Cajun Farm Mechanism

The tractor symbolizes the agricultural mechanization that has taken place with the growth of Cajun farming and this mechanization's effect. The arrival of the tractor with the Cajuns shifted the traditional means of local black life. Mechanization reduced the need for labor. The community of blacks who once cared for the land became suddenly unemployed, and most of them moved away. While the plantation once was carefully maintained by those who worked it, now only the old remain and the plantation's buildings are deteriorating. The image of the tractor is seen near Beau's dead body and later serves as a bastion for the Cajuns during the battle. Overall it is a negative symbol that suggests increased hardships for the local blacks. The tractor was the primary tool of the Cajuns that pushed the blacks off the land.
The sugar cane represents the times when the blacks worked the land and their community thrived. The Cajun farmers have destroyed the cane fields with their farming, much in the way that they have destroyed the old men's previous way of life. The empty cane fields seen on the way to the Marshall Plantation evoke the image of old houses from which good friends have moved. The cane is gone and destroyed just as familiar days of the past have disappeared. Additionally, the sugar cane also grows wildly in some areas and may even soon overrun their local graveyard—a clear symbol of how the Cajuns has pushed them from their ancestral land. The symbol of sugar cane also contains a textual reference to Jean Toomer's classic book Cane, a book that examines the vibrancy of early 20th century black life by interweaving poetry and fiction. In Toomer's book, as in Ernest Gaines's, the sugar cane represents the beauty and pain that African-Americans experienced as they worked for many years close to the