An Explication of the First Section of “Blood-Burning Moon”

A tribute to ‘Cane’ on its centennial

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Birch and Pine Trees - Pink (1925) is a portrait, after a fashion, of Jean Toomer. It would make a good cover for the book.

Cane, Jean Toomer’s literary cycle of the American South, was released one century ago this month. It is a strange work, difficult to grasp not only in the sense that its sentences are difficult but also in the sense that it seems to dissolve its way out of one’s readerly grip. When I first tried to read it, I used the Audra McDonald–narrated audiobook, and I would always get through three or four sections before something else came along and took me away from it. This not because the book or McDonald had not sustained my interest but because I felt myself, somehow, to be missing some vital essence in the book, so that it seemed correct to drift on to something else and read it later.

Maybe I should have been reading rather than listening to it. Or maybe it just wasn’t the right time. (Books, luckily enough, wait for every man.) In any event, I’ve read it now. And it remains difficult. It sometimes gets called a “novel,” but that’s not really right: As a combination of prose, poetry, and drama without a single overarching narrative thread, it is more properly a cycle, and like most cycles, Cane makes it difficult to know what lies at its center. Plots make it easy—too easy, perhaps—to summarize novels: How can you summarize Cane?

Hell if I know; but any adequate summary of Cane would surely involve race, and it would involve sex, and maybe more than either of these it would involve the passage (or, if you want to make a joke of it, the passing) of time. It would involve the American South and the painful, beautiful death of things remembered. Toomer’s insistence on his own racelessness—and eventually, by the way history reckoned things, on his own Whiteness—has attracted a great deal of interest and debate, mostly about whether it was honest, or whether it was justified, or whether it hurt his art, or whether it amounted to an abdication of racial responsibility. What seems most interesting to me about this insistence is the way it reflects Toomer’s larger concern with the future. His insistence on racelessness was, I think, just one particularly provocative facet of an insistence on the difference and strangeness of that which is to come. William Faulkner famously wrote that the past is never dead nor even past, a sentiment that animates much of his ferociously and even overbearingly past-haunted work. In this regard, Toomer is something of a mirror image to Faulkner. His portrait of the South is no less searing than the Mississippian’s, but his style feels lighter, even—to use a loaded term—freer.

Faulkner and Toomer make for an appropriate pairing, since they are both modernist writers of the early twentieth century concerned with the social and natural landscape of the American South. Yet they rarely seem to show up together. Cane has only recently experieced a revival in public interest—Penguin released an edition aimed at the general reader in 2019—and this revived interest has centered mostly on the cycle’s racial importance. The headline of the Times’s review of that Penguin edition, for instance, called Toomer “an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance,” while the review focused largely on his racial self-identification.¹ And, to be sure, Toomer was part of the milieu of the New Negro Renaissance (which was not confined to Harlem, hence the push by some scholars to change what we call it). Cane seems to have been significantly influenced, for instance, by his nights spent at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s salons in Washington, D.C.² But he was also part of the larger postwar vanguard of American modernism and had relationships with writers like Hart Crane and, especially, Waldo Frank. And while Toomer is widely acknowledged as a modernist, and even as an important modernist, Cane is far less often read as though it were, after all, a modernist work. Criticism of Cane has focused so much on Toomer’s relationship with race, on his experiences in the South, on the history of the time and place he captured in Cane—and has focused so little on his language.

Well, Faulkner’s language has certainly not been neglected, and it is a shame that Toomer’s has, because it is not only magnificent but, often, puzzling, seeming to demand an army of close-readers to keep up with it. Fortunately, it has not been neglected entirely—Jennifer D. Williams’s essay “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning,” for instance, is a trenchant example of the kind of criticism Cane deserves—and my sense is that the language of Cane has gotten even more attention over the last decade.³ There’s a third Norton Critical Edition on the horizon, even though the most recent one came out barely a decade ago, in 2011, and I gather this is because of the volume of criticism that has been published in the intervening years. And, of course, an aspiring critic is never really that sorry to stumble upon a critical lacuna, providing as it does an opportunity to do something that at least feels new.

