Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“What’s this about your going to sea?” he asked Anyanwu. He got along well with her as long as she kept her Warrick identity. Otherwise, she made him nervous. He could not accept the idea that his wife’s father could become a woman—in fact, had been born a woman. For him, Anyanwu wore the thin, elderly Warrick guise.

“I need to go away from here for a while,” she said.

“Where will you go this time?”

“To find the nearest school of dolphins.” She smiled at him. The thought of going to sea again had made her able to smile. During her years of hiding, she had not only spent a great deal of time as a large dog or a bird, but she had left home often to swim free as a dolphin. She had done it first to confuse and evade Doro, then to get wealth and buy land, and finally because she enjoyed it. The freedom of the sea eased worry, gave her time to think through confusion, took away boredom. She wondered what Doro did when he was bored. Kill?

“You’ll fly to open water won’t you?” Kane asked.

“Fly and run. Sometimes it’s safer to run.”

“Christ!” he muttered. “I thought I’d gotten over envying you.”

She was eating as he spoke. Eating what would probably be her last cooked meal for some time. Rice and stew, baked yams, cornbread, strong coffee, wine, and fruit. Her children complained that she ate like a poor woman, but she ignored them. She was content. Now she looked up at Kane through her blue white-man’s-eyes.

“If you’re not afraid,” she said, “when I come back, I’ll try to share the experience with you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t have the control. Stephen used to be able to share things with me … both of us working together, but me alone …” He shrugged.

There was an uncomfortable silence, then Anyanwu pushed back from the table. “I’m leaving now,” she said abruptly. She went upstairs to her bedroom where she undressed, opened her door to the upper gallery of the porch, took her bird shape, and flew away.

More than a month passed before she flew back, eagle-shaped but larger than any eagle, refreshed by the sea and the air, and ravenous because in her eagerness to see home again, she had not stopped often enough to hunt.

She circled first to see that there were no visitors—strangers to be startled, and perhaps to shoot her. She had been shot three times this trip. That was enough.

When she had satisfied herself that it was safe, she came down into the grassy open space three quarters enclosed by the house, its dependencies, and her people’s cabins. Two little children saw her and ran into the kitchen. Seconds later, they were back, each tugging at one of Rita’s hands.

Rita walked over to Anyanwu, looked at her, and said with no doubt at all in her voice, “I suppose you’re hungry.”

Anyanwu flapped her wings.

Rita laughed. “You make a fine, handsome bird. I wonder how you would look on the dining-room table.”

Rita had always had a strange sense of humor. Anyanwu flapped her wings again impatiently, and Rita went back to the kitchen and brought her two rabbits, skinned, cleaned, ready for cooking. Anyanwu held them with her feet and tore into them, glad Rita had not gotten around to cooking them. As she ate, a black man came out of the house, Helen at his side. The man was a stranger. Some local freedman, perhaps, or even a runaway. Anyanwu always did what she could for runaways, either feeding and clothing them and sending them on their way better equipped to survive or, on those rare occasions when one seemed to fit into the house, buying him.

This was a compact, handsome little black man not much bigger than Anyanwu was in her true form. She raised her head and looked at him with interest. If this one had a mind to match his body, she might buy him even if he did not fit. It had been too long since she had had a husband. Occasional lovers ceased to satisfy her after a while.

She went back to tearing at the rabbits unself-consciously, as her daughter and the stranger watched. When she finished, she wiped her beak on the grass, gave the attractive stranger a final glance, and flew heavily around to the upper gallery outside her room. There, comfortably full, she dozed for a while giving her body a chance to digest the meal. It was good to be able to take her time, do things at a pace her body found comfortable.

Eventually, she became herself, small and black, young and female. Kane would not like it, but that did not matter. The stranger would like it very much.

She put on one of her best dresses and a few pieces of good jewelry, brushed her glossy new crown of hair, and went downstairs.

Supper had just been finished without her. Her people never waited for her when they knew she was in one or another of her animal forms. They knew her leisurely habits. Now, several of her adult children, Kane and Leah, and the black stranger sat eating nuts and raisins, drinking wine, and talking quietly. They made room for her, breaking their conversation for greeting and welcome. One of her sons got her a glass and filled it with her favorite Madeira. She had taken only a single pleasant sip from it when the stranger said, “The sea has done you good. You were right to go.”

Her shoulders drooped slightly, though she managed not to change expression. It was only Doro.

He caught her eye and smiled, and she knew he had seen her disappointment, had no doubt planned her disappointment. She contrived to ignore him, looked around the table to see exactly who was present. “Where is Luisa?” she asked. The old woman often took supper with the family, feeding her foster children first, then coming in, as she said, to relearn adult conversation.

But now, at the mention of Luisa’s name, everyone fell silent. The son next to her, Julien, who had poured her wine, said softly, “She died, Mama.”

Anyanwu turned to look at him, yellow-brown and plain except for his eyes, utterly clear like her own. Years before when a woman he wanted desperately would have nothing to do with him, he had gone to Luisa for comfort. Luisa had told Anyanwu and Anyanwu had been amazed to find that she felt no resentment toward the old woman, no anger at Julien for taking his pain to a stranger. With her sensitivity, Luisa had ceased to be a stranger the day she arrived on the plantation.

“How did she die?” Anyanwu whispered finally.

“In her sleep,” Julien said. “She went to bed one night, and the next morning, the children couldn’t wake her up.”

“That was two weeks ago,” Leah said. “We got the priest to come out because we knew she’d want it. We gave her a fine funeral.” Leah hesitated. “She … she didn’t have any pain. I lay down on her bed to see, and I saw her go out just as easy …”

Anyanwu got up and left the table. She had gone away to find some respite from loved ones who died and died, and others whose rapid aging reminded her that they too were temporary. Leah, only thirty-five, had far too much gray mixed with her straight black hair.

Anyanwu went into the library, closed the door—closed doors were respected in her house—and sat at her desk, head down. Luisa had been seventy … seventy-eight years old. It was time for her to die. How stupid to grieve over an old woman who had lived what, for her kind, was a long life.

Anyanwu sat up and shook her head. She had been watching friends and relatives grow old and die for as long as she could remember. Why was it biting so deeply into her now, hurting her as though it were a new thing? Stephen, Margaret, Luisa … There would be others. There would always be others, suddenly here, then suddenly gone. Only she would remain.

As though to contradict her thought, Doro opened the door and came in.

She glared at him angrily. Everyone else in her house respected her closed doors—but then, Doro respected nothing at all.