Cane quotes

Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, O cant you see it, O cant you see it, Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon … When the sun goes down.

Men had always wanted her, this Karintha, even as a child, Karintha carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down.

Old men rode her hobbyhorse upon their knees. Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men.

Young men danced with her at frolics when they should have been dancing with their grown-up girls. God grant us youth, secretly prayed the old men. The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them.

This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live.

The young fellows counted the time to pass before she would be old enough to mate with them. This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her.

Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live.

At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldnt see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that …

Karintha is a woman.

Men do not know that the soul of her was a growing thing ripened too soon.

They will bring their money; they will die not having found it out … Karintha at twenty, carrying beauty, perfect as dusk when the sun goes down. Karintha …

Mouth setting in a twist that held her eyes, harsh, vacant, staring … Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks’ mouths. She wouldnt tell. Poor Catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks’ mouths.

White folks and black folks built her cabin, fed her and her growing baby, prayed secretly to God who’d put His cross upon her and cast her out.

When the first was born, the white folks said they’d have no more to do with her.

A single room held down to earth … O fly away to Jesus … by a leaning chimney …

Six trains each day rumbled past and shook the ground under her cabin.

Fords, and horse- and mule-drawn buggies went back and forth along the road. No one ever saw her. Trainmen, and passengers who’d heard about her, threw out papers and food.

Her voice is loud. Echoes, like rain, sweep the valley. Dusk takes the polish from the rails. Lights twinkle in scattered houses. From far away, a sad strong song. Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman.

She does not sing; her body is a song.

She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out … The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa.

Pungent and composite, the smell of farmyards is the fragrance of the woman. She does not sing; her body is a song. She is in the forest, dancing. Torches flare … juju men, greegree, witch-doctors … torches go out …

The Dixie Pike has grown from a goat path in Africa.

Foxie, the bitch, slicks back her ears and barks at the rising moon.)

She denied. He couldnt see that she was becoming hysterical. He would have liked to take his fists and beat her. Who was strong as a man. Stronger.

Words, like corkscrews, wormed to her strength.

It fizzled out. Grabbing a gun, she rushed from the house and plunged across the road into a canebrake … There, in quarter heaven shone the crescent moon … Bane was afraid to follow till he heard the gun go off.

They met in the road where lamplight showed tracks dissolving in the loose earth about the cane. The search began. Moths flickered the lamps. They put them out. Really, because she still might be live enough to shoot.

Time and space have no meaning in a canefield.

No more than the interminable stalks … Someone stumbled over her. A cry went up. From the road, one would have thought that they were cornering a rabbit or a skunk … It is difficult carrying dead weight through cane.

… not let her know whom it came from, watch out for her wedding-day and give her a magnificent something with no name on it, buy a house and deed it to her, rescue her from some unworthy fellow who had tricked her into marrying him.

As you know, men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.

She did not deny them, yet the fact was that they were denied. A sort of superstition crept into their consciousness of her being somehow above them. Being above them meant that she was not to be approached by anyone. She became a virgin.

They were strange eyes. In this, that they sought nothing—that is, nothing that was obvious and tangible and that one could see, and they gave the impression that nothing was to be denied.

When a woman seeks, you will have observed, her eyes deny.

Fern’s eyes desired nothing that you could give her; there was no reason why they should withhold. Men saw her eyes and fooled themselves. Fern’s eyes said to them that she was easy.

If it were dusk, then they’d wait for the searchlight of the evening train which you could see miles up the track before it flared across the Dixie Pike, close to her home. Wherever they looked, you’d follow them and then waver back.

Like her face, the whole countryside seemed to flow into her eyes.

Flowed into them with the soft listless cadence of Georgia’s South. A young Negro, once, was looking at her, spellbound, from the road.

Saw her on her porch, head tilted a little forward where the nail was, eyes vaguely focused on the sunset. Saw her face flow into them, the countryside and something that I call God, flowing into them …

Nothing ever really happened. Nothing ever came to Fern, not even I.

Something I would do for her. Some fine unnamed thing … And, friend, you? She is still living, I have reason to know. Her name, against the chance that you might happen down that way, is Fernie May Rosen.

This much is certain: an inspired Negress, of wide reputation for being sanctified, drew a portrait of a black madonna on the courthouse wall. And King Barlo left town. He left his image indelibly upon the mind of Esther.

He became the starting point of the only living patterns that her mind was to know.

Esther begins to dream. The low evening sun sets the windows of McGregor’s notion shop aflame. Esther makes believe that they really are aflame. The town fire department rushes madly down the road. It ruthlessly shoves black and white idlers to one side. It whoops.

