The fecklessness of the men in Jean Toomer's Cane

The stories in the 2nd/middle section of Jean Toomer's "Cane," which the excellent intro to the 1970s edition that I have explains were written last and included because publishers initially thought the book was too short, differ from the rest of the book in several significant ways: most obviously, they are not set in south Georgia but in black (or racially mixed) communities in the north, mostly Washington, D.C., but the last (and longest) story, Bona and Paul, in Chicago - for unity of sensibility it would have been smart to set all in D.C., I think. The intro (wish I could remember who wrote it) also notes wisely that these stories differ in tone, in that Toomer enters the minds of the characters and tells us what they're thinking, whereas the pieces in the two Georgia sections simply describe the characters and their action and dialogue - it may be that the Georgia sections are therefore too oblique, ambiguous, even obscure - but they're also mysterious and imagist, whereas the Northern sections feel more conventional and definitely more diadactic: Toomer has certain views on race and he uses his characters to convey these, sometimes heavy-handedly. What holds all sections of Cane together would be the fecklessness of the male characters: whether bourgeois blacks, a young mixed-race man trying to pass, southern black men, a northern black man visiting the south - none of these men can effectively deal with his sexual drive, with any sort of relationship with women, in any way: these relations all lead to violence, humiliation, and self-abnegation.