Cane. Jean Toomer

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СКАЧАТЬ the nigger. “Gedap.” Using reins to slap the mule, she disappears in a cloudy rumble at some indefinite point along the road.

      (The sun is hammered to a band of gold. Pine-needles, like mazda, are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up. Marvelous web spun by the spider sawdust pile. Curls up and spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along the eastern valley. A black boy . . . you are the most sleepiest man I ever seed, Sleeping Beauty . . . cradled on a gray mule, guided by the hollow sound of cowbells, heads for them through a rusty cotton field. From down the railroad track, the chug-chug of a gas engine announces that the repair gang is coming home. A girl in the yard of a whitewashed shack not much larger than the stack of worn ties piled before it, sings. Her voice is loud. Echoes, like rain, sweep the valley. Dusk takes the polish from the rails. Lights twinkle in scattered houses. From far away, a sad strong song. Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman. She does not sing; her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare . . . juju men, greegree, witchdoctors . . . torches go out . . . The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa.

      Night.

      Foxie, the bitch, slicks back her ears and barks at the rising moon.)

       Wind is in the cane. Come along.

      Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,

      Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,

       Wind is in the cane. Come along.

      Carma’s tale is the crudest melodrama. Her husband’s in the gang. And its her fault he got there. Working with a contractor, he was away most of the time. She had others. No one blames her for that. He returned one day and hung around the town where he picked up week-old boasts and rumors . . . Bane accused her. She denied. He couldnt see that she was becoming hysterical. He would have liked to take his fists and beat her. Who was strong as a man. Stronger. Words, like corkscrews, wormed to her strength. It fizzled out. Grabbing a gun, she rushed from the house and plunged across the road into a canebrake . . . There, in quarter heaven shone the crescent moon . . . Bane was afraid to follow till he heard the gun go off. Then he wasted half an hour gathering the neighbor men. They met in the road where lamp-light showed tracks dissolving in the loose earth about the cane. The search began. Moths flickered the lamps. They put them out. Really, because she still might be live enough to shoot. Time and space have no meaning in a canefield. No more than the interminable stalks . . . Some one stumbled over her. A cry went up. From the road, one would have thought that they were cornering a rabbit or a skunk . . . It is difficult carrying dead weight through cane. They placed her on the sofa. A curious, nosey somebody looked for the wound. This fussing with her clothes aroused her. Her eyes were weak and pitiable for so strong a woman. Slowly, then like a flash, Bane came to know that the shot she fired, with averted head, was aimed to whistle like a dying hornet through the cane. Twice deceived, and one deception proved the other. His head went off. Slashed one of the men who’d helped, the man who’d stumbled over her. Now he’s in the gang. Who was her husband. Should she not take others, this Carma, strong as a man, whose tale as I have told it is the crudest melodrama?

       Wind is in the cane. Come along.

      Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,

      Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,

       Wind is in the cane. Come along.

SONG OF THE SON

      Pour O pour that parting soul in song,

      O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,

      Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night,

      And let the valley carry it along.

      And let the valley carry it along.

      O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,

      So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,

      Now just before an epoch’s sun declines

      Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee,

      Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.

      In time, for though the sun is setting on

      A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;

      Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet

      To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,

      Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

      O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,

      Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,

      Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare

      One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes

      An everlasting song, a singing tree,

      Caroling softly souls of slavery,

      What they were, and what they are to me,

      Caroling softly souls of slavery.

GEORGIA DUSK

      The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue

      The setting sun, too indolent to hold

      A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,

      Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

      A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,

      An orgy for some genius of the South

      With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,

      Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

      The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,

      And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,

      Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill

      Their early promise of a bumper crop.

      Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile

      Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low

      Where only chips and stumps are left to show

      The solid proof of former domicile.

      Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,

      Race memories of king and caravan,

      High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,

      Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

       Their voices rise . . . the pine trees are guitars,

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