Toomer's water metaphors form a vortex from and through which rush mingled ideas of hope and suffering that replace the actual situation in which the narrator and other characters find themselves. Thus, water imagery in Cane does not mirror external reality but, in the manner of a symbol, denotes the metaphysical.

. . . 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:

In one of the short, imagistic poems he included in Cane (1923). Toomer linked America's racechange imperative "Make white!" to lynching. Through its grotesque personification of those who perpetrate racial violence, "Portrait in Georgia" hints that the hurt inflicted on victims boomerangs to damage the victimizers:

Hair--braided chestnut,

    coiled like a lyncher's rope,

Eyes--fagots,

Lips--old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath--the last sweet scent of cane,

. . . The great power of "Portrait in Georgia" resides in the relations between Petrarchan enumeration of parts ("Hair . . . / Eyes . . . / . . . / Breath . . . / body) and their transformation in death. The "clear-cut" images of the poem not only create a "mystery" of identity within the poem but point to the larger mystery of miscegenation within the text itself.

. . . Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is a bittersweet elegy to the beauty and the horror of the South. "Portrait in Georgia" and "Blood-Burning Moon" foreshadow and document, respectively, the lynching which spurs the movement of the text North. "Portrait in Georgia" might also be a portrait of Georgia. In this poem, Toomer establishes some of the major tropes of the migration narrative—tropes that are later revised and revisited by those African-American artists who follow him.

The visual is not confined to Cane's prose vignettes. The text’s poems employ visual devices as well. The first section of Cane contains three poems that had been collected in the Modern Review as "Three Portraits." The first two poems, "Face" and "Portrait in Georgia," employ something like the Petrarchan conceit. They compare the elements of a woman's face to a variety of objects or states.

Jean Toomer paints his "Portrait in Georgia" in one continuous movement, beginning with his portrait’s hair and moving down her face toward the rest of her body. While each detail is true to a physical description, it also serves to unmask the central cultural conflict of the American South. He documents hair, eyes, lips, breath, and body, with each feature simultaneously revealing a cultural history stalled in division.

“The Sinister Figure”: James Weldon Johnson’s “The White Witch” (1922) and Jean Toomer’s “Portrait in Georgia” (1923)

Cane’s most dazzling moment of regeneration is enabled by another image of connection: the tongue. Like roots and curls of smoke, the tongue can be pictured as a winding line, and it is in this form that it becomes the center of "Her Lips Are Copper Wire," a poem which must be Cane's most stunning single piece. . . .

In "Her Lips Are Copper Wire," the narator as persona is more intimately involved with the culture and addresses it as an agent providing love and care. Earlier values now rejected, this poem is a companion piece to "Rhobert" and "Calling Jesus," and what is important to the speaker is what he sees. He concentrates on the mechanistic attributes of his object of affection: the gleam of yellow globes of which she whispers, the instant contact with the "power-house," and the flashy billboards.