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16. Blood-Burning Moon
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cane, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Navigating Identity
Racism in the Jim Crow Era
Feminine Allure
Nature vs. Society
The Power and Limitations of Language
Summary
Analysis
Seventh Street, the heart of the Black community in Washington, D.C., is a place where “money burns” and well-dressed bootleggers race by in fancy cars. It is the “bastard” child of social forces in the 1920s. Prohibition has enriched bootleggers, and World War I helped to instigate the mass exodus of Black people from the South. Seventh Street pulses with “black reddish blood” that’s too rich and precious to be wasted. If God were a “Nigger God,” the waste of this blood would bring about Judgment Day.
The Northern section of Cane begins with a vignette or prose poem describing the bustling, vibrant, and diverse Black community in Washington, D.C. The Great Migration brings more people from the South to the North, and this piece celebrates their diversity while also acknowledging the ongoing difficulties that Black people in America face. In using a racial slur to imagine a Black God, Toomer emphasizes the difference between the Black experience of America (even in the North) and the White one, implying that the unnecessary suffering, marginalization, and violence inflicted on Black people by White society flies in the face of a just or merciful deity.
Themes
