dat dis unforchunit cat 's gwine to lose 'is
min'. Seein' places like dis is 'nough to make any natchel cat run
crazy."

Whereupon Emma relapsed into a colossal silence. She was fed up on
surprises and they were palling upon her palate, which fortunately
wasn't down. Things had been happening so fast that she couldn't
keep step with them. To begin with, Peter had preferred to come
north by sea, and although Emma had been raised on the coast,
although she was used to the capricious tide-water rivers which this
morning may be lamb-like and to-night raging lions, although she
had crossed Caliboga Sound in rough weather and been rolled about
like a ninepin, that had been, so to speak, near the shore-line.
This was different: here was more water than Emma had thought was in
the entire world; and she had been assured that this wasn't a
bucketful to what she was yet to see! Emma fell back upon silent
prayer.

Then had come this astounding city jutting jaggedly into the clouds,
and through whose streets poured in a never-ceasing, turgid flow all
the peoples of the earth. And, more astounding than waterful sea and
peopleful city, was the last, crowning bit of news: _Peter was going
to be married_! And he didn't know the young lady he was to marry,
except that she was a Miss Anne Simms. 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 h