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28. Bona and Paul
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
Late one warm Georgia night, in the ancient, drafty cabin that the Black school where he teaches has given him for living quarters, Ralph Kabnis can’t sleep. He tries to read, but as the wind whistles through the cracks in the cabin’s chinking he hears it as an eerie song warning Black people that they’ll have no peace in “White country” except in death. One of the hens from the nearby chicken yard finds its way into the cabin, and Kabnis springs from the bed and catches it. Enraged, he carries it outside, wringing it by the neck so severely that its head pops off. He hides the dead chicken behind a bush.
Readers enter this story through the eyes of Ralph Kabnis, and already at the outset there’s a deep sense of paranoia and fear running through his experience of the South. The incident with the chicken emphasizes the potential for violence to break out. It also contributes to a sense of Kabnis as a man on the verge of a breakdown. Hiding it in the bush suggests an unwillingness to take responsibility for himself or his actions.
Themes
Angry about his life and his degraded position, Kabnis wants to blame God, but when he turns his eyes up to the heavens, the beauty of the night overwhelms him. So he instead complains to God about unfair it is to make the world so beautiful but allow it to be so cruel to Black men. Gathering his wits, Kabnis tries to calm himself down, but he can hardly stand his “loneliness,” “dumbness,” and the “awful, intangible oppression” of the world. From where he stands, Kabnis can see the house where the headmaster (Hanby) and his family live and the trees of the Georgia forest. Many miles beyond them, he knows, lies the North. Bu it—and the comparative safety and dignity it offers Black people, compared to the South—seem as unreal and insubstantial as the headmaster’s house in the dark.
Kabnis’s relationship with the South is as vexed as his relationship with God. On the one hand, he has a lot to be angry about—Black people in the South in the early decades of the 20th century were segregated, mistreated, and subject to violence. Yet there is beauty in the world and the Southern landscape that doesn’t excuse the violence but helps to contextualize the lives of the people who live there. Besides, as Kabnis’s longing—but wary—look to the North suggests, the situation there, while better in some ways, isn’t perfect, either. Until society truly realigns itself, injustice will reign everywhere.
Themes
Inside the cabin, Kabnis kindles a fire and lights a cigarette, knowing he’ll be in trouble if Hanby finds out he smokes. A noise from outside scares him, and he grabs the fire poker to defend himself from the ghost or the lynch mob he’s sure is coming for him. He opens the door to discover a lost calf. It’s now early Sunday morning. An anxious Kabnis looks forward to getting some time social time with his friends Halsey and Layman. But he’ll have to go to church first—down here, everybody is expected to. Kabnis dislikes the loud, effusive way southern Black people worship.
Throughout the first section, it becomes clear that while there are systemic injustices like racism at play, Kabnis is also the architect of some of his own misery thanks to his refusal or inability to conform himself to the expectations of Black Southern society. He’s alienated from the South by dint of being a Northerner, and he's alienated from the North because of his choice to live in the South. This suggests that in early 20th-century America, the limited options offered to Black people are unjust and stifling.
Themes
Portraits of ancestors (White, Black, and mixed race) hang above the mantle in Fred Halsey’s parlor. His house is close to the church, and has he, Layman, and Kabnis sit around a cheerful fire to chat, they can hear the singing and shouting of parishioners attending the afternoon service. Halsey is a wagon-maker. Layman is an itinerant preacher. Kabnis tells Halsey and Layman that the South isn’t as bad as he expected it to be. But, Layman and Halsey warn, although it seems like times are changing, violence still simmers just below the surface. Even though there hasn’t been a lynching in their community for a while, they know it could happen again at any time. Layman describes some of the more recent lynching incidents, alarming Kabnis.
The portraits in Halsey’s house quietly remind readers of how porous race lines truly are. They also suggest the artificiality and injustice of segregating people by race. Yet, a lot of work goes into separating people into categories like “Black” and “White” and then ensuring that people stay within those categories. The horror stories Layman tells Kabnis emphasize this point. They also give readers a better context for Kabnis’s fear the preceding night. Although it seems very unlikely that he or anyone he knows will actually come to harm, the possibility always exists.