With all this in mind, I wrote an essay at the end of the last semester, in a class on the New Negro Renaissance, attempting to do what I would like to see done with Cane. It is an explication, taking inspiration from William Empson’s close-reading of poetry and especially from Ian Watt’s analysis of a paragraph from The Ambassadors, of the first section of “Blood-Burning Moon,” the short story that closes the first of Cane’s three parts. In my explication of it, I have tried in the first place to describe my experience reading it, in the second place to identify the mechanisms in the text that create that experience, and in the third place to speculate as to what larger implications that experience and those mechanisms might have.

It is a testament to the stature Cane has actually achieved in American letters that, though someone or other will periodicially proclaim it to be a monumental achievement, I have been able to find only one article commemorating its one hundredth year.⁴ (I expect not to find a similar dearth in two years, on the centennial of The Great Gatsby.) Well, here’s hoping there will be all the greater a glut of commemorative articles come its one-twenty-fifth. For now, here, in honor of Toomer and in honor of his work, is my attempt to be the change I want to see in Cane criticism.⁵

Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town. The full moon in the great door was an omen. Negro women improvised songs against its spell.

Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen. Her skin was 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. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her. By measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him, he had won her. Tom Burwell, whom the whole town called Big Boy, also loved her. But working in the fields all day, and far away from her, gave him no chance to show it. Though often enough of evenings he had tried to. Somehow, he never got along. Strong as he was with hands upon the ax or plow, he found it difficult to hold her. Or so he thought. But the fact was that he held her to factory town more firmly than he thought for. His black balanced, and pulled against, the white of Stone, when she thought of them. And her mind was vaguely upon them as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks’ kitchen. As she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon.

A strange stir was in her. Indolently, she tried to fix upon Bob or Tom as the cause of it. To meet Bob in the canebrake, as she was going to do an hour or so later, was nothing new. And Tom’s proposal which she felt on its way to her could be indefinitely put off. Separately, there was no unusual significance to either one. But for some reason, they jumbled when her eyes gazed vacantly at the rising moon. And from the jumble came the stir that was strangely within her. Her lips trembled. The slow rhythm of her song grew agitant and restless. Rusty black and tan spotted hounds, lying in the dark corners of porches or prowling around back yards, put their noses in the air and caught its tremor. They began plaintively to yelp and howl. Chickens woke up and cackled. Intermittently, all over the countryside dogs barked and roosters crowed as if heralding a weird dawn or some ungodly awakening. The women sang lustily. Their songs were cotton-wads to stop their ears. Louisa came down into factory town and sank wearily upon the step before her home. The moon was rising towards a thick cloud-bank which soon would hide it.

Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon. Sinner!
Come out that fact’ry door.

I

“Blood-Burning Moon” begins with space; it begins with a sequence of risings. The very first word of the story is Up, which becomes the springboard for an opening burst of anaphora: “Up from the skeleton stone walls, up from the rotting floor boards and the solid hand-hewn beams of oak of the pre-war cotton factory, dusk came. Up from the dusk the full moon came.” First the dusk, then the moon: The opening two sentences have an incantatory feel, as though with his words the narrator is pulling the dusk and the moon out from the ground. First the dusk, then the moon: The moon is the final object of this incantation. The dusk must be flung up only because the moon must be, and dusk comes first. The moon must be flung up because it defines the atmosphere of the story: Its ominous quality is the story’s ominous quality. Perhaps the events of the story do not rely on the moon to take place; perhaps violence can take place without an omen of violence. But an omen of violence, even if it is not a condition of possibility for violence, makes the thing inevitable; and a blood-red moon is quite the omen of violence. We know the moon is red because, even before the narration begins, we have read the title, which promises violence (Blood), along with passion (Burning) and, above all, the nocturnal grandeur of a good horror story (Moon).⁶

Spatially, we are situated inside a sorghum factory the skeleton stone walls of which instantly render it a haunted house, the physical quality denoted by skeleton stone being ambiguous and as a result immediately secondary to the phrase’s immediate connotative significance: It takes some time actually to imagine the walls but no time at all to associate them with the macabre.⁷ Skeleton, usually a noun, may here be either an adjective, modifying walls, or an adverb, modifying stone (itself already uprooted from its normal part of speech to become an adjective modifying walls). If it is the former, then it suggests the barrenness of the walls.⁸ If the latter, it suggests a ghastly white hue and a dry, smooth texture. In practice it is both, suggesting a physical skeletality that is both extrinsic and intrinsic to the wall itself and which is only the material dimension of the more important valence that the word skeleton casts about the place.

