Jean Toomer (#poetry)

November Cotton Flower

Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,

Made cotton stalks look rusty, seasons old,

And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,

Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,

Failed in its function as the autumn rake;

Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take

All water from the streams; dead birds were found

In wells a hundred feet below the ground--

Such was the season when the flower bloomed.

Old folks were startled and it soon assumed

Significance. Superstition saw

Something it had never seen before:

Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,

Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

 

-Jean Toomer

 

This is from Jean Toomer's novel Cane of 1923; it's written in a mix of poetry and prose. This poem is in heroic couplets, but it is fourteen lines and can be viewed as a sonnet, though the turn comes after the ninth line. Brown eyes, as with Chuck Berry's 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man', stand in for brown skin, and loving without a trace of fear would probably be considered a rare enough moment for Blacks in rural Georgia (where the novel is set) at the time.

 

My mother was born on a farm in Texas, though my grandparents lost the farm during the depression and she barely remembered it. But she picked cotton during World War II. She was fairly tall and always said it was the most miserable job imaginable.

 

Poking around for pictures of cotton fields, I discovered that Marion Brown, the alto saxophonist, titled his album of 1979 'November Cotton Flower' and I have to assume he was thinking of this Jean Toomer poem. The title track from the album: