Fern, from Cane

Jean Toomer's Cane is regarded as the highest literary achievement of the Harlem Renaissance and a masterpiece of African American writing, a blend of fiction, poetry, and drama set alternately in rural Georgia and Washington, D.C., among other locations. Puryear first read Cane while he was teaching at Fisk University, in Nashville, his first experience living in the south. He said that he related to the point of view of a visitor “looking at what so defines blackness in America, the agricultural life of the South, the sharecropping that had grown out of slavery.” In the late 1990s Puryear was asked to contribute illustrations to a new edition of the book. About his work for the project, Puryear has commented:
The overriding issue was to work in a two-dimensional medium. To make flat images is such a departure from what I do as a sculptor. I had seldom made woodcuts since my student days. The challenge was to create a set of images that would relate together in a familial way, suggestive of the narrative but not overtly so.