The class was small, composed of me, four young black women, and the professor, Coleman Barks. In those days he was the department’s poet in residence and tenured hippie. After I was long gone from Athens he became well-known as a translator and popularizer of the Persian mystic poet Rumi. But I was his student long before he did interviews with Bill Moyers. I took two courses from him in Park Hall, the other being 20th Century American Poetry, and my recollection is that there was a lot of overlap between them, not his poetry but his pet interests, like vision pits and the Puer aeternus. I gathered that no matter the ostensible topic of the class of his you signed up for, there was going to be a quality of Coleman 101 to it. That was fine. In a discipline sometimes seemingly committed to taking all the fun out of the subject, his approach to literary study was undeniably fun. I also remember that he was really encouraging to me personally, one time even reading aloud in class something silly but creative I had written. He introduced it with, “Jim Veal has written a great paper.” I hadn’t, but for me that was a well-timed and thrilling minor shoutout. I was sorry to read of Coleman’s passing away earlier this year.
On the first day of class Barks felt compelled to explain to us why a white man such as himself happened to be teaching Afro-American literature. His story was that years earlier, when the all-white English department finally committed to the long overdue implementation of an Afro-American literature course, it was decided that he was the one with the youth and the flower child bona fides to do the job. He had agreed to do it on the condition that the department would make fast work of hiring a scholar of color to replace him. And here we were, more than a decade later, and he was still doing it. He said it with a shrug, indicating that the length of his tenure was not a boast but a source of embarrassment. He was going to do his best, of course, but he clearly regarded it as an institutional fail that he was still in the role.
I still have several of the books we studied in that course: Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Langston Hughes’ The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Richard Wright's Native Son, James Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and The Slave, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The one I decided to revisit is Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) a classic of the Harlem Renaissance. Part of the appeal was geographical: the book grew out of Toomer’s brief 1921 experience as a transplanted Northerner teaching at a manual school for black youngsters in Sparta, Georgia, less than an hour from the homeplaces of state literary giants Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker, and Joel Chandler Harris. Cane, the only book the wandering Toomer ever wrote, is small and experimental: It alternates between modernist short fiction (heavy on psychology and inventively abstruse narration) and poetry. There is no completely unifying setting or narrative arc – the places and points of view vary - but we’re mostly in the rural South and we’re frequently in the consciousness of a perceptive but alienated young man, struggling with desire and isolation and an oppressive milieu, racism not the least of the challenges in his life. As was the case in 1985, this time around I found that reading Cane meant that I would have to be attentive and patient and open to the unconventional.
In the years since I studied Cane in Barks’ class I’d never been tempted to reread it, but it was never completely out of my mind because “Reapers”, one of Toomer’s Cane poems, sometimes showed up in high school American literature textbooks I taught from:
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
That poem inevitably makes me think of Larkin’s “The Mower", each of them finding in the violent death of a small critter an evocation of the casualness with which we bring about death in our everyday modern lives. It is interesting to see where Toomer has placed the poem in his collage of written portraits of the lives of rural Southern black people. It immediately follows an impressionistic account of a young woman’s life ruined by the ravenous lusts of the men around her (“Karintha”), and immediately precedes a poem about the untimely blooming of a cotton flower and its superstitious resonances and the surreal story of a pariah white woman who mothered two multi-racial sons and was ultimately crushed by her own falling chimney (“Becky”). Toomer has an empathetic eye for the plights of women, and his rural South is a believably cruel place for them. The placement of those four texts side by side is indicative of how the book is arranged – a collage of different texts connected thematically. They call it a pastiche.
The validation that comes from “Reapers” appearing in a high school textbook is not the only measure I’ve found of Cane’s influence. Here’s an example from the world of music. Among the short stories in the book is “Bona and Paul”, about a troubled interracial couple at a Chicago teacher’s college. Although I cannot find any explanation of the title, common sense tells me that Wynton Marsalis’ 1990 instrumental jazz composition “Bona and Paul” is named after the story. How could it not be? That an icon of Black American culture took care to name-check a Toomer text in this way says something of how much Cane has mattered.
Of all the experiences I’ve had since 1985 that affected this rereading experience, among the most significant must be having read Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, her extraordinary history of the Great Migration. When I first read Adam Serwer’s assertion that excellent books of history make better anti-racist texts than do explicitly anti-racist texts, The Warmth of Other Suns was the first book that came to mind: Wilkerson’s granular narratives of the “whys” that led to the slow-motion evacuation of the black South cannot be read without feeling “everything has to change” outrage. Beyond her depiction of why the trains from Memphis to Chicago were crowded with refugees in Toomer’s time, Wilkerson also made me more attuned to the cultural divides the migration created between northern and southern blacks. In Cane this dynamic is especially evident in the book’s final story, where Toomer’s fictional alter-ego, relieved-of-his-duties schoolteacher Ralph Kabnis, fumbles through his sense of displacement as a black man who has done the Great Migration in reverse. It’s all too much for him. There’s too much old-time religion to play along with, too many Jim Crow rules to adhere to (with a threat of violence behind missteps), too many black social hierarchies to navigate, and the chickens make too much noise.
