets of Night, and both are about the inchoate, nearly mystical quality of personal contact for young people...

...Raised by middle-class parents in Washington, he is a city boy with Georgia forever on his mind...

...Suddenly he longs for the peaceful streets of Washington and its people whom he had always half despised...

...In the '40s, the social outlook was already moving in the direction of worried acceptance of physical integration, and the rather gratuitous, pseudo-liberal insistence on the Problems the intermarrying couples would let themselves in for...

...threatening...

...And oddity, singularity of emotion, was a new concept in Negro fiction...

...Told her how they needed a larger life for their expression...

...A good deal of his adult life was spent among whites, and he was in fact himself introverted, testy and articulate—the very opposite of the instinctual black females he is so nostalgic for...

...Jean Toomer, though constantly aware of group and racial atmosphere—all of his stories take place against the background of these tensions—nevertheless wrote about the odd man out of this group, himself...

...Claps are steel fingers that manacle her wrists and move them forward to acceptance...

...Even as we can no longer abide by the esthetic principles of the '20s, we have, with all our inertia about improving Negro-white relations, come an enormous emotional distance in what we are able to take for granted now...

...Kabnis is again the alienated Toomer hero who longs to be where he is not, immobile, resenting the younger man, Lewis, who is the curious and irreverent visitor that Kabnis ought to have been...

...The house applauds...

...Kabnis," the longest and best story in Cane, loops together all of Toomer's opposing selves...

...I described her own nature and temperament...

...I talked, beautifully I thought, about an art that would be born, an art that would open the way for women the likes of her...

...Cane was published in 1923 and only reached 500 readers, but the novelist, Arna Bontemps, has said that a handful of people quietly went mad about it, among them practically the whole generation of young Negro writers just beginning to appear, and that their response to it ushered in what was later called the Negro Renaissance...

...It is true that in the first Georgia section, apparently in a state of vertigo from the scent of boiling cane that suffuses all these memories, Toomer did allow himself a rather rich stew of images, but no sooner does he get to the Washington stories that make up a third of Cane, than the style gets jagged, impertinent, speedy and very modern...

...Before the '20s, the usual subjects for the writers W.E.B...

...The hero is a Washingtonian who comes to teach in a small Georgia school, but on this side of the coin of his ambivalence, the South is no longer a feast of moons and soft resinous songs, it is chill and ashen, the stage for white violence...

...Yet Toomer is not really harping on the conventionality of the city here any more than he is harping on the violence of oppressiveness of the South in the Georgia stories...

...Barry offers Muriel the rose...

...I recited some of my own things to her...

...Arms of the audience reach out, grab Muriel, and hold her there...

...Even his haunting Georgian women, though natural, are not really happy, and while they do not reject men, they often reject themselves...

...He is Dan Moore in "Box Seat," with all the right instincts, the right feelings, even the right vocabulary, but no audience—a Christ-like figure without the power to convert...

...Its study in Southern Negro discipline, its gallows humor, its realistic portraits (Halsey the wheelwright, whose Sunday clothes smell of wood and glue...

...We can still ask for one more shade of outlook, humor, perhaps the eighth and rarest type of ambiguity, in our expectations for greatness in Negro fiction...

...Although the story is about Kabnis' intimidation by the South, and by the very strength of those folk roots Toomer is seeking, its language is so intricate a counterpoint of obliqueness and virility, its progression from private to social vision so logical that we read it with more awe than pity...

...Except for superficial limitations, however, Toomer was not very much like any of his contemporaries, and he was able to squirm out of any confining esthetic, whether of race or era...

...And then I began to wonder why her hand had not once returned a single pressure...

...Muriel flinches back...

...The images here are like comely trinkets out of Amy Lowell and Hilda Doo-little, and in this evocative writing as well as in his nostalgia for simple culture, Toomer was very much a writer of his own period...

...the sanctimonious school principal, a figure to be embellished in Ellison's Invisible Man) announce the beginning of black power in American art...

...This imaginative, psychologizing, verbal hero, usually ineffectual in the presence of a sensual woman, often reappears throughout an extraordinary book of sketches, poems, and stories by the Negro writer Jean Toomer...

...While he is explaining this complex imperative to the leering Negro doorman, the girl vanishes...

...I sang, with a strange quiver in my voice, a promise-song...

...Raised among college-educated Negroes, he went to the University of Wisconsin and spent his college years as a stranger in a Midwestern white society...

...never have sweet-gum trees, pine-needles or November cotton-flowers been so extravagantly celebrated...

...The book's first six sketches are impressionist portraits of Georgian women, soft as Monet gardens ("the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes"), acquiescent, denying men nothing...