Cane

Cane is a book unlike any other, mixing short stories, poems and a final piece written almost like a play. Its first part is set among Black farmers in rural Georgia, where women such as Karintha, Becky and Fern live and suffer among cane fields, sawmills and dusk; its second moves north to the cities of Washington and Chicago; and its third returns south with Ralph Kabnis, an educated Black teacher from the North, who struggles to face the legacy of slavery.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) wrote the book after working as a teacher in Georgia in 1921, and it was published in 1923. Hailed as a masterpiece, it became one of the founding works of the Harlem Renaissance. Compare Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which Toomer admired.