Summary
1. Ralph Kabnis, a Northerner now in the South to teach school, sits in his rundown, dirty Georgia cabin. He is trying to read that night, but the wind whistles through the cracks and sings a chill song. He slips his head under the cover and tries to masturbate. He can’t read and he can’t drink. He becomes irritated with a loud hen and kills it.
Outside he sees the half-moon that looks like a white child sleeping on the treetops. The night is beautiful and he is struck dumb. He would rather have an ugly world, though, and does not want to be chained to himself and these hills. God probably doesn’t exist, but if he does then the things he creates are ugly. His thoughts scatter. Why does Hanby get to be president of the school?
Kabnis stands up and totters. He looks up the hill at Hanby’s house and feels bitterness sweep him. His thoughts swing to lynchings and white minds. The towns of Washington D.C. and New York feel dreamlike and remote.
He looks beyond to a cabin about a mile away where black people sleep. He wonders if they feel him; “things are so immediate in Georgia” (84). Once back inside, he becomes frustrated that he cannot smoke or drink because those things are forbidden for teachers at this school he is working at.
The night is eerie and he wonders if there are ghosts. A strange noise frightens him, but it is just a calf.
2. Fred Halsey’s parlor is seedy and old-fashioned, having been home to seven generations of shopkeepers. There is a portrait of a bearded gentleman hanging on the wall. He has dark, curly hair, a sharp nose, and elegant features. Fred looks like his great-grandfather. His grandmother looks like a Negro woman.
The window looks out on a lonely whitewashed church. There are clumps of pine trees, a squat tower, and a spiral of buzzards flying up into the sky.
Halsey and his friend Professor Layman, a preacher and a teacher, enter. They talk with Kabnis about the South. Layman says white people mess up good and bad black people when they do their lynchings—there is no distinction. There is not much to be proud about Southern heritage, Layman tells Kabnis after he brags of having some relatives who lived here. They tell Kabnis stories of Sam Raymon, pursued by a lynch mob and given the ability to kill himself by drowning, and Mame Lankins, a woman murdered in the street and her unborn child pulled out and stabbed to a tree. Kabnis hears these stories with fear and pity, admitting that they get to him.
The men mention another new man, Lewis, and how he is a little strange. As they talk, in the background women at the church scream out to Jesus.
Suddenly a rock crashes into the room. It has a paper attached that reads “You northern nigger, its time fer y t leave. Git along now” (90). Kabnis knows it must be for him and is sick to his stomach. He bursts out of the house.
It is dusk and the countryside is chill. The choir sings.
3. Kabnis stumbles home, looking like a scarecrow replica of himself. He is terrified, mumbling of hounds, eyes, and pursuit. He hears voices and knows they’ve come for him. He brandishes a poker, but the men inside are just Layman and Halsey. Layman laughs and says white people don’t use hounds anymore; they don’t need those theatrics.
The men light a fire as Kabnis calms down. They pass around a bottle.
Suddenly Hanby, the well-dressed, wealthy, and mannered black president of the school, appears. He chastises Kabnis for breaking the rules and orates on the school’s goal of teaching the students to lead clean and noble lives. He demands Kabnis’s resignation.
Halsey angrily states that Kabnis can stay with him, and aggressively tells Hanby that he is tired of his bullying. Kabnis listens to both men and wishes he could put them in their places. He feels that his power will slip away to those outside. Halsey gives him water, and Kabnis’s feverishness subsides.
A knock sounds and Lewis enters. He is about thirty, intelligent and purposeful. He shakes Halsey’s hand, nods at Hanby, smiles at Layman, and looks fixedly at Kabnis. He informs Kabnis he thinks the note on the rock was for him and not to worry about it because he is planning on leaving soon.
Lewis’s eyes meet those of Kabnis. There is an intuitive sense of something shared. Kabnis suddenly wants to hold this man and call him Brother, but that passes—his thoughts grow savage and cynical.
Hanby and Lewis leave. As they depart the sound of a woman singing fills the valley. It is like a spark spreading ruddy flames throughout the countryside. Kabnis is fearful, but Halsey comforts him and says Kabnis will come work with him now. Layman posits that the South is no place for Kabnis.
