Cane Themes

The characters in Cane live in an era and a society that sorts people into strict categories by race, gender, and class. Yet, the poems, vignettes, and short stories in the collection repeatedly insist that reality is not that stark or simple. Cane instead portrays identity as a fluid, ever-evolving manifestation of a person’s experience in the world. By doing so, it makes an eloquent case that a better future awaits a society that can…

Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration, Cane paints a devastating picture of race and racism in America in the early 20th century. Black and multiracial people—both categorized as “Black” by their society—face an uphill battle to earn a living or create lives of dignity. While the lives of most of the Northern characters suggest the promise of a brighter future for Black people in America, in most…

An encounter with the natural world lies at the heart of almost every piece in Cane. Even when nature is absent literally, characters bring it into existence, as when John images the alley behind the Howard Theater morphing into a tree-lined country lane. Encounters with the natural world give meaning to people’s often confusing and painful lives. When Ralph Kabnis moves to Georgia from Washington, D. C., the beauty of the natural world is…

The very form of Cane, which brings together a series of interrelated yet often contradictory and fragmentary vignettes, poems, and short stories, suggests the power of language to remake the world. By reflecting early 20th-century society for its readers, Cane articulates the rot of racism, segregation, and violence in American society and positions itself as an inspiration for change. But it also recognizes the limits of this desire, because language involves both a speaker…