prejudice was growing in the colonies?even in this formerly Dutch colony where things had once been so casual. Earlier in the year, there had been mass executions at New York City. Someone had been setting fires and the whites decided it must be the blacks. On little or no evidence, thirty-one blacks were killed?thirteen of them burned at the stake. Doro was beginning to worry about this upriver town. Of all his English colonial settlements, only in this one did his blacks not have the protection of powerful white owners. How soon before whites from elsewhere began to see them as fair game.
Doro shook his head. The woman in the portrait seemed to look down at him as he looked up. He should have had too much on his mind to think about her or about her daughter Ruth, called Nweke. He should not have allowed himself to be drawn back to Wheatley. It was good to see Isaac … but that woman!
“She was the right wife for me after all,” Isaac was saying. “I remember her telling me she wasn’t once before we married, but that was one of the few times I’ve known her to be wrong.”
“I want to see her,” Doro said abruptly. “And I want to see Nweke. I think the girl’s a lot closer to her change than you realize.”
“You think that’s why you were pulled back here?”
Doro did not like the word “pulled,” but he nodded without comment.
Isaac stood up. “Nweke first, while you’re still in a fairly good mood.” He went out of the house without waiting for Doro to answer. He loved Doro and he loved Anyanwu and it bothered him that the two got along so badly together.
“I don’t see how you can be such a fool with her,” he told Doro once?to Doro’s surprise. “The woman is not temporary. She can be everything you need if you let her?mate, companion, business partner, her abilities complement yours so well. Yet all you do is humiliate her.”
“I’ve never hurt her,” Doro had told him. “Never hurt one of her children. You show me one other wild seed woman I’ve allowed to live as long as she has after childbearing.” He had not touched her children because from the first, she promised him that if any one of them was harmed, she would bear no more. No matter what he did to her, she would bear no more. Her sincerity was unmistakable; thus he refrained from preying on her least successful children, refrained from breeding her daughters to her sons?or bedding those daughters himself. She did not know what care he had taken to keep her content. She did not know, but Isaac should have.
“You treat her a little better than the others because she’s a little more useful,” Isaac had said. “But you still humiliate her.”
“If she chooses to be humiliated by what I have her do, she’s creating her own problem.”
Isaac had looked at him steadily, almost angrily, for several seconds. “I know about Nweke’s father,” he had said. He had said it without fear. Over the years, he had come to learn that he was one of the few people who did not have to be afraid.
Doro had gone away from him feeling ashamed. He had not thought it was still possible for him to feel shame, but Anyanwu’s presence seemed to be slowly awakening several long dormant emotions in him. How many women had he sent Isaac to without feeling a thing. Isaac had done as he was told and come home. Home from Pennsylvania, home from Maryland, home from Georgia, home from Spanish Florida … Isaac didn’t mind either. He didn’t like being away from Anyanwu and the children for long periods, but he didn’t mind the women. And they certainly didn’t mind him. He didn’t mind that Doro had begotten eight of Anyanwu’s children. Or seven. Only Anyanwu minded that. Only she felt humiliated. But Nweke’s father was, perhaps, another matter.
The girl, eighteen years old, small and dark like her mother, came through the door, Isaac’s arm around her shoulders. She was redeyed as though she had been crying or as though she hadn’t been sleeping. Probably both. This was a bad time for her.
“Is it you?” she whispered, seeing the sharp-featured stranger.
“Of course,” Doro said, smiling.
His voice, the knowledge that he was indeed Doro, triggered tears. She went to him crying softly, looking for comfort in his arms. He held her and looked over her shoulder at Isaac.
“Whatever you’ve got to say to me, I deserve it,” Isaac said. “I didn’t notice and I should have. After all these years, I surely should have.”
Doro said nothing, motioned Isaac back out the door.
Isaac obeyed silently, probably feeling more guilt than he should have. This was no ordinary girl. None of her brothers or sisters had reached Doro miles away with their desperation as their transitions neared. What had he felt about her? Anxiety, worry, more. Some indefinable feeling not only that she was near transition, but that she was on the verge of becoming something he had not known before. Something new. It was as though from New York City he had sensed another Anyanwu?new, different, attracting him, pulling him. He had never followed a feeling more willingly.
The girl moved in his arms and he took her to the high-backed settle near the fireplace. The narrow bench was nearly as uncomfortable as the wainscot chairs. Not for the first time, Doro wondered why Isaac and Anyanwu did not buy or have made some comfortable modern furniture. Surely they could afford it.
“What am I going to do?” the girl whispered. She had put her head against his shoulder, but even that close, Doro could hardly hear her. “It hurts so much.”
“Endure it,” he said simply. “It will end.”
“When!” From a whisper to almost a scream. Then back to the whisper. “When?”
“Soon.” He held her away from him a little so that he could see the small face, swollen and weary. The girl’s coloring was gray rather than its usual rich dark brown. “You haven’t been sleeping?”
“A little. Sometimes. The nightmares … only they aren’t nightmares, are they?”
“You know what they are.”
She shrank against the back of the bench. “You know David Whitten, two houses over?”
Doro nodded. The Whitten boy was twenty. Fairly good breeding stock. His family would be worth more in generations to come. They had a sensitivity that puzzled Doro. He did not know quite what they were becoming, but the feeling he got from them was good. They were a pleasant mystery that careful inbreeding would solve.
