Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“So you could become another person so completely that the children you gave Denice were not really yours.”

“I could have. But when she understood, she did not want that. She said she would rather have no children at all. But that sacrifice was not necessary. I could give her girl children of my own body. Girl children who would have her coloring. It was hard work arranging all that. There are so many tiny things within even one cell of a human body. I could have given her a monstrosity if I had been careless.”

“I made you study these things by driving you away?”

“You did. You made me learn very much. Much of the time, I had nothing to do but study myself, try things I had not thought of before.”

“If you duplicated another man’s shape then, you could father sons.”

“The other man’s sons.”

Slowly, Doro drew his mouth into a smile. “That’s the answer then, Anyanwu. You’ll take your son’s place. You’ll take the place of a great many people.”

“You mean … for me to go here and there getting children and then forgetting about them?”

“Either you go or I’ll bring women to you here.”

She got up wearily, without even outrage to make her stiff and hostile. “You are a complete fool,” she told him quietly, and she walked into the hall, through the house, and out the back door. From there, through the trees she could see the bayou with its slow water. Nearer were the dependencies and the slave cabins that were not inhabited by slaves. She owned no slaves. She had bought some of the people who worked for her and recruited the others among freedmen, but those she bought, she freed. They always stayed to work for her, feeling more comfortable with her and with each other than they had ever been elsewhere. That always surprised the new ones. They were not used to being comfortable with other people.

They were misfits, malcontents, troublemakers—though they did not make trouble for Anyanwu. They treated her as mother, older sister, teacher, and, when she invited it, lover. Somehow, even this last intimacy did nothing to diminish her authority. They knew her power. She was who she was, no matter what role she chose.

And yet, she did not threaten them, did not slaughter among them as Doro did among his people. The worst she did was occasionally fire someone. Firing meant eviction. It meant leaving the safety and comfort of the plantation and becoming a misfit again in the world outside. It meant exile.

Few of them knew how difficult it was for Anyanwu to turn one of them out—or worse, turn a family out. Few of them knew how their presence comforted her. She was not Doro, breeding people as though they were cattle, though perhaps her gathering of all these special ones, these slightly strange ones would accomplish the same purpose as his breeding. She was herself, gathering family. No doubt some of these people were of her family, her descendants. They felt like her children. Perhaps, there had been intermarriage, her descendants drawn together by a comforting but indefinable similarity and not knowing of their common origins. And there were other people probably not related to her, who had rudimentary sensitivity that could become true thought reading in a few generations. Mgbada had told her this—that she was gathering people who were like his grandparents. He had told her she was breeding witches.

An old woman came up to her—a white woman, withered and gray, Luisa, who did what sewing she could for her keep. She was one of five white people on the place. There could have been many more whites, fitting in very comfortably, but the race-conscious culture made that dangerous. The four younger whites tried to lessen the danger by telling people they were octoroons. Luisa was a Creole—a French-Spanish mixture—and too old to care who knew it.

“Is there trouble?” Luisa asked.

Anyanwu nodded.

“Stephen said he was here—Doro, the one you told me about.”

“Go and tell the others not to come in from the fields until I call them in myself.”

Luisa stared hard at her. “What if he calls—with your mouth?”

“Then they must decide whether to run or not. They know about him. If they want to run now, they can. Later, if the black dog is seen in the woods again, they can come back.” If Doro killed her, he would not be able to use her healing or metamorphosing abilities. She had learned that from her stay in Wheatley. He could possess someone’s body and use it to have children, but he could use only the body. When he possessed Thomas so long ago, he had not gained Thomas’ thought-reading ability. She had never known him to use any extra ability from a body he possessed.

The old woman took Anyanwu by the shoulders and hugged her. “What will you do?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I have never seen him and I hate him.”

“Go,” Anyanwu told her.

Luisa hurried across the grass. She moved well for her age. Like Anyanwu’s children, she had lived a long, healthy life. Cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other diseases swept across the land and left Anyanwu’s people almost untouched. If they caught a disease, they survived it and recovered quickly. If they hurt themselves, Anyanwu was there to care for them.

As Luisa disappeared into the trees, Doro came out of the house. “I could go after her,” he said. “I know you sent her to warn your field hands.”

Anyanwu turned to face him angrily. “You are many times as old as I am. You must have some inborn defect to keep you from getting wisdom to go with your years.”

“Will you eventually condescend to tell me what wisdom you have gotten?” There was an edge to his voice finally. She was beginning to irritate him and end the seductive phase. That was good. How stupid of him to think she could be seduced again. It was possible, however, that she might seduce him.

“You were pleased to see me again, weren’t you?” she said. “I think you were surprised to realize how pleased you were.”

“Say what you have to say, Anyanwu!”

She shrugged. “Isaac was right.”

Silence. She knew Isaac had spoken to him several times. Isaac had wanted them together so badly—the two people he loved best. Did that mean anything at all to Doro? It had not years before, but now … Doro had been glad to see her. He had marveled over the fact that she seemed unchanged—as though he was only now beginning to realize that she was only slightly more likely to die than he was, and not likely at all to grow decrepit with age. As though her immortality had been emotionally unreal to him until now, a fact that he had accepted with only half his mind.

“Doro, I will go on living unless you kill me. There is no reason for me to die unless you kill me.”

“Do you think you can take over work I’ve spent millennia at?”

“Do you think I want to?” she countered. “I was telling the truth. These people need me, and I need them. I never set out to build a settlement like one of yours. Why should I? I don’t need new bodies as you do. All I need is my own kind around me. My family or people who feel like my family. To you, most of my people here wouldn’t even be good breeding stock, I think.”

“Forty years ago, that old woman would have.”

“Does that make it competition for me to give her a home now?”

“You have others. Your maid …”

“My daughter!”

“I thought so.”

“She is unmarried. Bring her a man. If she likes him, let her marry him and bear interesting children. If she doesn’t like him, then find her someone else. But she needs only one husband, Doro, as my son needs only one wife.”

“Is that what your own way of life tells them? Or shall I believe you sleep alone because your husbands are dead?”