We know we are inside the factory because the third sentence of the paragraph tells us that, “[g]lowing like a fired pine-knot, it [the moon] illumined the great door.” As the only space to which we have been introduced that might have a door is the factory, this must be the factory’s door, its greatness elevating the factory from haunted house to haunted mansion. The fourth sentence asks us to picture “[t]he full moon in the great door,” placing us squarely in of doors and looking out of them.⁹

The factory’s interior is our primary locus; it is not an all-constraining one. It is possible that when the narrator tells us that the moon “illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town,” we are to imagine observing the soft showering through the factory door, but it is not necessarily so; from the get-go we do not know just how much of factory town is visible from the factory, or how the factory is situated relative to factory town. The soft showering image is lofty; we observe it from afar and from above. If we are observing it from within the factory, then, the factory must be atop a hill looking over factory town. But since we may not be observing it from within the factory, the factory may be not atop such a hill. The sentence leaves us with a vague sense that the factory might be above factory town, might be a site from which a person looks out upon factory town when he looks out the door, without ever telling us explicitly that this is the case.

This spatial confusion will be brought to bear and mostly resolved in the first paragraph of “Blood-Burning Moon’s” second section, when we are told that, as the sorghum is being processed in the factory, its sweet scent “came from the copper pan and drenched the forest and the hill that sloped to factory town, beneath its fragrance.” The metaphor of drenching suggests that the scent operates as a kind of flood, which in turn suggests that the hill to factory town slopes downward. Plus, the forest and the hill’s being drenched beneath the fragrance suggests that the fragrance has come from above, the comma forcing a pause that leads us to emphasize beneath as we read the sentence. Even here, however, it is necessary to use the word suggests a rather embarrassing amount. All these details could, theoretically, be compatible with the factory’s being situated at the bottom of the hill. The text is impressionistic; it leaves us grappling to surmise spatial facts from metaphor, with the result that even when we know where we are we do not really know where we are.¹⁰

It is proper that we should not know where we are. “Blood-Burning Moon” is, after all, a work of atmosphere. Cane is a work of atmosphere—a “swan song,” Jean Toomer called it, into which he had “put” the “feeling” he had had when he first ventured into rural Georgia and encountered “the valley, the valley of ‘Cane,’ with its smoke-wreaths during the day and mist at night.”¹¹ Not that the story’s precise details of spatial arrangement do not matter, of course (everything matters); but the imprecision with which the spatial arrangement is described disorients us and so takes us away from rigorously imagining physical space to immerse us in the smoke-wreaths and mist of it all. “Blood-Burning Moon” is a tale, in a way none of the other stories in Cane are, and the purpose of its opening vignette is to set a taleish mood, not to confine us in a claustrophobic sense. Bearing in mind the confirmation from drenched and beneath that the factory is situated atop a hill, we can read the entire opening paragraph as being told from the perspective of within the factory, not as a site of confinement but as a spot for observation: As the narrator describes the moon in the door and the shanties of factory town, we can imagine the camera of the text moving slowly toward the doorway and panning down from “the full moon in the great door” to the “Negro women improvis[ing] songs against its spell” in factory town. That it is Negro women improvising these songs is not incidental, nor is the fact that they are improvising. Jennifer D. Williams has noted that Cane’s Black women “animate the parting soul of slavery,” representing a naturalistic and erotic but, Williams argues (I remain ambivalent), not exoticized “folk spirit.”¹² Louisa’s “skin . . . the color of oak leaves” and “breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns” are an example of this, and the songs of the factory town women are another. These songs rise from factory town to atop our hill, blending together as they do so into a Faulknerian miasma, with all the vaporous force that implies. They blend together into the poem-song that ends each of the story’s three sections, so that it becomes a soundtrack for the story. The women’s song as soundtrack, the titular moon: Both lend “Blood-Burning Moon” a distinctly feminine air which, since femininity in Cane figures folkishness and since the tale is a folk form, is essential to the fact that the story’s atmosphere is that of a tale that one might tell at a campfire as it burns like the moon of the story’s title.

