These images are shocking not because they appeal to feelings either of guilt or of outrage but because they do not allow us to keep intact a reassuring distance between mind and body. The purple of the Georgia dusk may well be beautiful, the sweet scent of cane may well be sensuous, but only if we can forget that that purple is also the color of bloated, decaying flesh and that the sugarcane's intense sweetness is also the sickening stench of burned bodies. But Toomer goes beyond these writers in suggesting an identity between the figures joined in his poem. By superimposing the images of the white woman, the apparatus of lynching, and the burning flesh of the black man, Toomer graphically embodies both a union of black male and white female and the terrifying method of exorcising that union to maintain a racial difference the poem linguistically defies. To fall from the primacy of color into whiteness is to be excoriated, a word connoting condemnation that literally means being stripped of one's skin.
White ash is all that remains of black flesh after flame.
Copyright 1997 by Susan Gubar. Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr . . . As something unseen, miscegenation was a sin condemned in public but practiced in private. U of Pennsylvania P. Farah Jasmine Griffen . . . The object of this poem is a woman whose braided hair is likened to a lyncher's rope and whose slim white-skinned body is actually made of the ash of burned black flesh.