Themes
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The men’s talk turns to Lewis, another Black man from up North who, like Kabnis, has earned school headmaster Hanby’s contempt. Halsey and Layman expect Lewis to run into trouble because of the way he stirs things up and asks questions. Like the other day when he asked Layman about the death of Mame Lamkins. Kabnis is curious. After a dramatic pause, Layman tells him about Mame Lamkins, a pregnant woman who tried to hide her husband from an angry lynch mob. They shot her, cut her unborn child from her womb, and pinned it to a tree with a knife.
The story of Mame Lamkins—whose cloyingly childish name serves to underline her innocence and highlight the excessive violence of her death—is based on the story of Mary Turner, a pregnant woman who was lynched and mutilated in the way described here (and for similar reasons) in Brooks County, Georgia in the spring of 1918. Mary’s and Mame’s fates expose the virulence and cruel vindictiveness of anti-Black racial hatred in early 20th-century America.
Themes
Just as Layman concludes his story, a brick sails through the window with a note wrapped around it saying, “You northern nigger, its time fer y t leave.” Kabnis, sure the message is meant for him, flees Halsey’s parlor in a blind panic.
By this time the story has mentioned (although not yet named) the second Northern visitor to the town. So there’s no specific reason for Kabnis to assume the message is meant for him, besides the fact that it’s delivered to him. His fear speaks to the great psychological trauma caused by continual threats of violence.
Themes
Kabnis runs home, certain that White lynchers lurk in every cane field or stretch of woods. When he gets to his cabin, he carefully searches the inside for would-be lynchers, too. But he is alone until Layman and Halsey arrive. They light a fire and try to calm Kabnis down by offering him some illegal alcohol. Unfortunately, Hanby comes in as they’re passing the bottle.
The book does nothing to suggest that Kabnis’s fear is entirely ridiculous. After all, it just described the horrific murder and mutilation of an innocent Black woman at the hands of a White mob. But it does suggest that Kabnis’s reaction is paranoid and excessive. Kabnis’s identity is insecure in part because he allows outside forces—Hanby, Layman, Halsey, White people’s opinions—to define him for himself. He seems less like a person than a character in his own interior melodrama.
Themes
Stiffly, the stuck-up and self-important Hanby lectures Kabnis about the duty of educated and cultured Black men setting a good example and proving that “the Negro race can be just like any other race.” Since Kabnis has failed in this duty, Hanby fires him, warning him of legal consequences if he fails to vacate the cabin by the next morning. Halsey tells Hanby that he’ll take responsibility for Kabnis going forward. Kabnis knows that he should speak for himself to save his dignity. But he fails to.
Hanby’s prissy gentility and easy self-assurance contrast with Kabnis’s spinelessness. The book clearly holds people like Hanby in contempt. Hanby is a caricature of the “Race Man,” an idea that arises in the work of W. E. B. DuBois and others who argued that Black Americans’ lives could best be improved through the efforts of exemplary characters whose intelligence, work ethic, and success would hopefully convince White society that Black people could be their equals.
Themes
Just then, Lewis arrives. He’s come to tell Kabnis that the brick’s message was meant for him, since he’s irritated some Black locals, including Hanby. But, he says, he won’t let them bully him and he plans to stay for at least another month. Impressed with his moxie, Halsey invites him to drop by the wagon shop for a visit sometime. Lewis and Kabnis lock eyes. Lewis’s strength impresses Kabnis, but feeling inferior angers him. He decides to dislike Lewis. Lewis asks to speak with Hanby outside, and the two men go out, leaving Hasley to fuss over Kabnis like he’s a child.
The story positions Lewis and Kabnis as reflections of each other. Both are outsiders from the North, but their reactions to the South are quite different. Although Kabnis claims that he likes the South, his palpable fear suggests otherwise. Lewis finds the town antagonistic yet stays to prove his own mettle. Lewis doesn’t let others define him or his worth, while Kabnis’s sense of self seems to depend almost entirely on what other people think of him.