II

When the second paragraph of the story begins by transporting us to “the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen,” the effect is that of transitioning from a cold open to a narrative proper. With this emergence of a narrative comes a crystallization of geography. We know of the decaying, skeletal factory; of the one-street factory town; and now of the white folks’ kitchen and the hill coming from it. We encounter the hill as we encounter Louisa, who is singing “as she c[omes] over [its] crest.” Since we have just been at the factory and observing factory town, we can conclude that it is the factory–factory town area to which she is coming, and that the hill divides the white folks’ kitchen from the factory–factory town area. Negro women sing in factory town, and the factory was built for cotton (see note 2), so factory town’s inhabitants are Black; they live around the factory because they are the racialized proletariat of rural Georgia and work there. Louisa, coming from the white folks’ kitchen, is therefore not White herself; it is the end of the day, dusk and the moon having been pulled up from the ground, and she is heading home, so factory town is her home, so she is Black. She is heading home from where one spends the day, which is work; she works in the white folks’ kitchen; the employment opportunities for Blacks in rural Georgia three score years after the Emancipation Proclamation, we see, revolve around service to Whites, whether in the Whites’ own domestic space or in the industrial space that is closer to home and therefore feels more as though it belongs to one; probably Whites own the sorghum factory as well as the kitchen, but it is not the white folks’ factory. Louisa works in the White folks’ home and so splits her time between differently racialized spaces; the hill from the white folks’ kitchen is a liminal space that Louisa occupies during her transition between the two. What is interesting about these conclusions is less the conclusions themselves than how unthinkingly we draw them, so powerful is our understanding of race and class in the nineteen-twenties South; pointing them out feels almost pedantic. Jean Toomer needs to explain little for us to develop immediately an intuitive tripartite geography of “Blood-Burning Moon,” consisting of the Black factory town, working-class and mainly industrial; the White area, well-off enough that Blacks come from factory town to perform domestic labor there; and the hill between them, a liminal space where Louisa sings during her commute home.

Her singing is of dual significance. When we meet Louisa, we have just been told that the women of factory town are improvising songs against the blood moon. That she is joining them in this is confirmed by the final, fragmentary sentence of the second paragraph: “As she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon.” (Incidentally, since Louisa is singing at the rising moon as she walks toward factory town from the white folks’ kitchen, we can add to our geography that factory town occupies its easternmost part and that the hilltop factory occupies a western position relative to factory town, since one looking out the factory door beholds both the moon and the shanties.) Yet hers is also the singing of a commuter, of one walking along: It has the easy “low murmur of winds in fig trees.” Though her song’s ostensible superstitious function may be the same as that of the factory town women, though it may even have the same lyrics, it expresses something different, something softer and less portentous. At least to Louisa. As she walks along and sings her song, her thoughts are with her competing lovers. Their competition, and the choice on her part that it will force at some point in the future, is the source for her of some consideration, but not of any stress of a neurotic type. The tension between her attractions to the Black Tom Burwell and to the White Bob Stone is in something like equilibrium: Burwell’s “black” both “balance[s], and pull[s] against, the white of Stone,” so that “her mind” is but “vaguely upon them.”¹³ Though Bob appears to have “won her,” the odds actually favor Tom, who “h[olds] her to factory town more firmly than he thought for.” The odd syntax of more firmly than he thought for, with its dangling for, speaks to a poeticism in Tom’s love, which combines with the phrase’s straightforward semantic meaning and the fact that the narrator describes Bob’s appeal first and Tom’s appeal second to indicate that Tom is likely to win out; true love conquers all, or ought to, not only morally but narratively. Yet even as the story subverts White supremacist notions of interracial sexuality by making a Black woman the object of competition between a Black and a White man, it does not create an exact mirror to the White supremacist myth of lecherous Black men and pathetic White women, a mirror in which Bob would be a mustache-twirling rapist and Tom a noble-hearted and authentic paramour. Bob has “won” Louisa “by the way the world reckons things”—that is, by the material power that White men exercise over Black women, including that of sexual exploitation—true, but he has also “won” her “[b]y measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him.” At thought of him, with no the between at and thought, is a poetic phrase like more firmly than he thought for, and one need not dismiss the material power relation between Bob and Louisa to recognize that her feelings for him have some kind of authenticity. If her warm glow is partly or even wholly a product of internalized and sexualized reverence for power or Whiteness, it is nonetheless warm; feelings affected by material conditions are no less felt for it.