4. It has been a month. Halsey’s shop is old and rundown, filled with wheels and axles and cobwebs. There is a smoke-blackened chimney, wooden blocks, and other detritus. The basement is where the old man, Halsey's father, stays. It is called “The Hole.”
Halsey looks comfortable in his work, but Kabnis is exceedingly awkward. Layman and other men from the town saunter in. Lewis also arrives, but the townsmen look at him distrustfully and eventually leave.
Lewis plans to leave Georgia and tells the men so. Halsey replies that he knows people think Lewis has some queer opinions. Lewis smiles and says it is actually that he has a lack of opinions, and people don’t like that.
Kabnis asks for Lewis’s opinion on him, but Lewis demurs for a bit. Lewis then explains that the old man downstairs has had too much of life, that Halsey fits here quite nicely. Halsey agrees; he went to France and up North, but here is where he belongs.
An old white man with a broken hatchet-handle and head interrupts them. Halsey tries to instruct Kabnis how to do it, but Kabnis is utterly inept and Halsey has to finish the job for him. Kabnis looks at this man, Mr. Ramsey, and feels that “the whole white South weighs down upon him” (100).
Carrie K., Fred Halsey’s sister, comes down with lunch. She is bright and lovely. Lewis notices her and is filled with a sense of attraction, but then feels the weight of the knowledge of what will happen to her as she grows old in this environment. He knows the pressures she will face and asks Halsey what will come of her. Halsey thinks little of this question and says she will continue to feed the old man.
Lewis comments that he did not know there was someone down there, and Kabnis sneers there is a lot Lewis does not know. Halsey invites Lewis to come back later tonight; there will be girls and drinking. Lewis agrees. As he leaves he looks at Carrie and wishes he could take her with him.
5. Night is like the “soft belly of a pregnant Negress,” singing a “womb-song to the South,” her winds like “the breathing of the unborn child” (103). The streets are dark, empty, and quiet. Halsey leads Lewis, Kabnis, and two women, Stella and Cora, into the Hole. It is large and warm. There are furnishings and a table is set with whiskey glasses. The old man, gray and prophet-like, sits immobile in his chair.
Lewis is stunned by this man and calls him a John the Baptist. He asks if he ever talks, and Halsey laughs that Kabnis is always down here and gives the old man no chance. In truth, though, he rarely does talk; he only mumbles.
Cora laughs. She is a mulatto woman, a bit coarse and loose. Stella is darker-skinned and very lovely. She shuffles a deck of cards. Kabnis walks to the corner and grabs a robe, donning it and making a spectacle. Lewis laughs and Kabnis growls, annoyed. Everyone begins to drink but the party does not have a good spirit. Lewis sits and lets the Old South wash over him—white faces, cane, black roots, and magnolia. His face glows in the firelight. Suddenly he opens his eyes and looks at Kabnis. Kabnis irately asks why he is looking at him, and blusters that he is Ralph Kabnis, and that Lewis ought to look at someone else like the old man.
Lewis replies that Kabnis ought to look at this old man, “the old man as symbol, flesh, and spirit of the past” (106). Kabnis scoffs that the old man is just a done-up preacher and isn’t his past.
When Lewis looks at Stella she tells him not to do so, but then says the old man reminds her of her father before he died after a white man took her mother. She thinks to herself that she does not want sympathy, but knows there is something different about Lewis. Kabnis and Halsey play with her, but Lewis would not.
Halsey decides he wants to ask Lewis questions, and they pull aside from the others. Kabnis dances around with Cora, mock-bowing to the old man. Cora tries to act like she thinks Stella would when Kabnis pulls her down to the mattress.
Now that they are occupied, Halsey turns to Lewis. First he muses that he used to love Stella and that she’s no common wench. He then talks about how he went to a school in Augusta once. At the school, teachers only liked kids who were white, so he cussed them all and left to work with his father. Prejudice is everywhere in the country, he states. He sometimes plays dumb to white folks, but once he subscribed to Literary Digest.