Themes
Kabnis spends the next month working with Halsey in his wagon shop, but business is slow, so Kabnis spends a great deal of time in the shop’s cellar, talking to the “very old man” (later identified as Father John) who lives there. On the afternoon before his departure, Lewis drops by to visit Halsey. He says that many Black locals don’t like his questions or opinions. They think he’s stirring up trouble. Halsey thinks Kabnis should hear some of Lewis’s ideas. Lewis thinks Kabnis knows enough through experience, but that he doesn’t want to admit it.
While the Great Migration brought Black people from the South to the North, the era also saw movement in the opposite direction, with Black Northerners like Kabnis and Lewis (and Cane’s author, Jean Toomer, who, like Kabnis, worked at a school in rural Georgia for a period) traveling to the South. The story emphasizes the ways in which these movements destabilize and begin to change previously ossified societies, suggesting that the circulation of people and ideas might bring about social changes. But the world of the story isn’t there yet.
Themes
A White man, Mr. Ramsay, brings in an axe with a broken handle, and Halsey tries to talk Kabnis through fixing it. But Kabnis quickly makes a mistake that even Mr. Ramsay can clearly see, and in his embarrassment, he botches the work completely. Halsey fixes Kabnis’s work quickly and effortlessly, then refuses Mr. Ramsay’s offer of payment. After Mr. Ramsay leaves, Hanby arrives and bossily summons Kabnis to fix the axel on his buggy. Kabnis silently and immediately (if sullenly) obeys. Lewis watches all of this silently.
The way that Kabnis wilts under Mr. Ramsay’s attention speaks to his insecurity and his willingness to let others define him. Unlike Lewis and Halsey (and even Hanby), he lacks a solid sense of who he is and what he’s worth. It also seems that part of his willingness to let a White man like Mr. Ramsay define him stems from his caricatured view of life in the South—remember how quickly his imagination leapt to the threat of lynch mobs when he thought he was threatened. In contrast, Lewis’s imperturbable silence suggests his strength of character.
Themes
Then, Halsey’s sister, Carrie K., arrives with lunch. Carrie is young and beautiful, and Lewis more than half falls in love with her on the spot. She warms him like the sun and makes him want to rescue her from this small Georgia town. At first, she responds warmly to his attention, but then her southern propriety kicks in and she rushes to the cellar to escape.
Carrie initially appears in this story as the muse-woman character typical in the first two sections of the book. She is notable for her effect on Lewis more than in her own right. The richly significant unspoken exchange between them comes to a halt when Carrie remembers what’s expected of a good girl, suggesting a conflict between natural urges (like sexual attraction) and social codes.
Themes
Lewis asks about the man (Father John) who lives there, and Kabnis enjoys a momentary sense of superiority since he knows more than Lewis does. When Carrie returns, she remembers to tell Halsey that Mr. Marmon will be binging in a lumber wagon that needs immediate repairs. Her soft voice sends Lewis into an agony of desire. He wants to take her North with him. When he says goodbye to Halsey, Halsey invites him to stop by that evening for a send-off party.
Earlier in the story, Kabnis intuitively sensed that Lewis had something (a strong sense of identity) that Kabnis himself lacked. And rather than taking a lesson from Lewis, he resented Lewis’s security and has perceived him as a rival ever since. It’s clear that this pettiness does nothing to Lewis and only further isolates and harms Kabnis’s psyche, however.
Themes
Late that night, Halsey and Kabnis bring Lewis and two women, Cora and Stella, down to the cellar. Father John sits silently in a chair in a room that also holds two beds, a table and chairs, and a mirror. Kabnis compares Father John to the Roman god Vulcan, but Lewis thinks he looks more like the prophet John the Baptist. He asks the old man’s name, and Halsey says they just call him “Father.” According to Kabnis, he never speaks other than to mumble incoherently on occasion. Hasley retorts that Kabnis never gives Father John enough room to get a word in edgewise.
Although the story isn’t unkind to Cora and Stella, they represent a different kind of woman than the virtuous and unspoiled Carrie. Kabnis, whose experience as a Black northerner transplanted to the South has been one of fear and degradation—he’s fallen from teaching into manual labor—associates Father John with Vulcan, the maimed Roman god of metalworking and volcanoes. Lewis, in contrast, associates him with John the Baptist, the cousin and prophet of Jesus Christ in the New Testament—a fundamentally more hopeful image and one that suggests that if or when Father John speaks, his words will have prophetic import. If that’s the case, the fact that Kabnis hardly lets him speak hints that he might not be receptive to the message.
