He knew no more about his
bride than she, Emma, knew.
That was all Emma needed to reduce her to absolute befuddlement.
When food and drink were placed before her, she partook of both,
mechanically. If one spoke to her, she stared like a large black
owl. And when Peter had driven away in the taxi, leaving her for the
time being in the care of a highly respectable colored family, whose
children, born and raised in New York, looked upon the old South
Carolina woman as they might have looked upon a visitor from Mars,
Emma shut and locked her door, took the cat out of his cage, cuddled
him in her arms, tried to projeck,--and couldn't. The feel of
Satan's soft, warm body comforted her inexpressibly. He, at least,
was real in a shifting universe. She began to rock herself, slowly,
rhythmically, back and forth. Then the New York negroes heard a
shrill, sweet, wailing voice upraised in one of those speretuals in
which Africa concentrates her ages of anguish into a half-articulate
cry. In it were the voices of their fathers long gone, come back
from the rice-fields and the cane-brakes and the cotton-rows, voices
so sweet and plaintive that they were haunted.
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