As it will turn out, Bob’s feelings for Louisa are profoundly shaped by if they are not wholly a product of his revanchist nostalgia for slavery. “Those were the days,” he will think fondly, when he would have gone into “the plantation cookery . . . as a master should and t[aken] her.” When out of ironic indignation at the thought of competing “with a nigger over a nigger girl” he attacks and pulls a knife on Tom, and when Tom kills him, and when the Whites of the town lynch Tom, the power relations of the tale will be laid bare. Tom’s sexual claim on Louisa is violently enforceable and is therefore a claim of ownership. Like the ownership claim of a slaveholder, it is generally accepted by those in the town with the power materially to object. If Bob killed Tom, there would probably be upset among factory town’s residents (though given the conversations we witness among them they would as likely as not assign some blame to Tom for his anger, notwithstanding the fact that it is Bob who attacks Tom and denies Tom’s moves toward deëscalation, there being a general agreement among the factory town residents that Tom is “one bad nigger when he gets started” and will instigate a fight (“He’ll scrap, sho”) when he finds out that Tom has been sleeping with Louisa). But if Bob killed Tom the story would not end with Bob’s lynching, nor with his imprisonment, nor with his paying a small fine; Bob is allowed to kill Tom to defend his claim on Louisa, and Tom is not allowed to kill Bob even in self-defense.¹⁴

Notwithstanding these asymmetrical material conditions, around which the whole drama turns, by focusing on Louisa’s feelings for both men, the second paragraph of “Blood-Burning Moon” figures a symmetry in the Bob-Louisa-Tom triangle. This symmetry does not contradict the material asymmetry, not least because we are instantly aware of the latter upon learning that Bob is Black and Tom White; after all, we already have our tripartite geography. In fact, though we cannot predict its particular turns—Tom stopping short of quite confronting Louisa, Bob overhearing talk of Tom and Louisa, Bob attacking Tom, etc.—the story’s basic arc becomes instantly predictable from the moment we learn that a Black man and a White one are competing for a Black woman in the rural Georgia of the nineteen-twenties, especially if we have read W. E. Burghardt Du Bois’s fable “Of the Coming of John,” on which “Blood-Burning Moon” is something like a gothic riff.¹⁵ Instead of undermining the material asymmetry, the formal symmetry of the second paragraph creates a sense of completeness appropriate to a tale. As important to the second paragraph’s creation of this tale-like self-containment as the symmetry of the Bob-Louisa-Tom triangle is the symmetry of the paragraph itself, which follows a chiastic structure. It begins: “Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen.” It ends: “ . . . as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks’ kitchen. As she sang softly at the evil face of the full moon.” As she sang mirrors Louisa sang, while as she came over the crest of the hill, coming from the white folks’ kitchen mirrors as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen, so that the entire paragraph goes: AB[middle of the paragraph]BA, with softly at the evil face of the full moon pinned to the end to enhance the folkish spookiness.

III

In the third paragraph, Louisa’s ambivalence about Bob and Tom is taken over and transformed by the unavoidable sight of the blood-burning moon. The narrator states the operating principle of the story as a whole is stated writ small when he writes, “Separately, there was no unusual significance to either one. But for some reason, they jumbled when her eyes gazed vacantly at the rising moon.” Perhaps the mechanism linking the blood moon to violence is astrological (the blood moon causes violence, or is caused by and so signals violence’s inevitability), perhaps psychological (people see the blood moon, think it is an omen of violence, and act subconsciously in a way likely to bring violence about), perhaps purely formal and nondiegetic (the story has a blood-burning moon and is titled after it; therefore it must end in violence). At all events the moon is of central importance: It takes the premise of the story and jumbles its elements not only into a recipe for violence but into a recipe for violence with a distinctly supernatural quality. “A strange stir was in her,” the third paragraph begins. The strange stir—strange because it is somehow outside the natural order of things, a stir because it is disturbing some kind of inchoate and profound arrangement of the universe—is the subject of the sentence and so seems to operate away from Louisa’s control. Four sentences later, it will be described as “the stir that was strangely inside her,” the grammatically superfluous relative pronoun–and–verb phrase that was separating Louisa from the stir and rendering it an entity all its own, one coming “from the jumble” brought on by looking at the moon while thinking about Tom and Bob. A strange, sexual stir within a woman, out of her control and apparently caused by a blood-red moon: If the title did not already imply a menstrual theme, this surely does so, compounding the story’s feminine–folkish–tale-like complex in the process.

