Karintha

Karintha is the opening note of Cane — a child whose skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon, danced with by young men who should have been dancing with grown girls, prayed over by old men who wanted their youth back. She stones cows, beats her dog, fights the other children, and plays 'home' with a small boy who isn't afraid to do her bidding, and the town watches her with a hunger it calls admiration. By the time she is a woman, married many times and contemptuous of the old men who once bounced her on their knees, her story has become the book's first lesson in how a community's desire can ruin the very thing it claims to cherish.