Criterios de clasificación para las sustancias 1 Sensibilizantes respiratorios

One of the ways in which Cane stands out from Tropic Death is in Toomer’s nuanced portrayal of women. Most of the stories in the first section, set exclusively in the South, focus on women’s experiences. The opening story, “Karíntha,” compares the adolescence of a young woman to the ripening of the world around her. As a girl, men “counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them [...] This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her” (Toomer 3). Indeed, it does not. As a teenager, older men pursue her as a

“November cotton flower,” and she grows into a woman “perfect as dusk when the sun goes down” (4). By twenty, she is a mother, with a child which “fell out of her womb onto a bed of pine-needles in the forest [...] A sawmill was nearby. Its pyramidal sawdust pile smouldered” (5). The vivid image of Karíntha as a young budding flower, evading the clawing grasp of men who want to harvest and devour her as a child, before being forced to squat in the forest to bear child like an animal, sharply contrasts with the industrial stink of the burning sawmill which spreads out over the valley with “smoke so heavy you tasted it in the water” (5). Toomer draws a parallel between the exploitation of Karíntha and the environment and the men who threaten her and work in the sawmill which poisons the land around them. Karíntha keeps the men at arm’s length and loathes them for ripening her too soon even as she takes their money to survive, just as the men work at the sawmill which is slowly poisoning them. The process of exploiting the land

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to the community’s detriment, while having no other option to survive, is a system of life established under the plantation system.

In the North, women fare no better. In the next section of Cane, in “Avey,” the nameless male narrator chases his crush, Avey, from their small hometown to New York. As teenagers, Avey is as silent as “a great tree” as the narrator fantasizes about taking her like “one can strip a tree” (60). Similar to Karíntha, Avey is compared to ripening flora, but she is rootless. The narrator finds her five years later working as a prostitute in New York. When she falls asleep on the narrator in a park, he reflects that she no longer has “the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn” (64). Immediately after “Avey” comes “Beehive,” in which the speaker compares himself to “a drone” in the “waxen cell of the world comb” (65). Watching the bees buzz and work becomes a metaphor for the buzz of working in the modern city, and the speaker ends the poem longing to “curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower” (65). Despite being far away from the South, the women are still ripened and wounded by modern industry. Later in the section, the poem “Harvest Song” is sandwiched between two stories of city life. “I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown” says the speaker, “I am too chilled, and too fatigued [...] And I hunger” (93). The speaker longs to see the other harvesters, he starves, he longs to hear his brothers but knows he cannot reach them (94). This poem, mournful and rural, sticks out in a section of bustling streets and young love in the city. In the context of the rest of the section, it tells a story of workers lost in the face of industry. By portraying this modern isolation through the figure of a field worker, Toomer paints a picture of Northern work which is no different than Southern work, of women who are still suffering from the effects of the Southern system.

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In Toomer’s work, the South is more than just a place. It is an inescapable legacy. In the final story of the first section, “Blood Burning Moon,” beautiful Louisa is torn between the rich son of the white family for whom she works, Bob Stone, or the strong black fieldworker, Tom Burwell, who loves her fiercely and possessively. When they both come for her on the same night, Tom kills Bob and the white townspeople lynch him in a rage. The story is eerie from its first lines: “Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards [...] of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. [...] The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro

women improvised songs against its spell” (39). The women in the story ward themselves against the red moon and sing songs that warn of lynching. Louisa is “the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees” (39). Like Cane’s other women, Louisa appears so in tune with nature that she is nearly a part of the description of the landscape setting. Her characterization as part of the landscape, heightened by Toomer’s descriptions of her body nestled among descriptions of the Georgia countryside, avow her to the folk wisdom of the women and she recognizes the danger of the night. Like Bellon Prout in the “The Vampire Bat,” the men of the town, and her lovers, do not. Tom specifically scorns the folly of old women who warn him about the moon.

Because of his work far away in the fields, Tom has slipped from Louisa’s mind. She does not realize that Bob Stone is ashamed of her and of his desire for her. Walking outside, Bob’s mind “became consciously a white man’s. He passed the house with its huge open hearth which, in the days of slavery, was the plantation cookery. He saw Louisa bent over that hearth. He went in as a master should and took her. Direct, honest,

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bold. None of this sneaking that he had to go through now. The contrast was repulsive to him. His family had lost ground” (44).

Bob shudders at what his family or Northern friends would think, and then feels bitter that he has to consider their feelings at all, that to date Louisa now would mean he would have to acknowledge her in the public realm. Bob, determined to take Louisa, ends up challenging Tom to a fight and Tom kills him. The gothic setting of the Southern wilderness, the eerie moon, and the lynching mob all belie the supposed progress presented in the story. All of the elements of the supposed industrial transition are burning. The rotting husk of the pre-war cotton factory looms, crumbling, over the town. Bob complains about the supposed progress which stops him owning Louisa, but still tries to claim her anyway. When Tom meets Bob’s challenge and kills him, he is

immediately burned without any pretense of justice. “Blood Burning Moon” could be just as easily set on a slave plantation as it is in the post-reconstruction South. Again,

Toomer’s story is not about the industrial transition that would decimate the South—his South, like Walrond’s, is already decimated.

Supposedly, the next chapter’s “Bona and Paul” will show the progress of the North and interracial love. The story does not perfectly parallel “Blood Burning Moon,” but the two are very similar. Bona and Paul are white and black, young, and struggling with the weight of history pressing its foot down on the neck of their budding

relationship. Watching Paul during gym class, Bona thinks that despite looking white, Paul “is a harvest moon. He is an autumn leaf” (95). As Bona and Paul try to go on a date, Paul thinks about his Southern birthplace: “the South. What does that mean, precisely, except that you’ll love or hate a nigger? Thats a lot. What does it mean except

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that in Chicago you’ll have the courage to neither love or hate” (103). Looking at Bona, he thinks of how “A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern

planter” (104). Paul is angered by the smirk of a black doorman, and Bona is confused by his coldness to her in the aftermath. When they reconcile and go to leave the jazz club, Paul stops to talk to the doorman and assure him that he and Bona will have something beautiful, that “white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know her whom I brought here” (107). High and thrilling with love for Bona, Paul goes to the place where he left Bona on the street and finds she is gone. The metaphor he constructed for the doorman of racial and environmental harmony crumbles into dust. Even here, in a Chicago club, with teenagers too young to know firsthand the horrors of the South, the plantation creeps. “Blood Burning Moon” demonstrates that there is no linear, temporal progress for the South, that it will not be saved by the wave of industrial modernity or destroyed, and “Bona and Paul” shows that there is no geographic escape from the plantation’s reach, either.