Jean Toomer's Cane,1 from which Blood-Burning Moon is taken, is a collection of short stories interspersed with poems, which makes up a whole. It is divided into three parts. The first part includes the portraits of six southern women who are victims of the caste system. Most of the narratives in it take place in the atmosphere of a setting sun, at dusk, a symbol of the vanishing slave culture. The four stories of the second part are staged in northern cities; the protagonists, mostly cut off as they are from their spiritual heritage and unable to conform to white standards, suffer from a sense of spiritual sterility. Part three corresponds to a semi-dramatic narrative, Kabnis, the name of a black northerner who has come to Georgia to attempt to reestablish contact with his own roots. And whereas the South, in spite of the prevailing white norms, calls to mind the passions, mysticism and freedom of a mythical Africa, the North symbolizes whiteness-the oppressive civilization of puritanism. One critic of Cane has established that most of its protagonists, unable to achieve a fusion of opposite poles, are torn between passion and intellect, past and present, an agrarian and an industrial society, nature and culture. As if they were uncertain of their own identity, they alternately tend towards blackness or whiteness: or, when the tension is too unbearable, they will take refuge away from material conditions, in the spiritual, or mystical, realm.2 I wholly agree with this interpretation of Cane. Blood-Burning Moon ends and climaxes the first section of Cane. It is the only short story staging an open confrontation between the two races. The title of the short story under discussion differs from that of the five preceding narratives in that it is not a woman's name. This seems to point out the importance of the moon as an actor in the ensuing tragedy. Therefore, we may wonder whether Toomer, classified as black, struck a note of protest here, or whether the poet of the South tapped mythological sources to depict passion in an appropriate setting. Or did both elements enter into the picture? In order to assess Toomer's point of view in that respect, I intend first to make an intratextual study of this text, with a description of the poetic and dramatic setting; then, an analysis of the motivations of those characters involved in the drama will-hopefully-enable me to throw light on the racial conflict-a conflict which may be rooted in the deep recesses of the southern collective soul.