Wild Seed p-4

by Butler, Octavia

  “I don’t blame them.”

  “You should. Most people believe in a life that goes on after their bodies die. There are always tales of ghosts. Even people who think they are too sophisticated to be frightened are not immune. Talk to five people and at least three will have seen what they believe was a ghost, or they will know another person who has seen. But Denice really did see. She was very sensitive; she could see when no one else could—and since no one else could, people said she was mad. I think she had had a kind of transition.”

  “And it gave her a private view into the hereafter.”

  Anyanwu shook her head. “You should be less skeptical. You are a kind of ghost yourself, after all. What is there of you that can be touched?”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Of course.” She paused. “Doro, I will talk to you about Denice. I will talk to you about anyone, anything. But first, please, tell me what you plan for my son.”

  “I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about you and your potential value to me.” He looked again at the portrait. “You were right, you know. I came here to finish old business—kill you and take your children to one of my settlements. No one has ever done what you did to me.”

  “I ran from you and lived. Other people have done that.”

  “Only because I chose to let them live. They had their freedom for only a few days before I caught them. You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  “Now, a century after I lost you, I find you young and well—greeting me as though we had just seen each other yesterday. I find you in competition with me, raising witches of your own.”

  “There is no competition.”

  “Then why have you surrounded yourself with the kinds of people I seek out? Why do you have children by them?”

  “They need me … those people.” She swallowed thinking of some of the things done to her people before she found them. “They need someone who can help them, and I can help. You don’t want to help them, you want to use them. But I can help.”

  “Why should you?”

  “I’m a healer, Doro.”

  “That’s no answer. You chose to be a healer. What you really are is what’s called in this part of the country loup-garou—a werewolf.”

  “I see you’ve been talking to my neighbors.”

  “I have. They’re right, you know.”

  “The legends say werewolves kill. I have never killed except to save myself. I am a healer.”

  “Most … healers don’t have children by their patients.”

  “Most healers do as they please. My patients are more like me than any other people. Why shouldn’t I find mates among them?”

  Doro smiled. “There is always an answer, isn’t there? But it doesn’t matter. Tell me about Denice and her ghosts.”

  She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, calming herself. “Denice saw what people left behind. She went into houses and saw the people who had preceded her there. If someone had suffered or died there, she saw that very clearly. It terrified her. She would go into a house and see a child running, clothing afire, and there would be no child. But two, ten, twenty years before, a child would have burned to death there. She saw people stealing things days or years before. She saw slaves beaten and tortured, slave women raped, people shaking with ague or covered with smallpox. She did not feel things as people do in transition. She only saw them. But she could not tell whether what she was seeing was actually happening as she saw it or whether it was history. She was slowly going mad. Then her parents gave a party and I was invited because I seemed young and rich and handsome—perhaps a good prospect for a family with five daughters. I remember, I was standing with Denice’s father telling lies about my origins, and Denice brushed past. She touched me, you see. She could see people’s past lives when she touched them just as she could see the past of wood and brick. She saw something of what I am even in that brief touch, and she fainted. I didn’t know what had happened until she came to me days later. I was the only person she had ever found to be stranger than herself. She knew all that I was before we married.”

  “Why did she marry you?”

  “Because I believed her when she told me what she could do. Because I was not afraid or ridiculing. And because after a while, we started to want each other.”

  “Even though she knew you were a woman and black?”

  “Even so.” Anyanwu stared up at the solemn young woman, remembering that lovely, fearful courting. They had been as fearful of marrying as they had been of losing each other. “She thought at first that there could be no children, and that saddened her because she had always wanted children. Then she realized that I could give her girls. It took her a long time to understand all that I could do. But she thought the children would be black and people would say she had been with a slave. White men leave brown children all about, but a white woman who does this becomes almost an animal in the eyes of other whites.”

  “White women must be protected,” Doro said, “whether they want to be or not.”

  “As property is protected.” Anyanwu shook her head. “Preserved for the use of owners alone. Denice said she felt like property—like a slave plotting escape. I told her I could give her children who were not related to me at all if she wished. Her fear made me angry even though I knew the situation was not her fault. I told her my Warrick shape was not a copy of anyone. I had molded myself freely to create it, but if she wished, I could take the exact shape of one of the white men I had treated in Wheatley. Then as with the dolphins, I could have young who inherited nothing at all from me. Even male young. She did not understand that.”

