“Oh …” Margaret looked away, seeming to understand, to accept. No more than half the children on the plantation lived with their parents.
“Margaret?”
She looked up at him, then quickly looked down again. He was being remarkably gentle with her, but she was still afraid.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked.
“I wish I were,” she whispered. She was beginning to cry.
“All right,” Doro said. “All right, that’s all.”
She got up quickly and left the room. When she was gone, Anyanwu said, “Doro, Joseph was too old for a transition! Everything you taught me says he was too old.”
“He was twenty-four. I haven’t seen anyone change at that age before, but …” He hesitated, changed direction. “You never asked about his ancestry, Anyanwu.”
“I never wanted to know.”
“You do know. He’s your descendant, of course.”
She made herself shrug. “You said you would bring my grandchildren.”
“He was the grandchild of your grandchildren. Both his parents trace their descent back to you.”
“Why do you tell me that now? I don’t want to know any more about it. He’s dead!”
“He’s Isaac’s descendant too,” Doro continued relentlessly. “People of Isaac’s line are sometimes a little late going into transition, though Joseph is about as late as I’ve seen. The two children I’ve brought to you are sons of his brother’s body.”
“No!” Anyanwu stared at him. “Take them away! I want no more of that kind near me!”
“You have them. Teach them and guide them as you do your own children. I told you your descendants would not be easy to care for. You chose to care for them anyway.”
She said nothing. He made it sound as though her choice had been free, as though he had not coerced her into choosing.
“If I had found you earlier, I would have brought them to you when they were even younger,” he said. “Since I didn’t, you’ll have to do what you can with them now. Teach them responsibility, pride, honor. Teach them whatever you taught Stephen. But don’t be foolish enough to teach them you believe they’ll grow up to be criminals. They’ll be powerful men someday and they’re liable to fulfill your expectationseither way.”
Still she said nothing. What was there for her to sayor do? He would be obeyed, or he would make her life and her children’s lives not worth livingif he did not kill them outright.
“You have five to ten years before the boys’ transitions,” he said. “They will have transitions; I’m as sure as I can be of that. Their ancestry is just right.”
“Are they mine, or will you interfere with them?”
“Until their transitions, they’re yours.
“And then?”
“I’ll breed them, of course.”
Of course. “Let them marry and stay here. If they fit here, they’ll want to stay. How can they become responsible men if their only future is to be bred?”
Doro laughed aloud, opening his mouth wide to show the empty spaces of several missing teeth. “Do you hear yourself, woman? First you want no part of them, now you don’t want to let go of them even when they’re grown.”
She waited silently until he stopped laughing, then asked: “Do you think I’m willing to throw away any child, Doro? If there is a chance for those boys to grow up better than Joseph, why shouldn’t I try to give them that chance? If, when they grow up, they can be men instead of dogs who know nothing except how to climb onto one female after another, why shouldn’t I try to help?”
He sobered. “I knew you would helpand not grudgingly. Don’t you think I know you by now, Anyanwu?”
Oh, he knew herknew how to use her. “Will you do it then? Let them marry and stay here if they fit?”
“Yes.”
She looked down, examining the rug pattern that had held so much of Margaret’s attention. “Will you take them away if they don’t fit, can’t fit, like Joseph?”
“Yes,” he repeated. “Their seed is too valuable to be wasted.”
He thought of nothing else. Nothing!
“Shall I stay with you for a while, Anyanwu?”
She stared at him in surprise, and he looked back neutral-faced, waiting for an answer. Was he asking a real question, then? “Will you go if I ask you to?”
“Yes.”
Yes. He was saying that so often now, being so gentle and cooperativefor him. He had come courting again.
“Go,” she said as gently as she could. “Your presence is disruptive here, Doro. You frighten my people.” Now. Let him keep his word.
He shrugged, nodded. “Tomorrow morning,” he said.
And the next morning, he was gone.
Perhaps an hour after his departure, Helen and Luisa came hand in hand to Anyanwu to tell her that Margaret had hanged herself from a beam in the washhouse.
For a time after Margaret’s death, Anyanwu felt a sickness that she could not dispel. Grief. Two children lost so close together. Somehow, she never got used to losing childrenespecially young children, children it seemed had been with her for only a few moments. How many had she buried now?
At the funeral, the two little boys Doro had brought saw her crying and came to take her hands and stand with her solemnly. They seemed to be adopting her as mother and Luisa as grandmother. They were fitting in surprisingly well, but Anyanwu found herself wondering how long they would last.