The stir, already over a choice Louisa must make between men, is quickly linked to three of the femininized qualities that drive the story. First it is sexualized: “Her lips trembled.” Then it is aestheticized: “The slow rhythm of her song grew agitant and restless.” In this aestheticization, musical form is synthesized with eroticism, the transition from slow rhythm to agitant restlessness mirroring the buildup-to-climax structure of a sexual encounter. Finally, the stir is naturalized: “Rusty black and tan spotted hounds, lying in the dark corners of porches or prowling around back yards, put their noses in the air and caught its [her song’s] tremor. They began plaintively to yelp and howl.” As Louisa’s song speeds up, urged on by the tidal force of the moon, it hits some mysteriously frequency that resonates not only with nature but with the hidden, prowling—that is, both sexual and predatory, in an almost feline way—parts of nature, the parts that live in dark corners. The blood-burning moon, by way of the Black women of Georgia, is letting something loose tonight. That something is at least in part historical: Though the literal temporal setting at this moment is twilight, the dogs’ howling and chickens’ “cackl[ing]” and roosters’ “crow[ing]” seem to “heral[d] a weird dawn or some ungodly awakening.” Dawn of what? Awakening of what? Something, necessarily, not already here; something new, at least to the world as it is now and has been for some time; which is to say, something modern. Williams notes that one operating principle of Cane is the “fusion of modernist forms with African American vernacular culture;” here modernity is something weirdly dawning, awakening in an ungodly fashion, by way of Black femininity.¹⁶

As the third paragraph—and the first section of the story—nears its end, the song crescendos. Louisa’s song has lost the “[i]ndolent” quality it had before; in this way her singing has been pulled toward the other women’s, taking on the same portentousness. Now she pulls the other women’s singing toward her own: They begin to “s[i]ng lustily.” The sense of crescendo is added to by the rather puzzling sentence, “Their songs were cotton-wads to stop their ears.” Stop their ears against what, if not the song itself? Stop their ears against everything the song represents: against the chaos and impending violence of the night. The song is both storm and umbrella. “Louisa,” seeking calm amid the squall, comes “down into factory town and s[inks] wearily upon the step before her home.” The moon, like the volume of the song, of everything, is “rising.” And there is more to come: “rising towards a thick cloud bank which soon would hide it.” When a celestial body is behind a cloud, it comes out sooner or later; if “Blood-Burning Moon,” with its tripartite structure, is akin to a three-act play, the moon’s impending hiding period will be but an intermission, a period of calm that will serve as a breath that allows the action to rise even further. And it is, indeed, the end of the act: This is the last prose sentence of “Blood-Burning Moon’s” first section. By the grace of Black femininity, modernity is emerging, in a Benjaminian storm: The curtain is just about to fall.

IV

But it’s not falling just yet. This first act needs a finale: We must hear the women’s song, by now coalesced into enough of a unified creation that it can be given to us straight out.

Red nigger moon. Sinner!
Blood-burning moon. Sinner!
Come out that fact’ry door.

