A “Synchronous but More Subtle Migration”: Passing and Primitivism in Toomer’s Cane

Abstract

In part 1 Cane we encounter a poem that has seemed to many its readers to articulate the project the book as a whole, namely, the recovery the vanishing the South by a Northerner who has, at long last, returned home: the Pour O pour that in song, O pour it in the sawdust glow night, Into the velvet pine-smoke air to-night, And let the valley carry it along. And let the valley carry it along. O and soil, red and sweet-gum tree, So scant grass, so profligate pines, Now just before an epoch's declines Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee, Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee. In time, for though the is setting on A song-lit 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 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 songs slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls slavery. (14) Like so much the volume, this poem begins with dusk, the parting soul the first stanza linked to the declining sun the second, each somehow connected to the land and soil to which the speaker has returned. While it figures Toomer's interest in all the colors between black and white, dusk also marks the end an epoch, that slavery, persisting in the passing race whose songs Toomer wishes to memorialize. Song the Son seems, then, to rehearse the basic structure modernist primitivism, the race providing inspiration for a weary poet. (1) As I will show, however, this view fails to take account Cane's insistence that the premodern South and the modern industrial North are contemporary aspects the same historical moment. Two recent readings this poem have, in different yet compatible ways, begun to overturn the seeming primitivism Toomer's lyric. Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr argue that while the speaker hopes to counter time's mutability with the permanence art, this project falters as the world Toomer's narrators would like to articulate in song continually eludes them (164). Karen Jackson Ford finds a similar tension between the book's aestheticizing impulses--its desire to listen, record and preserve both the culture the slaves and [the speaker's] connection to them (31)--and its gradual recognition that the harsh realities Southern life are not amenable to lyric vision. Lyric poetry, the of idealism, the past, and hope, gives way, in Ford's account, to prose, the discourse realism, modernity and tragedy (43). In each case, then, Song the Son puts forward a that the volume itself refutes--a failure, each critic is careful to note, that one can find in the ambiguous language the poem itself. While these arguments are compelling, they miss what I will argue is a crucial aspect Song the Son and, by extension, Cane as a whole: namely, the way it makes an argument not about the demise the African American folk spirit and the trend toward modernization (Ford 30) but rather about the subjective investment its rural Northern speaker in this vision the disappearing rural South. (2) Indeed, the poem's ostensible object address, the vanishing way life the slaves, barely appears at all. Song the Son is not about rural Southern African American culture and its supposedly rejuvenating powers--whether this rejuvenation is shown to work or fail--but rather about the poet's desire for this recuperation. And as I will argue, it is precisely here in this framing the speaker's primitivism that we can find the intersection between the volume's modernist form and its interest in racial politics. …