Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

“Nothing is solved,” she said, “except that now, I must fight myself as well as you.”

“You’re talking foolishness,” he said.

She turned and kissed him. “Let it be foolishness for now,” she said. “Let it be foolishness for this moment.” She looked down at him in the dim light. “You don’t want to go upstairs, do you?”

“No.”

“We’ll stay here then. My children will whisper about me.”

“Do you care?”

“Now you are talking foolishness,” she said, laughing. “Do I care! Whose house is this? I do as I please!” She covered them both with the wide skirt of her dress, blew out the lamp, and settled to sleep in his arms.

Anyanwu’s children did whisper about her—and about Doro. They were careless—deliberately so, Doro thought—and he heard them. But after a while, they stopped. Perhaps Anyanwu spoke to them. For once, Doro did not care. He knew he was no longer fearsome to them; he was only another of Anyanwu’s lovers. How long had it been since he was only someone’s lover? He could not remember. He went away now and then to take care of his businesses, put in an appearance at one of his nearer settlements.

“Bring this body back to me as long as you can,” Anyanwu would tell him. “There cannot be two as perfect as this.”

He would laugh and promise her nothing. Who knew what punishment he might have to inflict, what madman he might have to subdue, what stupid, stubborn politician, businessman, planter, or other fool he might have to remove? Also, wearing a black body in country where blacks were under constant obligation to prove they had rights to even limited freedom was a hindrance. He traveled with one of his older white sons, Frank Winston, whose fine old Virginia family had belonged to Doro since Doro brought it from England 135 years before. The man could be as distinguished and aristocratic or as timid and naive as he chose to be, as Doro ordered him to be. He had no inborn strangeness great enough to qualify him as good breeding stock. He was simply the best actor, the best liar Doro knew. People believed what he told them even when he grew expansive and outrageous, when he said Doro was an African prince mistakenly enslaved, but now freed to return to his homeland and take the word of God back to his heathen people.

Though caught by surprise, Doro played his role with such a confusing mixture of arrogance and humility that slaveholders were first caught between bewilderment and anger, then convinced. Doro was like no nigger they had ever seen.

Later, Doro warned Frank to stick to more conventional lies—though he thought the man was probably laughing too hard to hear him.

He felt more at ease than he had for years—even at ease enough to laugh at himself—and his son enjoyed traveling with him. It was worth the inconvenience to keep Anyanwu happy. He knew that a kind of honeymoon phase of their relationship would end when he had to give up the body that pleased her so. She would not turn away from him again, he was certain, but their relationship would change. They would become occasional mates as they had been in Wheatley, but with better feelings. She would welcome him now, in whichever body he wore. She would have her men, and if she chose, her women—husbands, wives, lovers. He could not begrudge her these. There would be years, multiples of years, when he would not see her at all. A woman like her could not be alone. But there would always be room for him when he came back to her, and he would always go back to her. Because of her, he was no longer alone. Because of her, life was suddenly better than it had been for him in centuries, in millennia. It was as though she was the first of the race he was trying to create—except that he had not created her, had not been able to re-create her. In that way, she was only a promise unfulfilled. But someday …

Doro’s woman Susan had her child a month after Iye bore Stephen’s child. Both were boys, sturdy and healthy, promising to grow into handsome children. Iye accepted her son with love and gratitude that amazed Anyanwu. Anyanwu had delivered the child and all Iye could think of through her pain was that Stephen’s child must live and be well. It had not been an easy birth, but the woman clearly did not care. The child was all right.

But Iye could not feed it. She had no milk. Anyanwu produced milk easily and during the day visited Iye’s cabin regularly to nurse the child. At night, she kept the child with her.

“I’m glad you could do this,” Iye told her. “I think it would be too hard for me to share him with anyone else.” Anyanwu’s prejudices against the woman were fast dissolving.

As were her prejudices against Doro—though this frightened and disturbed her. She could not look at him now with the loathing she had once felt, yet he continued to do loathsome things. He simply no longer did them to her. As she had predicted, she was at war with herself. But she showed him no signs of that war. For the time he wore the beautiful little body that had been his gift to her, it pleased her to please him. For that short time, she could refuse to think about what he did when he left her. She could treat him as the very special lover he appeared to be.

“What are you going to do now?” Doro asked her when he came home from a short trip to find her nursing the baby. “Push me away?”

They were alone in her upstairs sitting room so she gave him a look of mock annoyance. “Shall I do that? Yes, I think so. Go away.”

He smiled, not believing her any more than she wished to be believed. He watched the nursing child.

“You will be father to one like this in seven months more,” she said.

“You’re pregnant now?”

“Yes. I wanted a child by this body of yours. I was afraid you would be getting rid of it soon.”

“I will be,” he admitted. “I’ll have to. But eventually you’ll have two children to nurse. Won’t that be hard on you?”

“I can do it. Do you think I can’t?”

“No.” He smiled again. “If only I had more like you and Iye. That Susan …”

“I’ve found a home for her child,” Anyanwu said. “It won’t be fostered with the older ones, but it will have loving parents. And Susan is big and strong. She’s a fine field hand.”

“I didn’t bring her here to be a field hand. I thought living with your people might help her—calm her and make her a little more useful.”

“It has.” She reached over and took his hand. “Here, if people fit in, I let them do whatever work they prefer. That helps to calm them. Susan prefers field work to anything indoors. She is willing to have as many more children as you want, but caring for them is beyond her. She seems especially sensitive to their thoughts. Their thoughts hurt her somehow. She is a good woman otherwise, Doro.”

Doro shook his head as though dismissing Susan from his thoughts. He stared at the nursing child for a few seconds more, then met Anyanwu’s eyes. “Give me some of the milk,” he said softly.

She drew back in surprise. He had never asked such a thing, and this was certainly not the first child he had seen her nursing. But there were many new things between them now. “I had a man who used to do that,” she said.

“Did you mind?”

“No.”

He looked at her, waiting.

“Come here,” she said softly.

The day after Anyanwu gave him milk, Doro awoke trembling, and he knew the comfortable time in the compact little body he had taken as a gift to her was over. It had not been a particularly powerful body. It had little of the inborn strangeness he valued. Anyanwu’s child by it might be beautiful, but chances were, it would be very ordinary.

Now the body was used up. If he held onto it for much longer, he would become dangerous to those around him. Some simple excitement or pain that he would hardly notice normally might force transmigration. Someone whose life was important to him might die.