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.They often have a narrativefunction: they present in a few concise terms a story or a significant, oftenintensely dramatic, moment in a person s life; these stories are more likevignettes in the structure of Cane and provide contrasts or echoes to the mainstory.They create a sudden irruption, a break in the narrative sequence, andat the same time serve as transitions and expansions.This interplay betweensongs and text is rendered even more complex by the repetition within Kabnis of the same song.In each reiteration, the song assumes a differentmeaning and intensity and in turn gives new meaning and intensity toKabnis s drama. Thus repeated, the song becomes irritating or hauntingand cannot be dispelled.It insistently offers more images for Kabnis to dealwith, and its semantic ambiguity increases the confusion.Yet as it creates anemotion and shapes an idea, it suggests keys to a deeper understanding of the face of the South, for the rhythmical and spiritual exploration of its soul. Repetitions within the song phonetic and semantic provide poeticcontinuities and reenforce the meaning.They also create a spell, a form ofincantation, and function musically.Each song, at the same time unique andpart of a collective utterance, is a call and response to other songs and echoesother calls and responses in the text.It acts as a burden whose musicalityheightens the drama and challenges the imagination.The songs, with their troubling simplicity and subtlety, play an 267Toomer s Cane and the Harlem Renaissanceimportant role in Cane, perhaps because Toomer sensed that this expressiveform, so pervasive in the area he was visiting, was the very core of the folkculture he was suddenly confronted with.In many passages of hiscorrespondence or his autobiographical writings, he has described hisencounter with the music of black folk, which he saw as an expression of theirfeelings, an effort to control their emotions, a response to their experience inan attempt to transcend it.Poetically compelling, the songs were also rootedin the soil and in the community.Sensually, physically, and vibrantly presentin the daily lives of the people, and with their ramifications in the past, theywere solidly anchored in structures and institutions, in work and churchactivities; they were the mold in which the souls were shaped, offering bothframe and patterns that could channel and discipline their outpourings.Theyresorted to devices borrowed from a diversity of traditions of indirectness,double dealing, mask and disguise, imagery and metaphoric phrasingcombined with intricate rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic variations.Improvisational, they were innovative and bore testimony to the intensecreativity and dynamism of the culture.At the same time as he wasoverwhelmed by the music he heard in the fields, the shacks and thechurches, Toomer saw it as a tragic and desperate effort to sustain a moodand tone that seemed about to disappear an expression that was ridiculedand disparage 1 by some and might not be able to sustain the energy it sopowerfully displayed: A family of back country Negroes had only recentlymoved into a shack not too far away.They sang.And this was the first timeI d ever heard the folk-songs and spirituals.They were rich and sad, andjoyous and beautiful.But I learned that Negroes of the town objected tothem.They called them shouting. They had victrolas and player-pianos.So, I realized with deep regret that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would becertain to die out.The folk spirit was walking to die on the modern desert (Turner, Wayward, 123).Like many of his contemporaries in the 1910s and 1920s, after Du Bois andRosamond and James Weldon Johnson, before Locke, who theorized hisview of the music, and like Hughes and Hurston, among many others,Toomer was fascinated with the music
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