Folks lazing on store windowsills wonder what on earth can be the matter with Jim Crane’s gal, as she passes them. “Come to remember, she always was a little off, a little crazy, I reckon.” Esther seeks her own room, and locks the door.

Her mind is a pink mesh-bag filled with baby toes.

Using the noise of the town clock striking twelve to cover the creaks of her departure, Esther slips into the quiet road. The town, her parents, most everyone is sound asleep. This fact is a stable thing that comforts her.

For a moment Esther wishes that she might be like her. Not white; she has no need for being that. But sharp, sporty, with getup about her. Barlo is connected with that wish. She mustnt wish. Wishes only make you restless.

Emptiness is a thing that grows by being moved.

“I’ll not think. Not wish. Just set my mind against it.” Then the thought comes to her that those purposeless, easygoing men will possess him, if she doesnt. Purpose is not dead in her, now that she comes to think of it.

Up from the dusk the full moon came. Glowing like a fired pine-knot, it illumined the great door and soft showered the Negro shanties aligned along the single street of factory town.

The full moon in the great door was an omen.

Negro women improvised songs against its spell.

Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen. Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall. Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns.

And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees.

Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her. By measure of that warm glow which came into her mind at thought of him, he had won her.

Louisa sang as she came over the crest of the hill from the white folks’ kitchen.

Her skin was the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall.

Her breasts, firm and up-pointed like ripe acorns. And her singing had the low murmur of winds in fig trees. Bob Stone, younger son of the people she worked for, loved her. By the way the world reckons things, he had won her.

“I did that, sho. But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there’s times when they jes wont come. I dunno why.

Seems like th love I feels fo yo done stole m tongue.

I got it now. Whee! Louisa, honey, I oughtnt tell y, I feel I oughtnt cause yo is young an goes t church an I has had other gals, but Louisa I sho do love y.

“I did that, sho.

But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there’s times when they jes wont come.

I dunno why. Seems like th love I feels fo yo done stole m tongue. I got it now. Whee!

Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, Bootleggers in silken shirts, Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.

Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War.

A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington. Wedges rust in soggy wood … Split it! In two! Again!

Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head.

His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thing, stuffed, prop up in the air. He is way down. He is sinking.

A blanket was borrowed from a neighbor house. I sat beside her through the night. I saw the dawn steal over Washington.

The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea.

Avey’s face was pale, and her eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn. I hated to wake her. Orphan-woman …

John: Soon the director will herd you, my full-lipped, distant beauties, and tame you, and blunt your sharp thrusts in loosely suggestive movements, appropriate to Broadway. (O dance!)

Soon the audience will paint your dusk faces white, and call you beautiful.

(O dance!) Soon I … (O dance!) I’d like …

Dorris dances. She forgets her tricks. She dances.

Glorious songs are the muscles of her limbs.

And her singing is of canebrake loves and mangrove feastings.

Her soul is like a little thrust-tailed dog that follows her, whimpering.

She is large enough, I know, to find a warm spot for it. But each night when she comes home and closes the big outside storm door, the little dog is left in the vestibule, filled with chills till morning.

Houses are shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon the dusk body of the street.

Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your liver lips to the lean, white spring. Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Upon the gleaming limbs and asphalt torso of a dreaming nigger. Shake your curled wool-blossoms, nigger. Open your liver lips to the lean, white spring. Stir the root-life of a withered people. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Dark swaying forms of Negroes are street songs that woo virginal houses.

Dan Moore walks southward on Thirteenth Street. The low limbs of budding chestnut trees recede above his head. Chestnut buds and blossoms are wool he walks upon. The eyes of houses faintly touch him as he passes them. Soft girl-eyes, they set him singing.

Whats the good of all you know if you dont know that? I wont let myself. I? Mrs. Pribby who reads newspapers all night wont. What has she got to do with me? She is me, somehow. No she’s not. Yes she is.

She is the town, and the town wont let me love you, Dan.

Dont you know? You could make it let me if you would. Why wont you? Youre selfish. I’m not strong enough to buck it. Youre too selfish to buck it, for me. I wish you’d go. You irritate me. Dan, please go.

“Happy, Muriel? No, not happy. Your aim is wrong. There is no such thing as happiness.

Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them.

No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death. Not happy, Muriel. Say that you have tried to make them create.

“Jesus was once a leper!”

He is as cool as a green stem that has just shed its flower.

Rows of gaping faces strain towards him. They are distant, beneath him, impalpable. Squeezing out, Dan again treads upon the corn-foot man. The man shoves him.

