What drove Ralph into cellar? On thin emotional ground, Jean Toomer's beleaguered schoolteacher visits home of Fred Halsey, where Halsey's friend Layman recalls local acts of racial violence. It is Sunday. The spirit-packed sounds of a church service punctuate Layman's storytelling; a shouting sister's high-pitched and hysterical voice grows to nervous key of Kabnis. The mood outside shifts when Layman reaches story's tragic denouement, lynching of Mame Lamkins. As choir begins an old spiritual, even wind itself seems to hum blues. Layman recalls, in a soft-spoken voice: She was in th family-way, Mame Lamkins was. They killed her in th street, an some white man seein th risin in her stomach as she lay there soppy in her blood like any cow, took an ripped her belly open, an th kid fell out. It was living; but a baby amt supposed t live. So he jabbed his knife in it an stuck it t a tree. An then they all went away. (92) When Layman is done, sister gives out another, frantic shriek: Jesus, I've found Jesus. O Lord, glory t God, one mo sinner is acomin home. Her cry echoes Kabnis's own reaction (Christ no!) and accompanies crash of rock breaking window. is certain that a note attached to rock, warning the northern nigger to go home (92), is meant for him and that he will be next lynching victim. He flees from room, with rest of Kabnis charting an existential and artistic breakdown in its title character so complete that his recovery remains uncertain, despite tender ministrations of a different sister, Carrie K. Questions of healing and closure remain particularly significant to troubling but explosive final section of Cane (1923). Both story and book end on a note of hope, deploying images of rebirth to compensate for horrific deaths of Mame Lamkins and her fetus: Outside, sun arises from its cradle in tree-tops of forest.... Gold-glowing child, it steps into sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of southern town (117). The musical accompaniment here is more Easter hymn than mournful blues, suggesting redemption for tortured souls who populate Cane's pages. That redemption gets undercut, however, by book's last view of Kabnis, stumbling over a bucket of dead coals that he jerks from floor and carries, Sisyphus-like, up stairs to Halsey's workshop. Does Cane offer closure or even coherence? Many readers have asked this of Toomer's hauntingly beautiful modernist experiment in style, form, and subject matter. Is it more hopeful or skeptical, as others have debated, more aesthetic or socially engaged? (1) Cane continues to prompt such questions because of its stark iuxtapositions: dead coals against sunrise, brutal violence against lyrical language, and different genres (poems, sketches, stories, and closet dramas) assembled in bold, new ways. Even book's graphics call attention to its fragmentary nature: visuals of arcs that never meet as complete circles divide its three sections. Rather than thinking in terms of resolutions, which Cane defies, literary scholars might approach text by doing what we do best: minding gaps, or paying more attention to fragments, fractures, and other places that seem to demand it most. What can we learn from a bucket of dead coals tripping up final story's main character? From a rock crashing through a window? Or from piercing shriek that accompanies Marne Lamkins's story? If sister's cry marks spot where character (and perhaps Kabnis text) begins to spiral downward, then readers should listen closely to what she wants us to hear. Although her voice is almost perfectly attuned to Kabnis's nervous key, narrative disruption she generates provides a counter-melody that harmonizes with a very different song. …