Kabnis

"God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty," Kabnis beseeches. "Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. . . . Dear Jesus, do not chain me to myself and set these hills and valleys heaving with folk-songs. So close to me that I cannot reach them. There is a radiant beauty in the night that touches and . . . tortures me. Ugh. Hell. Get up you damn fool. Look around. Whats beautiful there? Hog pens and chicken yards. Dirty red mud. Stinking outhouse. Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?"
-- Jean Toomer

Georgia forced the mixed-race Toomer (and Kabnis) to confront the African American past—the mixture of agrarian beauty, spiritual yearning, violence, and oppression—and to ponder his own place within the races and within the race to which society assigned him. Toomer responded with a mixture of poetry, lyrical sketches, short stories, vignettes, and finally, in the work's third and final section, the genre-bending "Kabnis," which mixes the lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic modes. The resulting composite, Cane, evokes powerful feelings of aesthetic pleasure, despair, confusion, and longing for mystical transcendence.