The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown. The last
gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and
drinking. White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of
their sleep and listened to the eerie sound. It rose and fell in the
darkness like a melancholy organ chord. The wailing of the women
quivered against the heavy grief of the men. The half-asleep listeners
were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies. The dolor
veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot
through with the uncanny and the terrible. White children crawled out of
their small beds and groped their way to their parents. The women
shivered and asked of the darkness, "_What_ makes the negroes howl
so?"
Nobody knew,--least of all, the negroes. Nobody suspected that the
bedlam harked back to the jungle, to black folk in African kraals
beating tom-toms and howling, not in grief, but in an ecstasy of terror
lest the souls of their dead might come back in the form of tigers or
pythons or devils and work woe to the tribe.
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