"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 insane—or 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 him—leaving 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.
"What'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 woman—in 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 visitors—strangers 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 door—closed doors were respected in her house—and 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 doors—but 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 about 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 die—the 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."
Again, she only shrugged.
"They'll all die, except me," he continued. "Because of me, you were not alone on the ship. Because of me, you will never be alone."
He took her to the sofa, finally, undressed her, made love to her. She found that she did not mind particularly. The lovemaking relaxed her, and when it was over, she escaped easily into sleep.
Not much time had passed when he woke her. The sunlight and the long shadows told her it was still evening. She wondered why he had not left her. He had what he wanted, and intentionally or not, he had given her peace. Now if only he would go away.
Anyanwu looked at him seated beside her half dressed, still shirtless. They were not crowded together on the large sofa as they would have been had he been wearing one of his usual large bodies. Again, she wondered about the original owner of his beautiful, unlikely, new body, but she asked no questions. She did not want to learn that it had been one of her descendants.
He caressed her silently for a moment and she thought he meant to resume the lovemaking. She sighed and decided that it did not matter. So little seemed to matter now.
"I'm going to try something with you," he said. "I've wanted to do it for years. Before you ran away, I assumed I would do it someday. Now . . . now everything is changed, but I mean to have some of this anyway."