Previous
6. Cotton Song
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
A quatrain describes the sound of wind in the sugarcane fields, rustling like the sound of talking voices that beckon the listener to come.
The quatrains which occur at the beginning, middle, and end of this short story form a refrain. This reflects the experimental nature of Cane as a literary production. It also reinforces the idea of the story as a sort of parable or moral folk tale from which readers should draw moral lessons.
Themes
The narrator of “Carma" watches as Carma, a physically imposing woman, drives her wagon home along the dusty old road that locals call the Dixie Pike. She sees, but doesn’t acknowledge, his stare. Eventually, she fades from his view, leaving only a cloud of dust behind her, which mixes with the smoke drifting from the sawdust piles at the mill. The smoke and dust beautifully diffuse the golden light of the sunset, sending the narrator into a reverie. In the distance, he hears cowbells, trucks driving home, and girls singing as they do their chores.
Carma is a much more substantial character than Karintha or Becky—she has a backstory and motivations and feelings that are visible to readers. Yet, she also functions as a muse of sorts for the narrator, who follows her passage with rapt attention. The opening scene emphasizes the beauty of nature while also reminding readers that making a living here, in the rural South, requires a lot of hard labor.
Themes
A quatrain describes the sound of the wind in the corn fields, rustling like the sound of talking voices that beckon the listener to come.
The second quatrain suggests orality, as if the poem’s speaker is listening to an audience responding to a storyteller. Here, as elsewhere, Toomer plays with oral and folk traditions to give urgency and immediacy to his work.
Themes
The narrator of “Carma” explains that Carma’s husband, Bane, is in prison. Their story is a “crude melodrama.” When Bane’s work kept him away from home for too long, Carma started cheating on him. When he heard rumors and accused her of infidelity, she took a gun and rushed from the house into a stand of sugarcane. Hearing a gunshot, Bane assumed she had killed herself, so he asked some neighbors to help him find her body. One located Carma and carried her back to her house.
A melodrama is a story characterized by action and excess rather than psychological realism. Carma and Bane thus become character types. Carma’s name gestures toward the concept of karma, the Hindu belief that one’s actions accrue good or bad consequences based on their morality. A“bane,” meanwhile, is a source of harm, ruin, or death. Symbolically, then, Carma and Bane’s story is of a fundamental misalignment of needs and communication. Carma takes lovers because Bane isn’t present enough—and it seems that Bane’s actions have cost Carma her life.
Themes
Get the entire Cane LitChart as a printable PDF.
But Carma was still alive—she’d only fired the shot to fool Bane. When one of the neighbors started poking around her body, looking for the bullet hole, Bane saw her become aroused and he knew that the rumors of her philandering were true. In a rage, he lashed out and killed one of the men who’d helped him find her. Carma’s narrator asks if she is justified in taking lovers now, since Bane is in prison for murder. The story closes with the same quatrain that opened it.
The narrator strongly insinuates that Carma’s desire—for touch, for love, and for appreciation—are natural and normal. It’s Bane’s inability to provide these for her that leads to trouble. The circumstances of their lives—both the job that takes Bane away and the social taboos around sexual relationships—are the underlying causes of the sad situation that entraps them both.
Themes