Why nigger? The moon is not Black,¹⁷ and the singers are not calling it Black when they address it this way. The word here is more connotative than denotative. On a personal note I will say that Cane is the only book I have ever read in which I would describe the word as beautiful. One’s mileage may vary on the beauty front; certainly here it is chiefly expressive and poetic. What it is expressing is not any exotic native Black vitality; on the contrary, its transmutation into a chiefly expressive word is dehistoricizing: It doesn’t feel like a slur in the poem. Perhaps, then, it is not a slur, not here. Toomer’s own relationship with race was complicated, but certainly one thing he wanted to do was free America from the constraining effects of race as a framework.¹⁸ Yet in Cane he looked exactly to Black life in the rural South to do that, perhaps intuiting what Jesse McCarthy has called the “dispersive and de-essentializing qualities” of Blackness.¹⁹ Of course, by using the word at all Toomer reminds us of the socio-politico-culturo-material complex that is race, and risks reifying race by doing so. But one thing about race is that it is there: Deny that, and you’re engaging in disingenuous, and therefore doomed, evasion—as Toomer’s critics argue he did after publishing Cane. The thing to do with race is not conscientiously to inflate or to deflate it but to use it for your own expressive ends and let the bones fall where they may. As Paul Beatty writes in The Sellout, “Unmitigated Blackness is . . . the acceptance of contradiction not being a sin;” “Unmitigated Blackness is simply not giving a fuck.”²⁰

Thus the Blackness, or at least the capital-B Blackness, of the singers is important for the production of the poem but not essential to its text. It is transmuted into a formal feature. Similarly, Sinner!, denotatively a term of condemnation, here feels like an interjection; it feels chiefly formal: Though the first two lines only rhyme in a trivial sense, they make a clear pair—_______ moon. Sinner!—so that it is possible to think of the poem as having an AAB structure, with a volta on the third and final line. “Blood-Burning Moon’s” first section begins with space and it ends with space, too, as Come out that fact’ry door uses a metaphor of movement between constructed spaces (or between a constructed and an unconstructed space) to shift the poem’s mood from that of an ecstatic greeting to that of a rather taunting invitation. There is a deliberateness, a cooling-down, in the full stop that ends the line. If a door is a figure of liminality, then it is proper that the tone of the line is ambiguous, at once seductive (“Come [hither] out that fact’ry door”) and threatening (“Come out that fact’ry door[, coward]”), and the possible applications of the poem to the story will become clear as its plot progresses: It could be either Louisa calling to Tom (seductive), or Bob doing so (threatening). Most explicitly, this multivalent, multigendered invitation-taunt is addressed to the moon. The omen promises sex; the omen promises violence; very well, we shall have sex and violence; let both come hither.

Paris, September 2023

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Bibliography

Avery, Tamlyn. “Jean Toomer’s Cane at 100: the ‘everlasting song’ that defined the Harlem Renaissance.” The Conversation, 13 Mar. 2023. https://theconversation.com/jean-toomers-cane-at-100-the-everlasting-song-that-defined-the-harlem-renaissance-197417.

Beatty, Paul. The Sellout. New York: Picador, 2015.

Borst, Allan G. “Gothic Economics: Violence and Miscegenation in Jean Toomer’s ‘Blood-Burning Moon.’” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (May 2008): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.7227/GS.10.1.4.

Byrd, Rudolph P. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Introduction.” In Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., xix–lxx. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2011.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of the Coming of John.” From The Souls of Black Folk. In W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan Huggins, 521–35. New York: Library of America, 1986. [First published 1903.]

Foley, Barbara. “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” African American Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 181–198. https://doi.org/10.2307/3042118.

———. “Jean Toomer’s Washington and the Politics of Class: From ‘Blue Veins’ to Seventh-Street Rebels,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 289–321. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.1995.0108.

Hutchinson, George B. “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ of Washington,” American Literature 63, no. 4 (Dec. 1991): 683–92. https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.2307/2926874.

McCarthy, Jesse. “A Note on Style and Usage.” In Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? xi–xiii. New York: Liveright, 2021.

PaulQ, reply to duomoduomo. https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/skeleton-stone-walls.3165799/. [Internet forum.]

Sehgal, Parul. “A Century Later, a Novel by an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance Is Still Relevant.” New York Times, 25 Dec. 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/books/review-cane-jean-toomer.html.

Toomer, Jean. “Blood-Burning Moon.” From Cane. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, vol. i, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Valerie Smith; et al, 1159–64. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2014. [First published 1923.]

———. “The Cane Years.” In The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, edited by Darwin T. Turner, 116–27. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980. [Written in 1928 or ’29.]