My body is opaque to the soul.

Driven of the spirit, long have I sought to temper it unto the spirit’s longing, But my mind, too, is opaque to the soul. A closed lid is my soul’s flesh-eye.

“

You have the beauty of a gem fathoms under sea.

”

“What can I say to you, brave dear woman—I cant talk love.

Love is a dry grain in my mouth unless it is wet with kisses.

”

A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference.

Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness.

There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real. He saw the faces of the people at the tables round him.

Her answer is a crash of jazz from the palm-hidden orchestra.

Crimson Gardens is a body whose blood flows to a clot upon the dance floor.

Art and Helen clot. Soon, Bona and Paul.

That I thought of her. That my thoughts were matches thrown into a dark window. And all the while the Gardens were purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk.

I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk.

That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know her whom I brought here with me to these Gardens which are purple like a bed of roses would be at dusk.”

The cabin room is spaced fantastically about it. Whitewashed hearth and chimney, black with sooty saw-teeth. Ceiling, patterned by the fringed globe of the lamp. The walls, unpainted, are seasoned a rosin yellow. And cracks between the boards are black.

These cracks are the lips the night winds use for whispering. Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.

Kabnis, against his will, lets his book slip down, and listens to them. The warm whiteness of his bed, the lamplight, do not protect him from the weird chill of their song:

Kabnis: Near me. Now. Whoever you are, my warm glowing sweetheart, do not think that the face that rests beside you is the real Kabnis. Ralph Kabnis is a dream.

And dreams are faces with large eyes and weak chins and broad brows that get smashed by the fists of square faces. The body of the world is bull-necked.

A dream is a soft face that fits uncertainly upon it … God, if I could develop that in words. Give what I know a bull-neck and a heaving body, all would go well with me, wouldnt it, sweetheart?

“

God Almighty, dear God, dear Jesus, do not torture me with beauty.

Take it away. Give me an ugly world. Ha, ugly. Stinking like unwashed niggers. 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?

God, he doesnt exist, but nevertheless He is ugly. Hence, what comes from Him is ugly. Lynchers and business men, and that cockroach Hanby, especially. How come that he gets to be principal of a school? Of the school I’m driven to teach in?

He forces himself to narrow to a cabin silhouetted on a knoll about a mile away. Peace. Negroes within it are content. They farm. They sing. They love. They sleep. Kabnis wonders if perhaps they can feel him. If perhaps he gives them bad dreams.

Things are so immediate in Georgia.

Thinking that now he can go to sleep, he reenters his room. He builds a fire in the open hearth. The room dances to the tongues of flames, and sings to the crackling and spurting of the logs.

What do they think this is, anyway, some sort of temperance school? How did I ever land in such a hole? Ugh. One might just as well be in his grave. Still as a grave. Jesus, how still everything is.

Does the world know how still it is? People make noise. They are afraid of silence.

Of what lives, and God, of what dies in silence. There must be many dead things moving in silence. They come here to touch me. I swear I feel their fingers … Come, Ralph, pull yourself together. What in hell was that?

What in hell was that? Only the rustle of leaves, I guess. You know, Ralph, old man, it wouldnt surprise me at all to see a ghost. People dont think there are such things.

They rationalize their fear, and call their cowardice science.

Fine bunch, they are. Damit, that was a noise. And not the wind either. A chicken maybe. Hell, chickens dont wander around this time of night. What in hell is it?

Layman:

Ever hear tell of a single shot killin moren one rabbit, Professor?

Kabnis: No, of course not, that is, but then—

Halsey:

Yankees are right up t th minute in tellin folk how t turn a trick. They always were good at talkin.

Kabnis: Well, anyway, they should be stopped.

Lewis:

Life has already told him more than he is capable of knowing. It has given him in excess of what he can receive.

I have been offered. Stuff in his stomach curdled, and he vomited me.

His words reach Lewis halfway to the corner.

Night, soft belly of a pregnant Negress, throbs evenly against the torso of the South.

Night throbs a womb-song to the South. Cane- and cotton-fields, pine forests, cypress swamps, sawmills, and factories are fecund at her touch. Night’s womb-song sets them singing.

Layman was feedin it back there that day you thought I ran out fearin things. White folks feed it cause their looks are words. Niggers, black niggers feed it cause theyre evil an their looks are words. Yallar niggers feed it.

This whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t hell in a holy avalanche of words.

I want t feed th soul—I know what that is; th preachers dont—but I’ve got t feed it. I wish t God some lynchin white man ud stick his knife through it an pin it to a tree. An pin it to a tree.