“Go to the sea,” Luisa told her when she would not eat, when she became more and more listless. “The sea cleanses you. I have seen it. Go and be a fish for a while.”
“I’m all right,” Anyanwu said automatically.
Luisa swept that aside with a sound of disgust. “You are not all right! You are acting like the child you appear to be! Get away from here for a while. Give yourself a rest and us a rest from you.”
The words startled Anyanwu out of her listlessness. “A rest from me?”
“Those of us who can feel your pain as you feel it need a rest from you.”
Anyanwu blinked. Her mind had been elsewhere. Of course the people who took comfort in her desire to protect them and keep them together, people who took pleasure in her pleasure, would also suffer pain when she suffered.
“I’ll go,” she told Luisa.
The old woman smiled. “It will be good for you.”
Anyanwu sent for one of her white daughters to bring her husband and children for a visit. They were not needed or wanted to run the plantation, and they knew it. That was why Anyanwu trusted them to take her place for a while. They could fit in without taking over. They had their own strangenesses. The woman, Leah, was like Denice, her mother, taking impressions from houses and pieces of furniture, from rocks, trees, and human flesh, seeing ghosts of things that had happened in the past. Anyanwu warned her to keep out of the washhouse. The front of the main house where Stephen had died was hard enough on her. She learned quickly where she should not step, what she should not touch if she did not want to see her brother climbing the railing, diving off head-first.
The husband, Kane, was sensitive enough to see occasionally into Leah’s thoughts and know that she was not insaneor at least no more insane than he. He was a quadroon whose white father had educated him, cared for him, and unfortunately, died without freeing himleaving him in the hands of his father’s wife. He had run away, escaped just ahead of the slave dealer and left Texas for Louisiana, where he calmly used all his father had taught him to pass as a well-bred young white man. He had said nothing about his background until he began to understand how strange his wife’s family was. He still did not fully understand, but he loved Leah. He could be himself with her without alarming her in any way. He was comfortable with her. To keep that comfort, he accepted without understanding. He could come now and then to live on a plantation that would run itself without his supervision and enjoy the company of Anyanwu’s strange collection of misfits. He felt right at home.
“Wh
at’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 womanin 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 visitorsstrangers 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 doorclosed doors were respected in her houseand 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 doorsbut then, Doro respected nothing at all.
“What do you want?” she asked him.
“Nothing.” He pulled a chair over to the side of her desk and sat down.
“What, no more children for me to raise?” she said bitterly. “No more unsuitable mates for my children? Nothing?”
“I brought a pregnant woman and her two children, and I brought an account at a New Orleans bank to help pay their way. I didn’t come to you to talk abou
t them, though.”
Anyanwu turned away from him not caring why he had come. She wished he would leave.
“It goes on, you know,” he said. “The dying.”
“It doesn’t hurt you.”
“It does. When my children diethe best of my children.”
“What do you do?”
“Endure it. What is there to do but endure it? Someday, we’ll have others who won’t die.”
“Are you still dreaming that dream?”
“What could I do, Anyanwu, if I gave it up?”
She said nothing. She had no answer. “I used to believe in it too,” She said. “When you took me from my people, I believed it. For fifty years, I made myself believe it. Perhaps … perhaps sometimes I still believe it.”
“You never behaved as though you believed it.”
“I did! I let you do all the things you did to me and to others, and I stayed with you until I could see you had decided to kill me.”
He drew a deep breath. “That decision was a mistake,” he said. “I made it out of habit as though you were just another not entirely controllable, wild-seed woman who had had her quota of children. Centuries-old habit said it was time to dispose of you.”
“And what of your habit now?” she asked.
“It’s broken now as far as you’re concerned.” He looked at her, looked past her. “I want you alive for as long as you can live. You cannot know how I have fought with myself over this.”
She did not care how he had fought.
“I tried hard to make myself kill you,” he said. “It would have been easier than trying to change you.”
She shrugged.
He stood up and took her arms to raise her to her feet. She stood passively, knowing that if she let him have his way, they would wind up on the sofa together. He wanted her. He did not care that she had just suffered the loss of a friend, that she wanted to be alone.
“Do you like this body?” he asked. “It’s my gift to you.”
She wondered who had died so that he could give such a “gift.”
“Anyanwu!” He shook her once, gently, and she looked at him. She did not have to look up. “You’re still the little forest peasant, trying to climb the ship’s railings and swim back to Africa,” he said. “You still want what you can’t have. The old woman is dead.”
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