Born in Washington, D.C., Jean Toomer lived in Harlem and also worked as a teacher in Spartanburg, Georgia, during the early 1920s. His experience in the urban North of Washington and Harlem and the rural South of Georgia inspired his landmark 1923 novel, Cane, which he wrote in the form of sketches, poems, and stories. The following excerpts, “Reapers” and “November Cotton Flower,” reveal how his time in the South shaped his work. More significantly, they testify to the centrality of slavery and the South in any narrative of African American history and culture.
Reapers
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hone
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
November Cotton Flower
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.
Source: Jean Toomer, Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923), 6–7.