Wild Seed

What could she do?

Doro and Stephen were talking like old friends when Anyanwu walked into the parlor. To her surprise, Doro stood up. He had always seemed lazily unconcerned with such courtesies before. She sat with Stephen on the sofa, noticing automatically that the boy’s arms seemed to be forming well. He had been so good, so controlled on that terrible day when he lost them.

“Go back to your work now,” she told him softly.

He looked at her, surprised.

“Go,” she repeated. “I’m here now.”

Clearly, that was what was concerning him. She had told him a great deal about Doro. He did not want to leave her, but finally, he obeyed.

“Good boy,” Doro commented, sipping brandy.

“Yes,” she agreed.

He shook his head. “What shall I do with him, Anyanwu? What shall I do with you?”

She said nothing. When had it ever mattered what she said to him? He did as he pleased.

“You’ve had more success than I have,” he said. “Your son seems controlled—very sure of himself.”

“I taught him to lift his head,” she said.

“I meant his ability.”

“Yes.”

“Who was his father?”

She hesitated. He would ask, of course. He would inquire after the ancestry of her children as though after the bloodline of a horse. “His father was brought illegally from Africa,” she said. “He was a good man, but … much like Thomas. He could see and hear and feel too much.”

“And he survived a crossing on a slave ship?”

“Only part of him survived. He was mad most of the time, but he was docile. He was like a child. The slavers pretended that it was because he had not yet learned English that he seemed strange. They showed me how strong his muscles were—I had the form of a white man, you see.”

“I know.”

“They showed me his teeth and his hands and his penis and they said what a good breeder he would be. They would have pleased you, Doro. They thought very much as you do.”

“I doubt it,” he said amiably. He was being surprisingly amiable. He was at his first stage—seeking to seduce her as he had when he took her from her people. No doubt by his own reasoning he was being extremely generous. She had run from him, done what no one else could do, kept out of his hands for more than a lifetime; yet instead of killing her at once, he seemed to be beginning again with her—giving her a chance to accept him as though nothing had happened. That meant he wanted her alive, if she would submit.

Her own sense of relief at this realization startled her. She had come down the stairs to him expecting to die, ready to die, and here he was courting her again. And here she was responding …

No. Not again. No more Wheatleys.

What then?

“So you bought a slave you knew was insane because he had a sensitivity you liked,” Doro said. “You couldn’t imagine how many times I’ve done things like that myself.”

“I bought him in New Orleans because as he walked past me in chains on his way to the slave pens, he called to me. He said, ‘Anyanwu! Does that white skin cover your eyes too?’ ”

“He spoke English?”

“No. He was one of my people. Not a descendant, I think; he was too different. In the moment he spoke to me, he was sane and hearing my thoughts. Slaves were passing in front of me all chained, and I was thinking, ‘I have to take more sunken gold from the sea, then see the banker about buying the land that adjoins mine. I have to buy some books—medical books, especially to see what doctors are doing now …’ I was not seeing the slaves in front of me. I would not have thought I could be oblivious to such a thing. I had been white for too long. I needed someone to say what he said to me.”

“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.