Halsey pauses and asks Lewis what he thinks of Kabnis. Kabnis, drunk, approaches the men and spits out that he knows they are talking about him because everyone is talking about him all the time. Halsey looks at Lewis and says they can talk about it some other time.
Kabnis refuses to back down. He claims it is the time to talk, and that he is from a family of orators. When Halsey ventures that they were preachers, Kabnis denies it. He says they were orators, and spells it out. He has always shaped words, shaped words to fit his soul.
Halsey asks Stella to help Kabnis sit down. She pushes him down and he springs up and keeps talking. He says he is a poet and has to feed that burned-up nightmare in his soul. He does not have pretty words, though: he has ugly, misshapen words. White folks feed the words, these black people feed it, and the “whole damn bloated purple country feeds it cause its goin down t hell in a holy avalanche of words” (109).
Cora tries to sit on him and seduce him. He resists and then gives in. Stella watches contemptuously and wishes she could take Kabnis somewhere and mother him. Halsey grabs her and kisses her. Lewis, feeling shut out, loses his glow. He has to get away from all this intense pain, and leaves into the night.
6. Everything is shadowy. Halsey tries to wake up the sleepers and Kabnis mutters that there is no need to get up. Halsey says he will be back, then goes upstairs to light the fire, put the kettle on, and do a bit of work. When he goes back downstairs, no one is roused.
Finally the girls get up and start doing their hair. It is like they are “two princesses in Africa going through the early ablutions of their pagan prayers” (111). They go upstairs with Halsey. Kabnis stumbles up but falls on the floor.
He remains there for an hour and then finally pulls himself up, looking at the old man in front of him. Words rush out of him like a flood. He spits out at the old man that he heard him mumbling the words “sin” and “death” all night. Why, when the old man has been dead since the 1860s?
He plays with the word. Death is in this place, this place like it was during slavery. He calls for Halsey and thinks he left him. Halsey is “just like a nigger. I thought he was a nigger all th time. Now I know it” (112).
Looking back to the old man, Kabnis laughs at his “Nigger soul,” his “gin soul” (113). He criticizes the old man’s watery, dead-fish eyes and tells him he was put here to die and he is still in slavery.
Carrie comes downstairs with her father’s food and tells Kabnis Halsey needs him for the wagon. He calls her a child and says he needs help with his soul. He mutters to himself about God.
Carrie asks if the old man talked and Kabnis says no—the old man only listens. Carrie believes the elderly can see and hear things others cannot.
Suddenly the old man shakes his head and begins to say the word “sin” over and over again. Kabnis tells him to shut up, that all America is sin, and that he is a victim. The old man sputters out that sin is in the white people who made the Bible lie. He grows silent. Carrie is teary.
Kabnis is angry and says that this is all the old man has to say. Carrie takes Kabnis’s face as if to draw out a fever. He crumples and sinks, all anger leaving him. Halsey calls for him and Kabnis rises. Carrie helps him take off the robe and with eyes swollen, he trudges upstairs.
Carrie kneels before her father and calls for Jesus. Light illuminates them both.
Analysis
"Kabnis" is the third and final part of the work. Toomer originally wrote it as a play and then adapted it for Cane. In its final form it is structured like a drama, with characters’ words preceded by their name. There are what we would deem stage directions, but they are often long and descriptive and are reminiscent of a short story. “Kabnis” completes the circle of the overall work, bringing the setting back to the South, but as the marks on the blank pages dividing the parts reveal, the circle is broken, incapable of being fully whole. This is mirrored in the character of Kabnis himself, a man who also eludes wholeness.
Kabnis is certainly a fascinating literary creation and one that has naturally inspired a lot of critical writing. He is an intelligent and sardonic Northerner who has moved to the South to teach school and write his poetry, but his irascible personality and frustration with the realities of the Jim Crow South cause him to butt heads with the school principal, Hanby (and the stringent rules regarding smoke and drink). He becomes profoundly alienated from this environment, commenting to himself, “The stillness of it: where they burn and hang men, you cant smoke. Cant take a swig of licker” (84). The school prides itself on high moral standards but does not stand up against the excesses of racial violence happening in its midst. Kabnis’s intellectualism precludes him from embracing religion. He is enthralled by the beauty of the Georgia landscape, but is also immensely frightened of it: he claims he would rather have something ugly instead. This is tied to his increasing fears of Southern racial violence. The stories Halsey and Layman tell him scare him senseless and contribute to his detachment from any sense of shared racial identity.
