Wind is in the cane. Come along.
Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,
Scratching choruses above the guinea’s squawk,
Wind is in the cane. Come along.

These lines are from Jean Toomer’s modernist composite work *Cane* (1923), in the rural Georgia section that evokes Black Southern life through lyric fragments, songlike refrains, and imagistic prose-poems. Toomer drew on impressions from a 1921 stay in Sparta, Georgia, where he encountered the region’s landscape, labor, and folk culture; *Cane* transforms those experiences into a stylized, musical language. The repeated call “Come along” and the auditory details (cane leaves, “guinea’s squawk”) reflect Toomer’s interest in vernacular rhythms and choral effects, while also situating the reader in a sensory field shaped by wind, vegetation, and animal sound.

The passage works like a refrain: wind moving through cane becomes both literal weather and a kind of communal voice. The cane leaves “rusty with talk” personify the landscape, suggesting that the environment carries memory and speech—an echo of work songs, gossip, and collective presence. The “scratching choruses” and the guinea fowl’s squawk layer sound into a rough, percussive music, turning ordinary rural noise into a chorus. “Come along” functions as invitation and propulsion, pulling the listener/reader into motion and into the poem’s soundscape. The effect is simultaneously celebratory and uneasy: beauty arises from abrasion (“scratching”), hinting at the hard textures of Southern life beneath the lyric surface.