Williams, Jennifer D. “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning,” in Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, edited by Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 404–17. Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton, 2011. [First published 2008.]

1. Parul Sehgal, “A Century Later, a Novel by an Enigma of the Harlem Renaissance Is Still Relevant,” New York Times, 25 Dec. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/books/review-cane-jean-toomer.html.

2. See Barbara Foley, “Jean Toomer’s Washington and the Politics of Class: From ‘Blue Veins’ to Seventh-Street Rebels,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 289–321, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.1995.0108. And George B. Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and the ‘New Negroes’ of Washington,” American Literature 63, no. 4 (Dec. 1991): 683–92, https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.2307/2926874. Both of these articles appear in and were originally brought to my attention by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Rudolph P. Byrd’s Norton Critical Edition of Cane, but I don’t have a copy of that with me, so I can’t cite them as they appear there.

3. Jennifer D. Williams, “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Erotics of Mourning,” in Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 2011), 404–17. [First published 2008.]

4. Tamlyn Avery, “Jean Toomer’s Cane at 100: the ‘everlasting song’ that defined the Harlem Renaissance,” The Conversation, 13 Mar. 2023, https://theconversation.com/jean-toomers-cane-at-100-the-everlasting-song-that-defined-the-harlem-renaissance-197417.

5. My thanks to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Georgia Soares, and the members of the seminar at Harvard University on the Negro Renaissance, conducted in the spring of 2023, as well as to Jesse McCarthy, for the role they played in making this essay possible.

6. Jean Toomer, “Blood-Burning Moon,” from Cane, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, vol. i, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Valerie Smith; et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2014), 1159. [Cane was first published in 1923.] Emphasis added. All subsequent quotes from Cane are from “Blood-Burning Moon” and, unless otherwise specified, appear on page 1,159 of the Norton Anthology.

7. The opening paragraph describes the building as a “pre-war cotton factory,” but it would make little sense for the unity of the story if this factory were not the same one in which we later see sorghum being processed. Allan G. Borst explains that it has been “converted from cotton processing to sugar cane preparation,” a satisfactory reconciliation. Allan G. Borst, “Gothic Economics: Violence and Miscegenation in Jean Toomer’s ‘Blood-Burning Moon,’” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (May 2008): 25, https://doi.org/10.7227/GS.10.1.4. I follow Barbara Foley in identifying the “cane” of Cane, and of “Blood-Burning Moon,” as sorghum rather than sugar. Barbara Foley, “‘In the Land of Cotton’: Economics and Violence in Jean Toomer’s Cane,” African American Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 186, https://doi.org/10.2307/3042118.

8. I owe this gloss to PaulQ, a user on the language-learning website WordReference who responded to a question from the user duomoduomo, a native Japanese speaker who was reading “Blood-Burning Moon” and was rightly confused by the phrase “skeleton stone walls.” https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/skeleton-stone-walls.3165799/. And a note of appreciation, from someone currently on a semester abroad, for any English language learner who would take on Cane. Bon courage.

9. Emphasis added.

10. Toomer, “Blood-Burning Moon,” 1160.

11. Toomer, “The Cane Years,” in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1980), 123.

12. Williams, “Erotics of Mourning,” 406.

13. Emphasis added.

14. Toomer, “Blood-Burning Moon,” 1161–62.

15. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of the Coming of John,” from The Souls of Black Folk, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 521–35. [The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903.]

16. Williams, “Erotics of Mourning,” 407.

17. It’s red. Rimshot!

18. For an overview of Toomer’s relationship with race, see Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Introduction,” in Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Norton Critical Editions (New York: Norton, 2011), xix–lxx.

19. Or, as McCarthy would have it, blackness. To discuss rigorously why I capitalize Black and White in dealing with race would require an essay unto itself; in this footnote it will have to suffice to say that I think capitalization highlights aesthetically the very artificiality, indeed imposedness of race to which McCarthy is so attuned. Jesse McCarthy, “A Note on Style and Usage,” in Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (New York: Liveright, 2021), xi–xiii. (The dispersive and de-essentializing qualities quote appears on page xii.)

20. Paul Beatty, The Sellout (New York: Picador, 2015), 277.