Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“Come into the house, Doro,” she said.

Her voice was the same, soft and young. He followed her in feeling oddly confused, suspended in time, with only the watchful, protective young son to jar him to reality.

He looked at the son, ragged and shoeless and dusty. The boy should have seemed out of place inside the handsomely furnished home, but somehow, he did not.

“Come into the parlor,” he said, catching Doro’s arm in his child-sized hands. “Let her put her clothes on. She’ll be back.”

Doro did not doubt that she would. Apparently, the boy understood his role as hostage.

Doro sat down in an upholstered armchair and the boy sat opposite him on a sofa. Between them was a small wooden table and a fireplace of carved black stone. There was a large oriental rug on the floor and several other chairs and tables scattered around the room. A maid in a plain clean blue dress and white apron brought brandy and looked at the boy as though daring him to have any. He smiled and did not.

The maid would have been good prey too. A daughter? “What can she do?” Doro asked when she was gone.

“Nothing but have babies,” the boy said.

“Did she have a transition?”

“No. She won’t either. Not as old as she is.”

A latent then. One who could pass her heritage on to her children, but could not use it herself. She should be bred to a near relative. Doro wondered whether Anyanwu had overcome her squeamishness enough to do this. Was that where this boy who was growing arms had come from? Inbreeding? Was his father, perhaps, one of Anyanwu’s older sons?

“What do you know about me?” he asked the boy.

“That you’re no more what you appear to be than she is.” The boy shrugged. “She talked about you sometimes—how you took her from Africa, how she was your slave in New York back when they had slaves in New York.”

“She was never my slave.”

“She thinks she was. She doesn’t think she will be again though.”

In her bedroom, Anyanwu dressed quickly and casually as a man. She kept her body womanly—she wanted to be herself when she faced Doro—but after the easy unclothed freedom of the dog body, she could not have stood the layers of tight clothing women were expected to wear. The male clothing accented her womanliness anyway. No one had ever seen her this way and mistaken her for a man or boy.

Abruptly, she threw her shirt to the floor and stood, head in hands, before her dressing table. Doro would break Stephen into pieces if she ran now. He would probably not kill him, but he would make him a slave. There were people here in Louisiana and in the other Southern states who bred people as Doro did. They gave a man one woman after another and when the children came, the man had no authority over what was done to them, no responsibility to them or to their mothers. Authority and responsibility were the prerogatives of the masters. Doro would do that to her son, make him no more than a breeding animal. She thought of the sons and daughters she had left behind in Doro’s hands. It was not likely that any of them were alive now, but she had no doubt of the way Doro had used them while they did live. She could not have helped them. It was all she had been able to do to get Doro to give his word not to harm them during her marriage to Isaac. Beyond that, she could have stayed with them and died, but she could not have helped them. And growing up as they had in Wheatley, they would not have wanted her help. Doro seduced people. He made them want to please him, made them strive for his approval. He terrified them into submission only when he could not seduce them.

And when he could not terrify them …

What could she do? She could not run again and leave him Stephen and the others. But she was no more able to help them by staying than she had been able to help her children in Wheatley. She could not even help herself. What would he do to her when she went downstairs? She had run away from him, and he murdered runaways. Had he allowed her to dress herself merely so that he would not have the inconvenience of taking over a naked body?

What could she do?

Doro and Stephen were talking like old friends when Anyanwu walked into the parlor. To her surprise, Doro stood up. He had always seemed lazily unconcerned with such courtesies before. She sat with Stephen on the sofa, noticing automatically that the boy’s arms seemed to be forming well. He had been so good, so controlled on that terrible day when he lost them.

“Go back to your work now,” she told him softly.

He looked at her, surprised.

“Go,” she repeated. “I’m here now.”

Clearly, that was what was concerning him. She had told him a great deal about Doro. He did not want to leave her, but finally, he obeyed.

“Good boy,” Doro commented, sipping brandy.

“Yes,” she agreed.

He shook his head. “What shall I do with him, Anyanwu? What shall I do with you?”

She said nothing. When had it ever mattered what she said to him? He did as he pleased.

“You’ve had more success than I have,” he said. “Your son seems controlled—very sure of himself.”

“I taught him to lift his head,” she said.

“I meant his ability.”

“Yes.”

“Who was his father?”

She hesitated. He would ask, of course. He would inquire after the ancestry of her children as though after the bloodline of a horse. “His father was brought illegally from Africa,” she said. “He was a good man, but … much like Thomas. He could see and hear and feel too much.”

“And he survived a crossing on a slave ship?”

“Only part of him survived. He was mad most of the time, but he was docile. He was like a child. The slavers pretended that it was because he had not yet learned English that he seemed strange. They showed me how strong his muscles were—I had the form of a white man, you see.”

“I know.”

“They showed me his teeth and his hands and his penis and they said what a good breeder he would be. They would have pleased you, Doro. They thought very much as you do.”

“I doubt it,” he said amiably. He was being surprisingly amiable. He was at his first stage—seeking to seduce her as he had when he took her from her people. No doubt by his own reasoning he was being extremely generous. She had run from him, done what no one else could do, kept out of his hands for more than a lifetime; yet instead of killing her at once, he seemed to be beginning again with her—giving her a chance to accept him as though nothing had happened. That meant he wanted her alive, if she would submit.

Her own sense of relief at this realization startled her. She had come down the stairs to him expecting to die, ready to die, and here he was courting her again. And here she was responding …

No. Not again. No more Wheatleys.

What then?

“So you bought a slave you knew was insane because he had a sensitivity you liked,” Doro said. “You couldn’t imagine how many times I’ve done things like that myself.”

“I bought him in New Orleans because as he walked past me in chains on his way to the slave pens, he called to me. He said, ‘Anyanwu! Does that white skin cover your eyes too?’ ”

“He spoke English?”

“No. He was one of my people. Not a descendant, I think; he was too different. In the moment he spoke to me, he was sane and hearing my thoughts. Slaves were passing in front of me all chained, and I was thinking, ‘I have to take more sunken gold from the sea, then see the banker about buying the land that adjoins mine. I have to buy some books—medical books, especially to see what doctors are doing now …’ I was not seeing the slaves in front of me. I would not have thought I could be oblivious to such a thing. I had been white for too long. I needed someone to say what he said to me.”