Themes
Cora and Stella sit at the table as Kabnis dons a ceremonial robe and joins them, half pretending to be a king, half behaving like he believes he is one. Halsey pours drinks and proposes a toast before remembering that he’s got a half-repaired lumber wagon in the shop. He wants to keep working on it. Lewis sits meditating on Father John, finding all the “pain and beauty of the South” in the old man’s lined face.
Kabnis’s robe suggests the fluidity of his own identity. It's a grand but garish costume that makes him stand out among the others rather than fit in, in much the same way he’s struggled to fit in in the South. Unlike Kabnis, Lewis is able to see not just the difficult and violent parts of Southern Black life, but also the beauty and resilience and artistry in it—in much the same way the book Cane tries to show Southern Black life in a more holistic way.
Themes
The air thickens with tension. Stella, Kabnis, and Halsey talk about the doings of the local moonshiner and other nefarious Black residents of the town. They ignore Lewis, until they realize that he’s started staring at them. Kabnis hates the scrutiny. He tells Lewis to look at Cora, or back at Father John. Then he defensively declares that his ancestors were “Southern bluebloods.” Lewis reminds Kabnis that his ancestors were Black, too—that Kabnis descends from both master and slave and that those two sides fight in him for dominance.
The small talk and gossip give texture to Lewis’s musings about the beauty and pain of Black people’s lives in the South. The people in the cellar and in the wider community are all dignified human beings with complex stories of their own, Cane hints, who face difficulties and dramas in the course of their daily existences. The verbal altercation between Kabnis and Lewis reminds readers of this tension—and of one of the circumstances that contributes to the sense of fluidity in the identities of people like Kabnis and others—the racialized hierarchy in the United States says that Black people are lesser than White people, yet many (if not most) Black Americans have at least some White ancestors due to a history of sexual violence at the hands of enslavers.
Themes
Halsey makes an inappropriate joke about Stella’s sex work, offending her. She defends herself. While Kabnis parades around the cellar with Cora, Halsey takes Lewis aside and tells him about his life. Halsey once wanted an education, but he left school when he realized that the “goody-goody” teachers from the North preferred the students who were better at looking and acting like White people. He’s proud of the work that he does and the life that he made for himself on his own terms, but he’s still bothered by the way prejudice and racism keep him oppressed.
Rather than caricaturing Stella and Cora for their sex work, the story allows Stella to defend herself, demonstrating her dignity and sense of self-worth. Unlike Kabnis, she knows who she is and isn’t ashamed of herself or her life. Neither is Halsey, although both he and Stella have lives which the story implies many people (including the regally-costumed Kabnis and the up-tight Hanby) might consider lowly or degraded. But Halsey and Stella know who they are without shame. Halsey, moreover, correctly identifies the sources of his limited prospects in the hierarchal and ossified racism of the social structures around him, not his personal weaknesses or failings.
Themes
Halsey asks Lewis what he thinks of Kabnis. Overhearing, Kabnis proclaims that he comes from a family of orators and that his whole life he’s tried to form and shape the words that would show the world what’s in his soul. But his soul is a “twisted awful” thing sprung from “nightmare[s].” It’s always hungry. It feeds on the lynching stories Layman tells and the looks of White folks. Kabnis says he wishes a White man would lynch him and cut his soul from his body and pin it to a tree. And he wishes the same fate for Lewis and Halsey and any other person who judges him as weak.
In this moment, Kabnis makes a claim on the power of language to shape the world—a claim that Cane itself has been quietly making throughout. Yet, this cuts both ways: Cane can try to make a more just world by showing Black characters as fully-formed human beings who are valuable in their own right. But bad stories about Black people’s criminality and danger—the kind of stories that feed the violence of lynchings—also have power to shape the world. And trying to tell himself a story about himself that diverges too far from reality—a reality in which he’s demoralized and degraded by manual labor and fear—makes Kabnis more unhappy than he was to begin with.
