Anyanwu took her hand, remembering?remembering Lale, her Isaac’s unlikely, unworthy brother. In all her time with Doro, she had not met another of his people as determinedly vicious as Lale.
Until now, perhaps. Why had Doro given her such a man? And why had he not at least warned her?
“What will you do with him?” the girl asked.
“Have Doro take him away.”
“Will Doro do that?just because you say so?”
Anyanwu winced.Just because you say so … How long had things been going on on the plantation just because she said so? People had been content with what she said. If they had problems they could not solve, they came to her. If they quarreled and could not settle matters themselves, they came to her. She had never invited them to come to her with their troubles, but she had never turned them away either. They had made her their final authority. Now her eleven-year-old daughter wanted to know if a thing would happen just because she said so. Her eleven-year-old! It had taken time, patience, and at least some wisdom to build the people’s confidence in her. It took only a few weeks of Doro’s presence to erode that confidence so badly that even her children doubted her.
“Will Doro take him away?” the girl persisted.
“Yes,” Anyanwu said quietly. “I will see to it.”
That night, Stephen walked in his sleep for the first time in his life. He walked out onto the upper gallery of the porch and fell or jumped off.
There was no disturbance; Stephen did not cry out. At dawn, old Luisa found him sprawled on the ground, his neck so twisted that Luisa was not surprised to find his body cold.
The old woman climbed the stairs herself to wake Anyanwu and take her to an upstairs sitting room away from the young daughter who was sleeping with her. The daughter, Helen, slept on, content, moving over a little into the warm place Anyanwu had left.
In the sitting room, Luisa stood hesitant, silent before Anyanwu, longing for a way to ease the terrible news. Anyanwu did not know how she was loved, Luisa thought. She gathered people to her and cared for them and helped them care for each other. Luisa had a sensitivity that had made closeness with other people a torture to her for most of her life. Somehow, she had endured a childhood and adolescence on a true plantation, where the ordinary accepted cruelties of slaveholder to slave drove her away into a marriage that she should not have made. People thought she was merely kind and womanishly unrealistic to be in such sympathy with slaves. They did not understand that far too much of the time, she literally felt what the slaves felt, shared fragments of their meager pleasure and far too many fragments of their pain. She had had none of Stephen’s control, had never completed the agonizing change that she knew had come to the young man two years before. The man-thing called Doro had told her this was because her ancestry was wrong. He said she was descended from his people. It was his fault then that she had lived her life knowing of her husband’s contempt and her children’s indifference. It was his fault that she had been sixty years old before she found people whose presence she could endure without pain?people she could love and be loved by. She was “grandmother” to all the children here. Some of them actually lived in her cabin because their parents could not or would not care for them. Luisa thought some parents were too sensitive to any negative or rebellious feelings in their children. Anyanwu thought it was more than that?that some people did not want any children around them, rebellious or not. She said some of Doro’s people were that way. Anyanwu took in stray children herself?as well as stray adults. Her son had shown signs of becoming much like her. Now, that son was dead.
“What is it?” Anyanwu asked her. “What has happened?”
“An accident,” Luisa said, longing to spare her.
“Is it Joseph?”
“Joseph!” That son of a whore Doro had brought to marry one of Anyanwu’s daughters. “Would I care if it were Joseph?”
“Who then? Tell me, Luisa.”
The old woman took a deep breath. “Your son,” she said. “Stephen is dead.”
There was a long, terrible silence. Anyanwu sat frozen, stunned. Luisa wished she would wail with a mother’s grief so that Luisa could comfort her. But Anyanwu never wailed.
“How could he die?” Anyanwu whispered. “He was nineteen. He was a healer. How could he die?”
“I don’t know. He … fell.”
“From where?”
“Upstairs. From the gallery.”
“But how? Why?”
“How can I know, Anyanwu? It happened last night. It … must have. I only found him a few moments ago.”
“Show me!”
She would have gone down in her gown, but Luisa seized a cloak from her bedroom and wrapped her in it. She noticed as she left with Anyanwu that the little girl was moving restlessly in her sleep, moaning softly. A nightmare?
Outside, others had discovered Stephen’s body. Two children stood back, staring at him wide-eyed, and a woman knelt beside him wailing as Anyanwu would not.
The woman was Iye, a tall, handsome, solemn woman of utterly confused ancestry?French and African, Spanish and Indian. The mixture blended all too well in her. Luisa knew her to have thirty-six years, but she could have passed easily for a woman of twenty-six or even younger. The children were her son and daughter and the one in her belly would be Stephen’s son or daughter. She had married a husband who loved wine better than he could love any woman, and wine had finally killed him. Anyanwu had found her destitute with her two babies, selling herself to get food for them, and considering very seriously whether she should take her husband’s rusty knife and cut their throats and then her own.