  “Neither do I,” Doro said. “This is something new.”

  “Only for me. You do it all the time—fathering or giving birth to children who are no blood kin to you. They are the children of the bodies you wear, even though you call them your own.”

  “But … you only wear one body.”

  “And you have not understood how completely that one body can change. I cannot leave it as you can, but I can make it over. I can make it over so completely in the image of someone else that I am no longer truly related to my parents. It makes me wonder what I am—that I can do this and still know myself, still return to my true shape.”

  “You could not do this before in Wheatley.”

  “I have always done it. Each time I learned a new animal shape, I did it. But I did not understand it very well until I began running from you. Until I began to hide. I bore dolphin young—and they were dolphins. Not human at all. They were the young of the dolphin Isaac caught and fed to us so long ago. My body was a copy of hers down to the smallest living part. There are no words for me to tell you how deep and complete such a change is.”

  “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 m
ake 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?”

  “If my children show any signs of growing as old as I am, they may do as they please.”

  “They will anyway.”

  “But without you to guide them, Doro. Without you to make them animals. What would my son be in your hands? Another Thomas? You are going everywhere tending ten different settlements, twenty, and not giving enough of yourself to any of them. I am staying here looking after my family and offering to let your children marry mine. And if the offspring are strange and hard to handle, I will handle them. I will take care of them. They need not live alone in the woods and drink too much and neglect their bodies until they are nearly dead.”

  To her surprise, he hugged her very much as Luisa had, and he laughed. He took her arm and walked her over to the slave quarters, still laughing. He quieted though as he pushed open a random door and peered into one of the neat, sturdy cabins. There was a large brick fireplace with a bake kettle down amid the nearly dead coals.

  Someone’s supper bread. There was a large bed in one corner and a trundle bed beneath. There were a table and four chairs all of which looked homemade, but adequate. There was a cradle that also looked homemade—and much used. There were a wood box and a water bucket with its gourd dipper. There were bunches of herbs and ears of corn hung from the ceiling to dry and cooking utensils over and alongside the fireplace. Overall, the cabin gave the impression of being a plain but comfortable place to live.

  “Is it enough?” Anyanwu asked.

  “I have several people, black and white, who don’t live this well.”

  “I don’t.”

  He tried to d
raw her into the cabin toward the chairs or the bed—she did not know which—but she held back.

  “This is someone else’s home,” she said. “We can go back into the house if you like.”

  “No. Later, perhaps.” He put an arm around her waist. “You must feed me again and find us another earthen couch to lie on.”

  And hear you threaten my children again,she thought.

  As though in answer, he said: “And I must tell you why I laughed. It isn’t because your offer doesn’t please me, Anyanwu; it does. But you have no idea what kinds of creatures you are volunteering to care for.”

  Didn’t she? Hadn’t she seen them in Wheatley?

  “I’m going to bring you some of your own descendants,” Doro said. “I think they will surprise you. I’ve done a great deal of work with them since Nweke. I think you won’t be wanting to care for them or their children for long.”

  “Why? What new thing is wrong with them?”

  “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps your influence is just what they need. On the other hand, perhaps they will disrupt the family you’ve made for yourself here as nothing else could. Will you still have them?”

  “Doro, how can I know? You haven’t told me anything.”

  Her hair was loose and short and rounded as it had been when he first styled it for her. Now he put his hands on either side of it, pressing it to her head. “Sun Woman, either you will accept my people in this way that you have defined or you will come with me, taking mates when and where I command, or you will give me your children. One way or another, you will serve me. What is your choice?”

  Yes,she thought bitterly.Now the threats. “Bring me my grandchildren,” she said. “Even though they have never seen me, they will remember me. Their bodies will remember me down to the smallest structures of their flesh. You cannot know how well people’s bodies remember their ancestors.”

  “You will teach me,” he said. “You seem to have learned a great deal since I saw you last. I’ve been breeding people nearly all my life and I still don’t know why some things work and others don’t, or why a thing will work only some of the time even with the same couple. You will teach me.”