Jean Toomer's 1923 collage of fiction, poetry, and drama is a sequence of narrative forms riveted together by its title, Cane, The image of the sugar cane is Southern, nourishing, phallic, common, redolent – as Toomer says in his poems – of the Southern agrarian life. In “Georgia Dusk,” his central image is of black men singing “the chorus of the cane … caroling a vesper to the stars.” Cane is also sweet, sensual, and a source of some of the (rare) pleasure in the lives of Toomer's black characters. The noun cane also is a homonym for the Biblical Cain, whose character suggests the bloody destruction of brotherhood and introduces the concept of immoral violence. The image of cane ties the reader to the earth, to the commonplace that was the touchstone of one current of American avant-garde literature in the early 1920s (represented by William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon's journal, Contact). Through that resonating image, Toomer creates place, time, and theme. The location is the South, both rural Georgia and urban Washington, D.C.; the time is the present; and one pervasive theme is the pitiful and yet self-defeating way black people live in contemporary America. Cane also explores the sexual lives of the blacks, and much of its narrative is expressed from a male perspective. It therefore fits neatly into mainstream American modernism, which was soon dominated by the writing of Ernest Hemingway, E Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.

For all its similarity to other modernist texts, however, Cane is unique in American literature. In its wide-ranging eclecticism, it goes beyond the provincialism of much American writing.