Themes
Halsey presses another drink on Kabnis. Cora sits in Kabnis’s lap and smothers him with affection. The pain of everyone in the cellar and their limited lives overwhelms Lewis and he runs upstairs and out into the night.
Threats of violence and personal harm weren’t enough to chase Lewis from the town, but the despair and smallness of Kabnis’s thinking sends Lewis fleeing. There is little hope for a future, the book suggests, if Black people can’t recognize their own worth and their role in the American story.
Themes
Very early the next morning, before sunrise, Halsey, Cora, and Stella leave Kabnis in the dark cellar with Father John. Hours later, as he approaching sunrise lightens the room, Kabnis stirs. He berates the old man, accusing him of “mumblin, feedin that ornery thing” in his chest. He associates the old man with the figure of Death, and then gets caught up in a chain of free association. He thinks that the cellar looks like the places they used to “stow away the wornout, no-count” Black people during the days of slavery. He decides that Halsey is a “wornout, no-count” man for abandoning him in the cellar. He brags that, unlike the old man, he has at least seen “th beauty of th world.”
The dawn in this final section of the book is a very clear metaphor for enlightenment or revelation. Halsey doesn’t need illumination; he made it very clear the night before that he has his own sense of pride and dignity intact and that no one can take that from him. Stella and Cora are excluded, too, suggesting that—although they have worth as human beings, they’re not yet ready for the truth either. This leaves only Kabnis, who falls into another linguistic reverie that focuses on, emphasizes, and reinforces his own sense of persecution and misery. This isn’t to say that his feelings are unfounded—racialized hierarchies and segregated opportunities do render life for Black Americans at the turn of the 20th century (and still today) profoundly unfair. But, Cane suggests, focusing on that instead of standing up for oneself won’t solve the problem. Kabnis’s claim to have seen beauty rings hollow given his misery.
Themes
Carrie, coming to bring food to Father John and to fetch Kabnis for Halsey, enters the cellar. Kabnis refuses to move, and she likens his attitude to that of a sinner that shirks church. Kabnis declares that he’ll stay in the cellar with the old man. Then, Father John begins to speak. At first, he says “sin” over and over. Kabnis angrily asks what Father John knows about sin. He says that he himself is both the victim and the evidence of America’s sin. Carrie shushes Kabnis and asks Father John to speak. Slowly, interrupted by Kabnis’s comments, Father John says that White people sinned when they made the Bible lie.
Although earlier scenes made it clear that Kabnis admires (and possibly has romantic feelings for) Carrie, she has little respect for him in this moment because he has done nothing to earn it. In the face of difficulty and injustice, he has allowed others to define him to himself and he has given too much weight to their judgements. He has no solid sense of identity, which is the foundation of having a sense of dignity. He is as unwilling to take responsibility for his own state as White society is unwilling to acknowledge its sin by offering real restitution to the Black people it harmed. Incidentally, all that flowed from the lie—by implication, interpretations of the Bible in favor of enslavement and which cast Black people as subhuman or inherently sinful and dangerous—should remind readers of the power language has to shape the world, since this lie by misinterpretation has had such obvious and significant implications.
Themes
Upstairs, Halsey drops wagon beams on the floor, making thudding noises. Father John sinks back into silence. Carrie is moved by his revelation, but Kabnis declares it useless. Carrie turns to him and places her hands on his face, and slowly he calms down. She helps him take off his ceremonial robe. Sullenly, he grabs the bucket of cold coals and stamps upstairs. With a prayer on her lips, Carrie kneels at Father John’s feet as the sun rises over Georgia.
In the end, Kabnis proves himself to be unworthy and unwilling to hear the real message of Father John’s revelation. Part of the sin is White society’s lie—but part of it also seems to be the willingness of people like Kabnis to let this lie direct the flow of his life. Carrie is poised to hear what Father John has to say and act on it, and so Cane ends with a woman transformed from a muse of beauty into a muse of transformation who points the way toward a better future for all, if American society as a whole is willing to look at itself critically in the harsh light of day and make the necessary—if difficult—changes this self-critical look calls for.
Themes
