ABSTRACT
My epigraph emphasizes that Jean Toomer considered Cane to be an embodied physical form, an “organism” that could be “dismembered” through fragmentation. Toomer’s language here figures the textual form as a material body that through imagined violence is transfigured into a lynched figure that is “dismembered,” “torn,” and “scattered” by the violent action of others. Toomer’s description of the possible violence to the form of the book echoes the descriptions within Cane of the destroyed bodies of lynching victims Tom Burwell in “Blood Burning Moon” and Mame Lamkins in “Kabnis” and connects to the imagined fate of the body of the speaker of “Portrait in Georgia.” In his description of the textual “organism” and its possible dismemberment, Toomer forces us to connect the fragmentation of the textual form through the violently decontextualizing format of anthologies and the repeated horror of lynching that haunts Cane’s stories and poems. This epigraph makes us reconsider Toomer’s more well-known account of the text’s abstract “curved” design, as Toomer’s language here constructs Cane as a living textual body and as a vulnerable body always at risk of racialized violence.
