Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“So you brought him home and bore him a son.”

“I would have borne him many sons. It seemed that his spirit was healing from what they had done to him on the ship. At the end, he was sane nearly all the time. He was a good husband then. But he died.”

“Of what sickness?”

“None that I could find. He saw his son and said in praise, ‘Ifeyinwa!—what is like a child.’ I made that Stephen’s other name, Ifeyinwa. Then Mgbada died. I am a bad healer sometimes. I am no healer at all sometimes.”

“No doubt the man lived much longer and better than he would have without you.”

“He was a young man,” she said. “If I were the healer I long to be, he would still be alive.”

“What kind of healer is the boy?”

“Less than I am in some ways. Slower. But he has some of his father’s sensitivity. Didn’t you wonder how he knew you?”

“I thought you had seen me and warned him.”

“I told him about you. Perhaps he knew your voice from hearing it in my thoughts. I don’t ask him what he hears. But no, I did not see you before you arrived—not to know you, anyway.” Did he really think she would have stayed to meet him, kept her children here so that he could threaten them? Did he think she had grown stupid with the years? “He can touch people sometimes and know what is wrong with them,” she continued. “When he says a thing is wrong, it is. But sometimes he misses things—things I wouldn’t miss.”

“He’s young,” Doro said.

She shrugged.

“Will he ever grow old, Anyanwu?”

“I don’t know.” She hesitated, spoke her hope in a whisper. “Perhaps I have finally borne a son I will not have to bury.” She looked up, saw that Doro was watching her intently. There was a kind of hunger in his expression—hunger that he masked quickly.

“Can he control his thought reading?” he asked, neutral-voiced.

“In that, he is his father’s opposite. Mgbada could not control what he heard—like Thomas. That was why his people sold him into slavery. He was a sorcerer to them. But Stephen must make an effort to hear other people’s thoughts. It has not happened by accident since his transition. But sometimes when he tries, nothing happens. He says it is like never knowing when he will be struck deaf.”

“That is a tolerable defect,” Doro said. “He might be frustrated sometimes, but he will never go mad with the weight of other people’s thoughts pressing in on him.”

“I have told him that.”

There was a long silence. Something was coming, and it had to do with Stephen, Anyanwu knew. She wanted to ask what it was, but then Doro would tell her and she would have to find some way to defy him. When she did … when she did, she would fail, and he would kill her.

“He is to me what Isaac was to you,” she whispered. Would he hear that as what it was—a plea for mercy?

He stared at her as though she had said something incomprehensible, as though he was trying to understand. Finally, he smiled a small, uncharacteristically tentative smile. “Did you ever think, Anyanwu, how long a hundred years is to an ordinary person—or a hundred and fifty years?”

She shrugged. Nonsense. He was talking nonsense while she waited to hear what he meant to do to her son!

“How do the years seem to you?” he asked. “Like days? Like months? What do you feel when good companions are suddenly old and gray and addled?”

Again, she shrugged. “People grow old. They die.”

“All of them,” he agreed. “All but you and I.”

“You die constantly,” she said.

He got up and went to sit beside her on the sofa. Somehow, she kept still, subdued her impulse to get up, move away from him. “I have never died,” he said.

She stared past him at one of the candlesticks on the mantel. “Yes,” she said. “I should have said you kill constantly.”

He was silenced. She faced him, looked into eyes that were large and wide-set and brown. He had the eyes of a larger man—or his current body did. They gave him a false expression of gentleness.

“Did you come here to kill?” she asked. “Am I to die? Are my children to become mares and studs? Is that why you could not leave me alone!”

“Why do you want to be alone?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. “Doro, tell me what is to happen.”

“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps eventually, I will bring your son a wife.”

“One wife?” she said, disbelieving.

“One wife here, as with you and Isaac. I never brought women to Wheatley for him.”

That was so. From time to time, he took Isaac away with him, but he never brought women to Isaac. Anyanwu knew that the husband she had loved most had sired dozens of children with other women. “Don’t you care about them?” she had asked once, trying to understand. She cared about each one of her children, raised each one she bore and loved it.

“I never see them,” he had answered. “They are his children. I sire them in his name. He sees that they and their mothers are well cared for.”

“So he says!” She had been bitter that day, angry at Doro for making her pregnant when her most recent child by Isaac was less than a year old, angry at him for afterward killing a tall, handsome girl whom Anyanwu had known and liked. The girl, understanding what was to happen to her, had still somehow treated him as a lover. It was obscene.

“Have you ever known him to neglect the needs of the children he claims?” Isaac had asked. “Have you ever seen his people left landless or hungry? He takes care of his own.”

She had gone away from Isaac to fly for hours as a bird and look down at the great, empty land below and wonder if there was nowhere in all the forests and rivers and mountains and lakes, nowhere in that endless land for her to escape and find peace and cleanness.

“Stephen is nineteen years old,” she said. “He is a man. Your children and mine grow up very quickly, I think. He has been a man since his transition. But he’s still young. You’ll make him an animal if you use him as you used Isaac.”

“Isaac was fifteen when I gave him his first woman,” Doro said.

“Then he had been yours for fifteen years. For you, Stephen will be as much wild seed as I was.”

Doro nodded agreeably. “It is better for me to get them before they reach their transitions—if they’re going to have transitions. What will you give me then, Anyanwu?”

She turned to look at him in surprise. Was he offering to bargain with her? He had never bargained before. He had told her what he wanted and let her know what he would do to her or to her children if she did not obey.

Was he bargaining now, then, or was he playing with her? What could she lose by assuming that he was serious? “Bring Stephen the woman,” she said. “One woman. When he is older, perhaps there can be others.”

“Do you imagine there are none now?”

“Of course not. But he chooses his own. I don’t tell him to breed. I don’t send him women.”

“Do women seem to like him?”

She surprised herself by smiling a little. “Some do. Not enough to suit him, of course. There is a widow paying a lot of attention to him now. She knows what she is doing. Left alone, he will find a good wife here when he is tired of wandering around.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t let him get tired of it.”

“I tell you, you will make an animal of him if you don’t!” she said. “Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other men. One thinks he is greater than another because he has more children. Both exaggerate the number of women who have borne them children, neither is doing anything a father should for his children, and the master who is indifferently selling off his own brown children is laughing and saying, ‘You see? Niggers are just like animals!’ Slavery down here opens one’s eyes, Doro. How could I want such a life for my son?”