22) showed up with her son Bubba and laughed,
23) “Now y’all can play together.” He had a sweet
24) nature, but even so we raised a little Cain,
25) and Daddy told her not to bring him back.
26) He thought I’d begun to sound like colored people.
27) She smiled, dropped her eyes, kept working.
28) And kept putting on weight. She later died of stroke.
29) Daddy developed diabetes by age fifty-five,
30) insulin burned what his blood couldn’t handle.
31) Chronic depressions I have, a nutritionist
32) gently termed “the sugar blues,” but damned
33) if any lyrics come out of them, baby.
Alfred Corn's third stanza is another interesting one in relation to form and diction. There is the speaker of the poem, but there are also many other voices. Similar to the epigraph from Wheatley.
This stanza continues with the intertextual "mise en abyme." Not only does Corn's "Sugar Cane" reference Wheatley's poem, but also references the Book of Genesis (Which Wheatley also alludes to in her poem).
On one level, the character's Evelina, "Daddy," and Bubba and introduced to the narrative, with the speaker. These characters can be seen as those from Genesis. Bubba derives from "brother." Evelina is the diminutive of Eve. "Daddy" is the speaker's father, however, neither the speaker nor the speaker's father have a given name within the poem.
In this stanza, Corn retells the story of Cain and Abel. In order to understand a subversion or role reversal in the biblical story of Cain and Abel, it is important to first have a concept of the story from Genesis. In the Bible this is also the first instance of mortal murder. Cain is the first born son of Adam and Eve and Abel is his brother. The story according to Genesis tells of Cain who planted crops and Abel who tended flocks making offerings to God. Abel sacrificed the season's first-born lamb and Cain offered the early harvest of vegetables. However, God expressed his dissatisfaction to Cain about his offering. Which results in Cain then secretly killing Abel while he is tending his flocks. In the evening Cain returns to Adam and Eve and does not admit what he has done when asked whether he knows where Abel is. According to Genesis he responds, "I am not my brother's keeper." God calls Cain out on his lie and then banishes Cain to wander the earth cursed. (Apparently he wanders the world for 700 years procreating the whole time, cursed to be unhappy and never able to settle down) Because of this story, it is Cain who is known as the "black son" and is associated with "evil" and sin.
In Corn's poetic interpretation of Cain and Abel, it is hard to tell which role is taken by whom. If we assume Evelina is Eve, then it is unclear whether Bubba is meant to be Cain or Abel. The expression "to raise Cain" is idiomatic and the equivalent to "to raised hell" meaning to behave in a rowdy or disruptive way. Corn however writes that "we raised a little Cain." First, it's important to note that the pronoun is "we." The two boys behave together. Another shade of meaning belonging to the word raise, would be "to life." If we assume that the biblical Cain has died, perhaps the two have resurrected Cain (though I am not convinced of that interpretation). "Daddy" in this story fulfils the action of God in the story of Cain and Abel by banishing the son of Eve from his house. In this story, it is Bubba who is banished, however, he has not killed anyone. However, the one who shamed and cursed in this story is Evelina. In line 28 she becomes obese and dies of a stroke.
The theme of transformation and sugar in the first stanza is paralleled in the third. Whereas the sugar in the first stanza starts as thick black liquid boiled in a vat until it becomes pure, white granular crystal, like table sugar, the sugar in the third stanza is carried in a different kind of vessel. here, the vessel is the human body, and sugar is carried in the blood and it is "burned" by insulin.
Again, color is thematized. Color is a emotional sickness, it is a symptom of a nutritional illness. In line "32" the "sugar blues" are diabetes related depression.
Another element of this is a diction, a vocabulary which is borrowing from AAVE. This is another way which Alfred Corn's "Sugar Cane" subverts the binary.
There are binaries of health and sickness and life and death in this stanza.
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