Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

He seemed utterly sincere. She could not recall the last time she had heard him apologize for anything. She stared at him, confused.

“Joe didn’t say anything about his brother going crazy,” Margaret said.

“Joseph didn’t live with his family,” Doro said. “He couldn’t get along with them, so I found foster parents for him.”

“Oh …” Margaret looked away, seeming to understand, to accept. No more than half the children on the plantation lived with their parents.

“Margaret?”

She looked up at him, then quickly looked down again. He was being remarkably gentle with her, but she was still afraid.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

“I wish I were,” she whispered. She was beginning to cry.

“All right,” Doro said. “All right, that’s all.”

She got up quickly and left the room. When she was gone, Anyanwu said, “Doro, Joseph was too old for a transition! Everything you taught me says he was too old.”

“He was twenty-four. I haven’t seen anyone change at that age before, but …” He hesitated, changed direction. “You never asked about his ancestry, Anyanwu.”

“I never wanted to know.”

“You do know. He’s your descendant, of course.”

She made herself shrug. “You said you would bring my grandchildren.”

“He was the grandchild of your grandchildren. Both his parents trace their descent back to you.”

“Why do you tell me that now? I don’t want to know any more about it. He’s dead!”

“He’s Isaac’s descendant too,” Doro continued relentlessly. “People of Isaac’s line are sometimes a little late going into transition, though Joseph is about as late as I’ve seen. The two children I’ve brought to you are sons of his brother’s body.”

“No!” Anyanwu stared at him. “Take them away! I want no more of that kind near me!”

“You have them. Teach them and guide them as you do your own children. I told you your descendants would not be easy to care for. You chose to care for them anyway.”

She said nothing. He made it sound as though her choice had been free, as though he had not coerced her into choosing.

“If I had found you earlier, I would have brought them to you when they were even younger,” he said. “Since I didn’t, you’ll have to do what you can with them now. Teach them responsibility, pride, honor. Teach them whatever you taught Stephen. But don’t be foolish enough to teach them you believe they’ll grow up to be criminals. They’ll be powerful men someday and they’re liable to fulfill your expectations—either way.”

Still she said nothing. What was there for her to say—or do? He would be obeyed, or he would make her life and her children’s lives not worth living—if he did not kill them outright.

“You have five to ten years before the boys’ transitions,” he said. “They will have transitions; I’m as sure as I can be of that. Their ancestry is just right.”

“Are they mine, or will you interfere with them?”

“Until their transitions, they’re yours.

“And then?”

“I’ll breed them, of course.”

Of course. “Let them marry and stay here. If they fit here, they’ll want to stay. How can they become responsible men if their only future is to be bred?”

Doro laughed aloud, opening his mouth wide to show the empty spaces of several missing teeth. “Do you hear yourself, woman? First you want no part of them, now you don’t want to let go of them even when they’re grown.”

She waited silently until he stopped laughing, then asked: “Do you think I’m willing to throw away any child, Doro? If there is a chance for those boys to grow up better than Joseph, why shouldn’t I try to give them that chance? If, when they grow up, they can be men instead of dogs who know nothing except how to climb onto one female after another, why shouldn’t I try to help?”

He sobered. “I knew you would help—and not grudgingly. Don’t you think I know you by now, Anyanwu?”

Oh, he knew her—knew how to use her. “Will you do it then? Let them marry and stay here if they fit?”

“Yes.”

She looked down, examining the rug pattern that had held so much of Margaret’s attention. “Will you take them away if they don’t fit, can’t fit, like Joseph?”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Their seed is too valuable to be wasted.”

He thought of nothing else. Nothing!

“Shall I stay with you for a while, Anyanwu?”

She stared at him in surprise, and he looked back neutral-faced, waiting for an answer. Was he asking a real question, then? “Will you go if I ask you to?”

“Yes.”

Yes. He was saying that so often now, being so gentle and cooperative—for him. He had come courting again.

“Go,” she said as gently as she could. “Your presence is disruptive here, Doro. You frighten my people.” Now. Let him keep his word.

He shrugged, nodded. “Tomorrow morning,” he said.

And the next morning, he was gone.

Perhaps an hour after his departure, Helen and Luisa came hand in hand to Anyanwu to tell her that Margaret had hanged herself from a beam in the washhouse.

For a time after Margaret’s death, Anyanwu felt a sickness that she could not dispel. Grief. Two children lost so close together. Somehow, she never got used to losing children—especially young children, children it seemed had been with her for only a few moments. How many had she buried now?

At the funeral, the two little boys Doro had brought saw her crying and came to take her hands and stand with her solemnly. They seemed to be adopting her as mother and Luisa as grandmother. They were fitting in surprisingly well, but Anyanwu found herself wondering how long they would last.

“Go to the sea,” Luisa told her when she would not eat, when she became more and more listless. “The sea cleanses you. I have seen it. Go and be a fish for a while.”

“I’m all right,” Anyanwu said automatically.

Luisa swept that aside with a sound of disgust. “You are not all right! You are acting like the child you appear to be! Get away from here for a while. Give yourself a rest and us a rest from you.”

The words startled Anyanwu out of her listlessness. “A rest from me?”

“Those of us who can feel your pain as you feel it need a rest from you.”

Anyanwu blinked. Her mind had been elsewhere. Of course the people who took comfort in her desire to protect them and keep them together, people who took pleasure in her pleasure, would also suffer pain when she suffered.

“I’ll go,” she told Luisa.

The old woman smiled. “It will be good for you.”

Anyanwu sent for one of her white daughters to bring her husband and children for a visit. They were not needed or wanted to run the plantation, and they knew it. That was why Anyanwu trusted them to take her place for a while. They could fit in without taking over. They had their own strangenesses. The woman, Leah, was like Denice, her mother, taking impressions from houses and pieces of furniture, from rocks, trees, and human flesh, seeing ghosts of things that had happened in the past. Anyanwu warned her to keep out of the washhouse. The front of the main house where Stephen had died was hard enough on her. She learned quickly where she should not step, what she should not touch if she did not want to see her brother climbing the railing, diving off head-first.

The husband, Kane, was sensitive enough to see occasionally into Leah’s thoughts and know that she was not insane—or at least no more insane than he. He was a quadroon whose white father had educated him, cared for him, and unfortunately, died without freeing him—leaving him in the hands of his father’s wife. He had run away, escaped just ahead of the slave dealer and left Texas for Louisiana, where he calmly used all his father had taught him to pass as a well-bred young white man. He had said nothing about his background until he began to understand how strange his wife’s family was. He still did not fully understand, but he loved Leah. He could be himself with her without alarming her in any way. He was comfortable with her. To keep that comfort, he accepted without understanding. He could come now and then to live on a plantation that would run itself without his supervision and enjoy the company of Anyanwu’s strange collection of misfits. He felt right at home.