In Cane, the first-person narrative voice makes its debut in "Reapers," the brief poem that appears after "Karintha." Here, Tommer shows how the narrative "I" emerges in a vision of violence: the poet sees how the reapers sharpen their scythes for the work ahead, and how that harvesting work involves violence that is incidental and inevitable, as a mower slaughters a rat in the field and then goes on. The homology that was lightly sketched in "Karintha" between artistic capital and human capital emerges here in bolder strokes through the parallel between the actual harvest of "Reapers" and Toomer’s artistic "harvest," wherein disparate black folk materials—for example, the blues stanza and gospel shouts—are gathered together to total a larger whole. Both harvests, it is hinted, do violence; this exploration of representational violence is further developed in "Becky," the story of the white woman who has two black children and is consequently ostracized by the white and black communities.