Readers of Jean Toomer's Cane are familiar with the major contrast in that book: rural South vs. urban North, primitivism vs. sophistication. Toomer grew up in a middle-class section of Washington, D.C., but before writing Cane he had experienced the rural South. He had also spent some time in Chicago. Thus he had seen the contrast firsthand. Taken together, two little-known plays, Balo and Natalie Mann, written around the time of Cane's composition, also illustrate the rural/urban contrast.1 In addition, the plays reflect both Toomer's successes and failures as he worked with the portrayal of black life and his own black identity during his early years as a writer.2 In 1921, Toomer spent about four months teaching at the Georgia Normal and Industrial Institute in Sparta, Georgia.3 This was Toomer's second sojourn into the South. In 1920, he had traveled in the South with Waldo Frank.4 The experience of teaching in Georgia and the trip with Frank a year earlier were very important to Toomer. In a 1922 letter to The Liberator, he wrote, A visit to Georgia last fall was the starting point of almost everything of worth that I have done.5 What Toomer saw in Georgia was not the urban black of his home city of Washington, but the rural black peasant living off the land, the sweet land of cane, the dark land of lynching, a soft land of folk song and red earth in contrast to Washington's jazz and concrete. Toomer viewed this land with excitement, and much of Cane, published in 1923, was inspired by his Southern experience in Sparta, called Sempter in his book. Nevertheless, by the mid-twenties, when the Harlem Renaissance was in full flower, Toomer had abandoned black writing and had traveled to Europe in pursuit of the mystical wisdom of Georges I. Gurdjieff.6 Although Cane is the fruit of his enthusiasm for rural black culture, even as he was writing the book, Toomer felt he was depicting a culture that was dying,7 and after the publication of Cane, he gave up his attempts at depicting black life in his creative work. Cane, however, is not Toomer's only piece of black writing: Balo and Natalie Mann, neither as artistically