Violence In Jean Toomer's Blood Burning Moon

In the case of a lynching, the violence affects both the lynchman and the lynched. Other times the violence is psychological in nature and it is often indirect. No matter what, it poisons and corrodes everything and everyone, from the environment itself to the very self; the “i” within the environment. And it still does to this day. Jean Toomer’s short story, “Blood Burning Moon” and other works featured in Cane, visualizes depictions of violence through lynching and reveal the innermost madness of the psyche that is the product of racialized violence in the South.
Tom Burwell,“whom the whole town called Big Boy” (Jean Toomer 39) and aptly so, is a manchild who never reaches maturity and understanding because of the environment around him.

The factory town of the prose embodies death and danger with the factory itself described as one whose “skeleton stone walls” and “rotten floor boards” (Toomer 39) create an environment where violence is required to counteract the violence of the skeleton-white surroundings. Modern technology (of the time) and the work that it requires turns Tom into someone who was “strong as he was with hand upon the ax or plow” (Toomer 39). These instruments of reaping also become tools for his violent ways, as he had “‘...been on the gang three times for cuttin men’” (Toomer 45) and threatens to cut Bob Stone for the love of Louisa. In fact, he ends up doing so, and is lynched because of it. The lynching of Tom turns the crowd of white men into animals, “ants upon a forage rush[ing] about… flatten[ing] the negroes beneath it” (Toomer 47). The white men become animalistic, turning into a mob that swarmed and preyed using searchlights to illuminate their target and the cruelty within themselves. The violence of his death is emphasized as “stench of burning flesh soaked the air. Tom’s eyes popped” (Toomer 48). The reader’s sense of smell (”stench of burning”), touch (“soaked the air”) and sound (“eyes popped”) are attacked to awaken into active action, analysis and understanding.
Toomer’s overt use of violence through active visuals, illuminates the workings of the psyche - the wrenching parasitic thoughts of madness that infects the minds and environment of those around it. The cruelty and inhumane treatment of Tom reveals the contradiction the white mob embodies through