Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“No!” She jerked away from him, then cried out in pain and surprise when her sudden movement caused him to hurt her ear. She doused the pain quickly and repaired the slight injury. “We will not do such a thing!”

He gave her a smile of gentle condescension, picked up the earring from where it had fallen, and put it on her ear.

“Doro, we will not do it!”

“All right,” he said agreeably. “It was only a suggestion. You might enjoy it.”

“No!”

He shrugged.

“It would be a vile thing,” she whispered. “Surely an abomination.”

“All right,” he repeated.

She looked to see whether he was still smiling, and he was. For an instant, she wondered herself what such a switch might be like. She knew she could become an adequate man, but could this strange being ever be truly womanly? What if …? No!

“I will show Isaac the clothing,” she said coldly.

He nodded. “Go.” And the smile never left his face.

There was, in Isaac’s eyes when Anyanwu stepped before him in the strange clothing, a look that warned her of another kind of abomination. The boy was open and easy to accept as a young stepson. Anyanwu was aware, however, that he would have preferred another relationship. In a less confined environment, she would have avoided him. On the ship, she had done the easy thing, the pleasurable thing, and accepted his company. Doro often had no time for her, and the slaves, who knew her power now, were afraid of her. All of them, even Okoye and Udenkwo, treated her with great formality and respect, and they avoided her as best they could. Doro’s other sons were forbidden to her and it would not have been proper for her to spend time with other members of the crew. She had few wifely duties aboard. She did not cook or clean. She had no baby to tend. There were no markets to go to—she missed the crowding and the companionship of the markets very much. During several of her marriages, she had been a great trader. The produce of her garden and the pottery and tools she created were always very fine. Her goats and fowls were always fat.

Now there was nothing. Not even sickness to heal or gods to call upon. Both the slaves and the crew seemed remarkably healthy. She had seen no diseases but what Doro called seasickness among the slaves, and that was nothing. In her boredom, Anyanwu accepted Isaac’s companionship. But now she could see that it was time to stop. It was wrong to torment the boy. She was pleased, though, to realize that he saw beauty in her even now, smothered as she was in so much cloth. She had feared that to eyes other than Doro’s she would look ridiculous.

“Thank you for these things,” she said softly in English.

“They make you even more beautiful,” he told her.

“I am like a prisoner. All bound.”

“You’ll get used to it. Now you can be a real lady.”

Anyanwu turned that over in her mind. “Real lady?” she said, frowning. “What was I before?”

Isaac’s face went red. “I mean you look like a New York lady.”

His embarrassment told her that he had said something wrong, something insulting. She had thought she was misunderstanding his English. Now she realized she had understood all too well.

“Tell me what I was before, Isaac,” she insisted. “And tell me the word you used before: Civilization. What is civilization?”

He sighed, met her eyes after a moment of gazing past her at the main mast. “Before, you were Anyanwu,” he said, “mother of I-don’t-know-how-many children, priestess to your people, respected and valued woman of your town. But to the people here, you would be a savage, almost an animal if they saw you wearing only your cloth. Civilization is the way one’s own people live. Savagery is the way foreigners live.” He smiled tentatively. “You’re already a chameleon, Anyanwu. You understand what I’m saying.”

“Yes.” She did not return his smile. “But in a land where most of the people are white, and of the few blacks, most are slaves, can only a few pieces of cloth make me a ‘real lady.’ ”

“In Wheatley I can!” he said quickly. “I’m white and black and Indian, and I live there without trouble.”

“But you look like a ‘real man.’ ”

He winced. “I’m not like you,” he said. “I can’t help the way I look.”

“No,” she admitted.

“And it doesn’t matter anyway. Wheatley is Doro’s ‘American’ village. He dumps all the people he can’t find places for in his pure families on us. Mix and stir. No one can afford to worry about what anyone else looks like. They don’t know who Doro might mate them with—or what their own children might look like.”

Anyanwu allowed herself to be diverted. “Do people even marry as he says?” she asked. “Does no one resist him?”

Isaac gave her a long, solemn look. “Wild seed resists sometimes,” he said softly. “But he always wins. Always.”

She said nothing. She did not need to be reminded of how dangerous and how demanding Doro could be. Reminders awakened her fear of him, her fear of a future with him. Reminders made her want to forget the welfare of her children whose freedom she had bought with her servitude. Forget and run!

“People run away sometimes,” Isaac said, as though reading her thoughts. “But he always catches them and usually wears their bodies back to their home towns so that their people can see and be warned. The only sure way to escape him and cheat him out of the satisfaction of wearing your body, I guess, is my mother’s way.” He paused. “She hanged herself.”

Anyanwu stared at him. He had said the words with no particular feeling—as though he cared no more for his mother than he had for his brother Lale. And he had told her he could not remember a time when he and Lale had not hated each other.

“Your mother died because of Doro?” she asked, watching him carefully.

He shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I was only four. But I don’t think so. She was like Lale—able to send and receive thoughts. But she was better at it than he was, especially better at receiving. From Wheatley, sometimes she could hear people in New York City over a hundred and fifty miles away.” He glanced at Anyanwu. “A long way. A damned long way for that kind of thing. She could hear anything. But sometimes she couldn’t shut things out. I remember I was afraid of her. She used to crouch in a corner and hold her head or scratch her face bloody and scream and scream and scream.” He shuddered. “That’s all I remember of her. That’s the only image that comes when I think of her.”

Anyanwu laid a hand on his arm in sympathy for both mother and son. How could he have come from such a family and remained sane himself, she wondered. What was Doro doing to his people, to his own children, in his attempt to make them more as the children of his own lost body might have been. For each one like Isaac, how many were there like Lale and his mother?

“Isaac, has there been nothing good in your life?” she asked softly.

He blinked. “There’s been a lot. Doro, the foster parents he found me when I was little, the travel, this.” He rose several inches above the deck. “It’s been good. I used to worry that I’d be crazy like my mother or mad-dog vicious like Lale, but Doro always said I wouldn’t.”

“How could he know?”

“He used a different body to father me. He wanted a different ability in me, and sometimes he knows exactly which families to breed together to get what he wants. I’m glad he knew for me.”

She nodded. “I would not want to know you if you were like Lale.”

He looked down at her in that intense disturbing way he had developed over the voyage, and she took her hand away from his arm. No son should look at his father’s wife that way. How stupid of Doro not to find a good girl for him. He should marry and begin fathering yellow-haired sons. He should be working his own farm. What good was sailing back and forth across the sea, taking slaves, and becoming wealthy when he had no children?