Many of the themes of the prior two sections resonate here as well. The first is the body, but in “Kabnis” the body is a more nebulous concept. The black man’s body is subject to torture and death, certainly, but is also regulated by intangible mechanisms of fear and black capitulation to this fear. White people are nearly absent from the story, yet the black characters behave in ways that demonstrate the power of the white supremacist social structure. Layman keeps his mouth shut, Halsey is an accommodationist, and Lewis eventually returns North. The second is space/landscape. Whereas in the first part of the book the sprawling fields of Georgia were spaces for characters to enact their historical and bodily dramas, and the streets and clubs and parks of the second part were artificial milieu that forced black men and women to negotiate their identity, all of the spaces in “Kabnis” are claustrophobic and dark. Critic Maria Isabel Caldeira notes Kabnis is first confined to his bed and cabin and then ultimately ends up in the appropriately titled “Hole.” She writes, “these spaces function as metaphors for both states of mind and social models” and they let the “intellectualized, troubled, egoistic, and decadent mind of protagonist [become] easily prone to slide into the abyss of the unconscious or the chaos of values.”
While at the beginning of “Kabnis” the character could not even concentrate enough to read the words on the page before him, at the end of the story Kabnis practically explodes with words. He refers to himself as an orator and boasts of “shapin words” (109) and that the “form thats burned int my soul…wont stay still unless I feed it. An it lives on words.” He is obsessed with himself and his putative singularity, turning inward and, as critic Charles Harmon notes, aligning himself with the universe. This alignment as well as the fact that Kabnis’s words are purely his own and are not intended for or received by an audience of his peers (one might recall how Kabnis always complains about the shouting in black churches). After these words, though, Kabnis falls silent. Critic Charles Harmon explains, “Kabnis falls quiet not because he has learned to honor or even respect the beliefs and practices of the people he lives among, but for the simple reason that he is ‘exhausted’.” He is in a paradoxical situation because he cannot identify with the milieu he is in but he will not go somewhere else; “he reacts to this paradox by turning inward, by insisting –in the face of the skepticism around him –that his existence is absolutely unique.”
The end of the story is open to interpretation. On the one hand, there is Harmon’s conclusion that the sun shining is an affirmation of Kabnis’s belief that “he will be able to construct a bridge between himself and the universe, all by himself, without the help of any existing community.” On the other hand, it seems that Kabnis is making what Toomer leads the reader to believe is the wrong choice. It is Carrie—the young woman who feeds and tries to actually talk to her father—and Father John who get the last scene; as they embrace and the sun illuminates them, Kabnis skulks back upstairs, no longer raging but rather a meek and emptied “scarecrow replica of a man” (91). Critic Charles Scruggs describes it thusly: “The artist’s final vision of Carrie K. and Father John is like a religious painting, and the world outside the window, to the artist’s eye, participates in the revelatory moment.”
Thus, though Kabnis says he had Southern blue-blood relatives, he is not of the South. He rejects Father John, the symbol of the past. The two have no real communication even though there are words exchanged between them. Kabnis is contemptuous of the language of his community, and prefers to orate to and for himself. Critic Mary Battenfeld explains, “Kabnis calls himself an orator, but he is only interested in shaping his own soul, and so cannot be a socially and politically transformative speaker.” Interestingly, Toomer even calls into question whether or not language can help at all. Language does not help Mame Lamkins or Sam Raymon. It keeps black people like Layman and Halsey quiescent. It gives someone like Hanby power.
The character of Lewis, who ultimately returns North, is filled with disgust for Kabnis and is happy to abandon Kabnis in the Hole. At the end of the work he is still lonely and self-centered, unable to acknowledge his racial past and caught between the North and the South.
