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 make 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.”
