Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“I’ve never hurt her,” Doro had told him. “Never hurt one of her children. You show me one other wild seed woman I’ve allowed to live as long as she has after childbearing.” He had not touched her children because from the first, she promised him that if any one of them was harmed, she would bear no more. No matter what he did to her, she would bear no more. Her sincerity was unmistakable; thus he refrained from preying on her least successful children, refrained from breeding her daughters to her sons—or bedding those daughters himself. She did not know what care he had taken to keep her content. She did not know, but Isaac should have.

“You treat her a little better than the others because she’s a little more useful,” Isaac had said. “But you still humiliate her.”

“If she chooses to be humiliated by what I have her do, she’s creating her own problem.”

Isaac had looked at him steadily, almost angrily, for several seconds. “I know about Nweke’s father,” he had said. He had said it without fear. Over the years, he had come to learn that he was one of the few people who did not have to be afraid.

Doro had gone away from him feeling ashamed. He had not thought it was still possible for him to feel shame, but Anyanwu’s presence seemed to be slowly awakening several long dormant emotions in him. How many women had he sent Isaac to without feeling a thing. Isaac had done as he was told and come home. Home from Pennsylvania, home from Maryland, home from Georgia, home from Spanish Florida … Isaac didn’t mind either. He didn’t like being away from Anyanwu and the children for long periods, but he didn’t mind the women. And they certainly didn’t mind him. He didn’t mind that Doro had begotten eight of Anyanwu’s children. Or seven. Only Anyanwu minded that. Only she felt humiliated. But Nweke’s father was, perhaps, another matter.

The girl, eighteen years old, small and dark like her mother, came through the door, Isaac’s arm around her shoulders. She was redeyed as though she had been crying or as though she hadn’t been sleeping. Probably both. This was a bad time for her.

“Is it you?” she whispered, seeing the sharp-featured stranger.

“Of course,” Doro said, smiling.

His voice, the knowledge that he was indeed Doro, triggered tears. She went to him crying softly, looking for comfort in his arms. He held her and looked over her shoulder at Isaac.

“Whatever you’ve got to say to me, I deserve it,” Isaac said. “I didn’t notice and I should have. After all these years, I surely should have.”

Doro said nothing, motioned Isaac back out the door.

Isaac obeyed silently, probably feeling more guilt than he should have. This was no ordinary girl. None of her brothers or sisters had reached Doro miles away with their desperation as their transitions neared. What had he felt about her? Anxiety, worry, more. Some indefinable feeling not only that she was near transition, but that she was on the verge of becoming something he had not known before. Something new. It was as though from New York City he had sensed another Anyanwu—new, different, attracting him, pulling him. He had never followed a feeling more willingly.

The girl moved in his arms and he took her to the high-backed settle near the fireplace. The narrow bench was nearly as uncomfortable as the wainscot chairs. Not for the first time, Doro wondered why Isaac and Anyanwu did not buy or have made some comfortable modern furniture. Surely they could afford it.

“What am I going to do?” the girl whispered. She had put her head against his shoulder, but even that close, Doro could hardly hear her. “It hurts so much.”

“Endure it,” he said simply. “It will end.”

“When!” From a whisper to almost a scream. Then back to the whisper. “When?”

“Soon.” He held her away from him a little so that he could see the small face, swollen and weary. The girl’s coloring was gray rather than its usual rich dark brown. “You haven’t been sleeping?”

“A little. Sometimes. The nightmares … only they aren’t nightmares, are they?”

“You know what they are.”

She shrank against the back of the bench. “You know David Whitten, two houses over?”

Doro nodded. The Whitten boy was twenty. Fairly good breeding stock. His family would be worth more in generations to come. They had a sensitivity that puzzled Doro. He did not know quite what they were becoming, but the feeling he got from them was good. They were a pleasant mystery that careful inbreeding would solve.

“Almost every night,” Nweke said, “David … he goes to his sister’s bed.”

Startled, Doro laughed aloud. “Does he?”

“Just like married people. Why is that funny? They could get into trouble—brother and sister. They could …”

“They’ll be all right.”

She looked at him closely. “Did you know about it?”

“No.” Doro was still smiling. “How old is the girl? Around sixteen?”

“Seventeen.” Nweke hesitated. “She likes it.”

“So do you,” Doro observed.

Nweke twisted away, embarrassed. There was no coyness to her; her embarrassment was real. “I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t try to know!”

“Do you imagine I’m criticizing you for knowing? Me?”

She blinked, licked her lips. “Not you, I guess. Were you going to … to put them together anyway?”

“Yes.”

“Here?”

“No. I was going to move them down to Pennsylvania. I see now that I’d better prepare a place for them quickly.”

“They were almost a relief,” Nweke said. “It was so easy to get caught up in what they were doing that sometimes I didn’t have to feel other things. Last night, though … last night there were some Indians. They caught a white man. He had done something—killed one of their women or something. I was in his thoughts and they were all blurred at first. They tortured him. It took him so long … so long to die.” Her hands were clinched tight around each other, her eyes wide with remembering. “They tore out his fingernails, then they cut him and burned him and the women bit him—bit pieces away like wolves at their kill. Then …” She stopped, choked. “Oh God!”

“You were with him the whole time?” Doro asked.

“The whole time—through … everything.” She was crying silently, not sobbing, only staring straight ahead as tears ran down her face and her nails dug themselves into her palms. “I don’t understand how I can be alive after all that,” she whispered.

“None of it happened to you,” Doro said.

“All of it happened to me, every bit of it!”

Doro took her hands and unclinched the long, slender fingers. There were bloody marks on her palms where the nails had punctured. Doro ran a finger across the hard neatly cut nails. “All ten,” he said, “right where they should be.None of it happened to you .”

“You don’t understand.”

“I’ve been through transition, girl. In fact, I may have been the first person ever to go through it—back more years than you can imagine. I understand, all right.”

“Then you’ve forgotten! Maybe what happens doesn’t leave marks on your body, but it leaves marks. It’s real. Oh God, it’s so real!” She began sobbing now. “If someone whips a slave or a criminal, I feel it, and it’s as real to me as to the person under the lash!”

“But no matter how many times others die,” Doro said, “you won’t die.”

“Why not? People die in transition. You died!”

He grinned. “Not entirely.” Then he sobered. “Listen, the one thing you don’t have to worry about is becoming what I am. You’re going to be something special, all right, but nothing like me.”

She looked at him timidly. “I would like to be like you.”