. . . if religion failed to keep blacks in subservience, there were other means. "Portrait in Georgia," the sequel to "Conversion," uses the figure-ground pattern to expose the white southern obsession behind the blood sacrifice of lynching. Through Toomer's newly made eyes, the image of a southern belle dissolves into a black man tortured and burned alive at the stake. One by one, the woman's features yield to the paraphernalia of lynching, until in a final chilling montage her white body becomes a simile for the black victim:

And her slim body, white as the ash

    of black flesh after flame.

 

The poem's silent imagery summons the black folk voices of "Blood-Burning Moon" that improvise desperately against the spell of violence hovering over the land as pregnantly as the full "red nigger moon."