“I never knew him. He died. But she says he could hear what people were thinking.”
“Can you?”
“Sometimes.”
Doro shook his head. Anyanwu had come almost as near to success as he hadand with far less raw material. “Take me to her!” he said.
“She’s here,” the boy said.
Startled, Doro looked around, searching for Anyanwu, knowing she must be in animal form since he had not sensed her. She stood perhaps ten paces behind him near a yellow pine sapling. She was a large, sharp-faced black dog, standing statuestill, watching him. He spoke to her impatiently.
“I can’t very well talk to you while you’re like that!”
She began to change. She took her time about it, but he did not complain. He had waited too long for a few minutes to matter.
Finally, human, female, and unself-consciously naked, she walked past him onto the porch. In that moment, he meant to kill her. If she had taken any other form, become anyone other than her true self, she would have died. But she was now as she had been over a hundred and fifty yearsa century and a halfbefore. She was the same woman he had shared a clay couch with thousands of miles away, lifetimes ago. He raised his hand toward her. She did not see it. He could have taken her then and there without further trouble. But he lowered the hand before it touched her smooth, dark shoulder. He stared at her, angry with himself, frowning.
“Come into the house, Doro,” she said.
Her voice was the same, soft and young. He followed her in feeling oddly confused, suspended in time, with only the watchful, protective young son to jar him to reality.
He looked at the son, ragged and shoeless and dusty. The boy should have seemed out of place inside the handsomely furnished home, but somehow, he did not.
“Come into the parlor,” he said, catching Doro’s arm in his child-sized hands. “Let her put her clothes on. She’ll be back.”
Doro did not doubt that she would. Apparently, the boy understood his role as hostage.
Doro sat down in an upholstered armchair and the boy sat opposite him on a sofa. Between them was a small wooden table and a fireplace of carved black stone. There was a large oriental rug on the floor and several other chairs and tables scattered around the room. A maid in a plain clean blue dress and white apron brought brandy and looked at the boy as though daring him to have any. He smiled and did not.
The maid would have been good prey too. A daughter? “What can she do?” Doro asked when she was gone.
“Nothing but have babies,” the boy said.
“Did she have a transition?”
“No. She won’t either. Not as old as she is.”
A latent then. One who could pass her heritage on to her children, but could not use it herself. She should be bred to a near relative. Doro wondered whether Anyanwu had overcome her squeamishness enough to do this. Was that where this boy who was growing arms had come from? Inbreeding? Was his father, perhaps, one of Anyanwu’s older sons?
“What do you know about me?” he asked the boy.
“That you’re no more what you appear to be than she is.” The boy shrugged. “She talked about you sometimeshow you took her from Africa, how she was your slave in New York back when they had slaves in New York.”
“She was never my slave.”
“She thinks she was. She doesn’t think she will be again though.”
In her bedroom, Anyanwu dressed quickly and casually as a man. She kept her body womanlyshe wanted to be herself when she faced Dorobut after the easy unclothed freedom of the dog body, she could not have stood the layers of tight clothing women were expected to wear. The male clothing accented her womanliness anyway. No one had ever seen her this way and mistaken her for a man or boy.
Abruptly, she threw her shirt to the floor and stood, head in hands, before her dressing table. Doro would break Stephen into pieces if she ran now. He would probably not kill him, but he would make him a slave. There were people here in Louisiana and in the other Southern states who bred people as Doro did. They gave a man one woman after another and when the children came, the man had no authority over what was done to them, no responsibility to them or to their mothers. Authority and responsibility were the prerogatives of the masters. Doro would do that to her son, make him no more than a breeding animal. She thought of the sons and daughters she had left behind in Doro’s hands. It was not likely that any of them were alive now, but she had no doubt of the way Doro had used them while they did live. She could not have helped them. It was all she had been able to do to get Doro to give his word not to harm them during her marriage to Isaac. Beyond that, she could have stayed with them and died, but she could not have helped them. And growing up as they had in Wheatley, they would not have wanted her help. Doro seduced people. He made them want to please him, made them strive for his approval. He terrified them into submission only when he could not seduce them.
