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,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.

You've got a white woman's dead body, but it's being described via images of the lynching and burning of a black body. Um. Yeah. Wow.

This little poetic snippet uses a modernist style to depict a pretty controversial scene: a dead body, described via references to the lynching of a black person.

It's hard to say exactly what race the body is, or why it's a focal point here, but the effect is a snapshot of all the forms of torture used to describe the lynching. In other words, it multiplies the number of viewpoints crystallized in that moment.

Why do we italicize our own words? No, it's not because we like to feel ultra-important. It's because those words are key to modernism, which was all about capturing a moment in time. We're not going to get all into the chemistry of crystallization now, but what we can tell you is that this obsession over a literary style that tries to create crystallized moments had a lot to do with World War I.

In fact, think of modernism as a reaction to the horrors of World War I. Back then, we had just developed things like machine guns. And these new weapons resulted in an unprecedented number of war-time deaths. That kind of carnage, plus all the other major changes of the industrial world (like trains and cars), made modernist writers want to get all experimental with language. They wanted and invent a new way of viewing the world—one that reflected the fractured societies and selves that abounded during that period.

Toomer's poem takes the concepts of the frozen image and the fractured self and grafts them onto the world of American racial politics. He uses modernist style to make us see not just a white woman's body, but also a lynched black body. Simultaneously.

In other words, his little poem holds at least two perspectives of a woman's body at the same time. Pretty nifty, eh?

First, there's the hair. Then the eyes. Then the lips. Notice how Toomer pauses after each of those body parts with a dash. It's like we're looking at each body part the way a CSI investigator would gaze at a dead body.

Not that we want to get all gruesome on you. It's just hard to ignore the violence in Toomer's super concise descriptions that follow each of those body parts. "Coiled like a lyncher's rope"; "fagots"; "old scars, or the first red blisters"—all of those images reference, either directly or indirectly, key aspects of a lynching.

And after that horror, we get "Breath—the last sweet scent of cane." Is this a black body getting whipped by cane or is it a white woman breathing? Either way, we get a clear picture of the essence of the scene: while the woman is breathing, somewhere there's a black body that's been whipped of its last breath.

And then we have the last lines, "And her slim body, white as the ash / of black flesh after flame." Sure, losing one white woman is a tragedy. But there's so much more loss in this poem than that. These lines serve as a huge reminder of this equation: black man + white woman = death for the black man.

So even though we could squabble all day about whose body it is that we're looking at in this poem, that'd kind of be missing the point. What we're supposed to understand here is really that old modernist goal: to see the essence of a thing—it's larger significance—through the barest use of language.

In this case, we're looking at a white woman's body, and what it meant to a black man during Jim Crow. Powerful stuff indeed.