Most of all, history is too close. Since losing his teaching job, Kabnis has been working in the shop of a local wagon-maker, Halsey. The boss throws him a booze-soaked going away party in the shop, with a guest list including an itinerant gadfly named Lewis, a couple of lively girls, and a nearly mute, older-than-God former slave who lives in the basement and makes an occasional appearance: “He is like a bust in black walnut. Gray-bearded. Gray-haired. Prophetic. Immobile.” The presence of the old man, Father John, turns the party into an exchange of bitter, impressionistic reflections on human struggle and death. Kabnis wants out. His bitter fury culminates in a full-page rant directed at the nearly catatonic old slave, seeming to scold him – most unfairly - for his own decrepitude: “You’re dead already . . . “You ain’t got no sight.” I don’t think I can infer a coherent message to this rant except that this entire encounter seems a literal reckoning with the burden of enslavement’s legacy for people like Kabnis, young and Northern and eager to look exclusively forward. But there’s no getting shut of this particular past. Leaving the relative liberty of the North and coming South is what got Kabnis into this dark basement, drunk and face-to-face with ugly history. And it knocks him for a loop.
I'll confess that I'm not a fan of Toomer’s narration of that scene. To me there is something irksomely mannered about it. It seemed that way to me in 1985, too, though I didn't have the words back then to name what I thought the trouble was. As I embarked on rereading Cane I wondered if I would think of it today as deprecatingly as I had back then: as a book we were reading more as an outstanding specimen of a particular literary movement than as a timeless classic. Not everybody slights it in this way. In an essay accompanying a 2018 reissue of Cane, a commentator called it “oracular, delirious and American — rich with the intensities of Melville, the expansiveness of Whitman.” Was it? In Barks’ class it was obvious to me that Invisible Man was an all-timer, and The Color Purple, as new as it was, already showed signs that it would one day occupy the canonical status it has since secured. But how enduringly great was some of the rest of what we were reading? Reexamining the content of that course, I believe much of what we read in a mid-1980s single semester survey course devoted to America’s greatest black literature has been surpassed by what has been published since. Just off the top of my head: Beloved, A Lesson Before Dying, The Known World, The Sellout, Sing Unburied Sing, The Underground Railroad, and the better part of the oeuvre of August Wilson. There’s much more I haven’t named. There's also the astonishing resurrection of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1933 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a movement that was already gathering steam when I took that Barks class in 1985 and has swept the world in the time that I’ve been teaching high school English. It has made 20 appearances on the AP English exam since 1988. That’s one numerical measure – there’s no estimating how many thousands of hearts the story of Janie Crawford has touched. With the iconicizing of that novel and all the brilliant new black literature that has reached the bookstores and the book clubs and the classrooms and the awards lists in the last 40 years, do Jean Toomer and Charles Chesnutt and Frank Yerby still make the cut? A Harlem Renaissance course or a Black Literature Before World War II course would be incomplete without Cane, but in 2026 I don’t think it has a place any longer in a survey of the best of the best. That’s not meant to disparage Cane but to applaud what Toomer’s literary descendants have accomplished.
One of those descendants is Atlanta’s Tayari Jones, author of the acclaimed new novel Kin. Part of rereading Cane is wondering what Toomer might have pulled off had he continued to write and publish into the 1930s and 40s. “Yeah, Cane is amazing but it’s no _____________________” – What unwritten Toomer novels, works he might have composed once he gained greater control of his gifts, could have filled in the blank in that sentence? Jones is her own author, of course, but I would put the name of Kin there as one of those texts that has surpassed Cane. It is historical fiction, the story of two motherless daughters raised as devoted friends in rural Louisiana and sent out into the world in the Civil Rights era, one to the perfumed world of the black elite at Spelman College in Atlanta, the other to gritty rhythm-and-blues Memphis. The chapters alternate voices between Vernice in Atlanta and Annie in Memphis, each of the young women experiencing the many inequalities and changes of that era – and her personal struggles with absent mothers and with love and sex – in her own complicated and dramatic way. And the different milieus of two different important cities of the black South make Kin lush with history. It’s amazing, and it doesn’t always go where your expectations based on previous experience tell you it might. That’s part of the wonder of it.
Of course reading at my age has really changed from what it was when I was reading in 1985 (that's the whole premise of this little project!). There’s a kind of fresh excitement to reading a great novel for the first time when you’re young, an excitement I haven’t felt in a long time and I sometimes miss that feeling. But the breadth of experience that comes with age brings its own pleasures to reading. Extensive life experience - including extensive reading experience - makes some things more intelligible to you and more able to reach you. The list of authors I’ve read who got me ready to read and appreciate Kin is long, including Isabel Wilkerson and the ones I studied in Coleman Barks’ class, but also Jane Austen, Julia Alvarez, Hilary Mantel, and Colm Toibin. As I read Kin I also kept thinking of Andrew Young’s wonderful memoir An Easy Burden for what I learned from him about what it was to be young, black, well-educated, and sophisticated in Atlanta during the Civil Rights era and its atmosphere of possibility. Andy Young would have been right at home as a character in Kin, advocating for the Movement in somebody’s Collier Heights parlor while Vernice and her smart young friends listen raptly.
And Jean Toomer’s rural Georgians would have known how to get around in Tayari Jones’ Honeysuckle, Louisiana, would known something of what was in the hearts of people they passed on the road. I’m glad I reread Cane before I read Kin. I think maybe that with his sensitivity to the lives of women Toomer would have been delighted to read about the adventures and heartbreaks of Annie and Vernice in that momentous time and maybe, hopefully given himself a little credit for his part, however small, in making their story possible.