And when he could not terrify them …
What could she do? She could not run again and leave him Stephen and the others. But she was no more able to help them by staying than she had been able to help her children in Wheatley. She could not even help herself. What would he do to her when she went downstairs? She had run away from him, and he murdered runaways. Had he allowed her to dress herself merely so that he would not have the inconvenience of taking over a naked body?
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 controlledvery 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 wereI 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 stageseeking 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 hergiving 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 booksmedical 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 arrivednot 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 thingsthings 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 expressionhunger 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 heardlike 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 wasa 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 personor 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 manor his current body did. They gave him a false expression of gentleness.
“Did you come here to kill?” she asked. “Am I to die? Are my children to become mares and studs? Is that why you could not leave me alone!”
“Why do you want to be alone?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “Doro, tell me what is to happen.”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps eventually, I will bring your son a wife.”
“One wife?” she said, disbelieving.
“One wife here, as with you and Isaac. I never brought women to Wheatley for him.”
That was so. From time to time, he took Isaac away with him, but he never brought women to Isaac. Anyanwu knew that the husband she had loved most had sired dozens of children with other women. “Don’t you care about them?” she had asked once, trying to understand. She cared about each one of her children, raised each one she bore and loved it.
“I never see them,” he had answered. “They are his children. I sire them in his name. He sees that they and their mothers are well cared for.”
“So he says!” She had been bitter that day, angry at Doro for making her pregnant when her most recent child by Isaac was less than a year old, angry at him for afterward killing a tall, handsome girl whom Anyanwu had known and liked. The girl, understanding what was to happen to her, had still somehow treated him as a lover. It was obscene.
“Have you ever known him to neglect the needs of the children he claims?” Isaac had asked. “Have you ever seen his people left landless or hungry? He takes care of his own.”
She had gone away from Isaac to fly for hours as a bird and look down at the great, empty land below and wonder if there was nowhere in all the forests and rivers and mountains and lakes, nowhere in that endless land for her to escape and find peace and cleanness.
“Stephen is nineteen years old,” she said. “He is a man. Your children and mine grow up very quickly, I think. He has been a man since his transition. But he’s still young. You’ll make him an animal if you use him as you used Isaac.”
“Isaac was fifteen when I gave him his first woman,” Doro said.
“Then he had been yours for fifteen years. For you, Stephen will be as much wild seed as I was.”
Doro nodded agreeably. “It is better for me to get them before they reach their transitionsif they’re going to have transitions. What will you give me then, Anyanwu?”
She turned to look at him in surprise. Was he offering to bargain with her? He had never bargained before. He had told her what he wanted and let her know what he would do to her or to her children if she did not obey.
Was he bargaining now, then, or was he playing with her? What could she lose by assuming that he was serious? “Bring Stephen the woman,” she said. “One woman. When he is older, perhaps there can be others.”
“Do you imagine there
are none now?”
“Of course not. But he chooses his own. I don’t tell him to breed. I don’t send him women.”
“Do women seem to like him?”
She surprised herself by smiling a little. “Some do. Not enough to suit him, of course. There is a widow paying a lot of attention to him now. She knows what she is doing. Left alone, he will find a good wife here when he is tired of wandering around.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t let him get tired of it.”
“I tell you, you will make an animal of him if you don’t!” she said. “Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other men. One thinks he is greater than another because he has more children. Both exaggerate the number of women who have borne them children, neither is doing anything a father should for his children, and the master who is indifferently selling off his own brown children is laughing and saying, ‘You see? Niggers are just like animals!’ Slavery down here opens one’s eyes, Doro. How could I want such a life for my son?”
There was silence. He got up, wandered around the large room examining the vases, lamps, the portrait of a slender white woman with dark hair and solemn expression. “Was this your wife?” he asked.
She wanted to shake him. She wanted to use her strength, make him tell her what he meant to do. “Yes,” she whispered.
“How did you like itbeing a man, having a wife?”
“Doro …!”
“How did you like it?” He would not be rushed. He was enjoying himself.
“She was a good woman. We pleased each other.”
“Did she know what you were?”
“Yes. She was not ordinary herself. She saw ghosts.”
“Anyanwu!” he said with disgust and disappointment.
She ignored his tone, stared up at the picture. “She was only sixteen when I married her. If I hadn’t married her, I think she would have been put in an asylum eventually. People spoke about her in the way you just said my name.”
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