ANYANWU HAD NEVER WATCHED a group like her own break apart. She did not know whether there had ever before been a group like her own. Certainly, once Doro began to spend time at the plantation, exercising his authority as he chose while Anyanwu stood by and said nothing, the character of the group began to change. When he brought Joseph Toler as husband for one of Anyanwu’s daughters, the young man changed the group more by refusing to do work of any kind. His foster parents had pampered him, allowed him to spend his time drinking and gambling and bedding young women. But he was a beautiful young man—honey-colored with curly black hair, tall and slender. Anyanwu’s daughter Margaret Nneka was fascinated by him. She accepted him very quickly. Few other people on the plantation accepted him at all. He was not doing his share of the work, yet he could not be fired and sent away. He could, however, make a great deal of trouble. He had been on the plantation for only a few weeks when he went too far and lost a fist fight with Anyanwu’s son Stephen.
Anyanwu was alone when Stephen came to tell her what had happened. She had just come from treating a four-year-old who had wandered down to the bayou and surprised a water moccasin. She had been able to manufacture within her own body a medicine to counter the poison easily, since one of the first things she had done on settling in Louisiana was allow herself to be bitten by such a snake. By now, countering the poison was almost second nature to her. She did like to have a meal afterward, though; thus Stephen, bruised and disheveled, found her in the dining room eating.
“You’ve got to get rid of that lazy, worthless bastard,” he said.
Anyanwu sighed. There was no need to ask who the boy meant. “What has he done?”
“Tried to rape Helen.”
Anyanwu dropped the piece of cornbread she had been about to bite. Helen was her youngest daughter—eleven years old. “He what!”
“I caught them in the Duran cabin. He was tearing her clothes off.”
“Is she all right?”
“Yes. She’s in her room.”
Anyanwu stood up. “I’ll see her in a little while, then. Where is he?”
“Lying in front of the Duran cabin.”
She went out, not knowing whether she was going to give the young man another beating or help him if Stephen had hurt him seriously. But what kind of animal was he to try to rape a child? How could Anyanwu possibly tolerate him here after this? Doro would have to take him away, breeding be damned.
The young man was not beautiful when Anyanwu found him. He was half again as large as Stephen and strong in spite of his indolence, but Stephen had inherited much of Anyanwu’s strength. And he knew how to administer a good beating, even with his tender, newly finished arms and hands.
The young man’s face was a lumpy mass of bruised tissue. His nose was broken and bleeding. The flesh around his eyes was grotesquely swollen. The left ear was torn nearly off. He would lose it and look like one of the slaves marked and sold South for running away.
His body was so bruised beneath his shirt that Anyanwu was certain he had broken ribs. And he was lacking several of his front teeth. He would never be beautiful again. He began to come to as Anyanwu was probing at his ribs. He grunted, cursed, coughed, and with the cough, twisted in agony.
“Be still,” Anyanwu said. “Breathe shallowly, and try not to cough anymore.”
The young man whimpered.
“Be thankful Stephen caught you,” she said. “If it had been me, you would take no more interest in women, I promise you. Not for the rest of your life.”
In spite of his pain, the young man cringed away from her, clutching himself protectively.
“What can there be in you worth inflicting on descendants?” she asked in disgust. She made him stand up, ignoring his weakness, his moans of pain. “Now get into the house!” she said. “Or go lie in the barn with the other animals.”
He made it into the house, did not pass out until he reached the stairs. Anyanwu carried him up to a small, hot attic bedroom, washed him, bandaged his ribs, and left him there with water, bread, and a little fruit. She could have given him something to ease his pain, but she did not.
The little girl, Helen, lay asleep on her bed still wearing her torn dress. Her face was swollen on one side as though from a heavy blow, and the sight of it made Anyanwu want to give the young man another beating. Instead, she woke the child gently.
In spite of her gentleness, Helen awoke with a start and cried out.
“You are safe,” Anyanwu told her. “I’m here.”
The child clung to her, not weeping, only holding tightly, holding with all her strength.
“Are you hurt?” Anyanwu asked. “Did he hurt you?”
The girl did not respond.
“Obiageli, are you hurt?”
The girl lay down again slowly and looked up at her. “He came into my thoughts,” she said. “I could feel him come in.”
“… into your thoughts?”
“I could feel it. I knew it was him. He wanted me to go to Tina Duran’s house.”
“He made you go?”
“I don’t know.” Finally, the child began to cry. She pulled her pillow around her swollen face and wept into it. Anyanwu rubbed her shoulders and her neck and let her cry. She did not think the girl was crying because she had nearly been raped.
“Obiageli,” she whispered. Before the girl’s birth, a childless white woman named Helen Matthews had asked Anyanwu to give a child her name. Anyanwu had never liked the name Helen, but the white woman had been a good friend—one of those who had overcome her own upbringing and her neighbors’ noisy mouths and come to live on the plantation. She had never been able to have children, had been past the age of bearing when she met Anyanwu. Thus, Anyanwu’s youngest daughter was named Helen. And Helen was the daughter Anyanwu most often called by her second name, Obiageli. Somehow, she had lost that custom with the others.
“Obiageli, tell me all that he did.”
After a while, the girl sniffed, turned over, and wiped her face. She lay still, staring up at the ceiling, one small frown between her eyes.
“I was getting water,” she said. “I wanted to help Rita.” This was the os rouge cook—a woman of black and Indian ancestry and Spanish appearance. “She needed water, so I was at the well. He came to talk to me. He said I was pretty. He said he liked little girls. He said he had liked me for a long time.”
“I should have thrown him into the pigsty,” muttered Anyanwu. “Let his body wallow in shit so that it could be fit for his mind.”
“I tried to go take the water to Rita,” the girl continued. “But he told me to come with him. I went. I didn’t like to go, but I could feel him in my thoughts. Then I was away from myself—someplace else watching myself walk with him. I tried to turn back, but I couldn’t. My legs were walking without me.” She stopped, looked at Anyanwu. “I never knew if Stephen was looking into my thoughts.”
“But Stephen can only look,” Anyanwu said. “He can’t make you do anything.”
“He wouldn’t anyway.”
“No.”
Eyes downcast, the girl continued. “We went into Tina’s cabin and he was closing the door when I found I could move my legs again. I ran out the door before he could get it shut. Then he took back my legs and I screamed and fell. I thought he would make me walk back, but he came out and grabbed me and dragged me back. I think that was when Stephen saw us.” She looked up. “Did Stephen kill him?”
“No.” Anyanwu shuddered, not wanting to think of what Doro might have done to Stephen if Stephen had killed the worthless Joseph. If there had to be killing, she must do it. Probably no one on the plantation disliked killing more than she did, but she had to protect her people from both Doro’s malicious strangers and Doro himself. Still, she hoped Joseph would behave himself until Doro returned and took him away.
“Stephen should have killed him,” Helen said softly. “Now maybe he’ll make my legs move again. Or maybe he’ll do something worse.” She shook her head, her child’s face hard and old.
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.
Anyanwu had given her a home and hope. Stephen, when he was old enough, had given her something more. Luisa could remember Anyanwu shaking her head over the match, saying, “She is like a bitch in heat around him! You would never know from her behavior that she could be his mother.”
And Luisa had laughed. “You should hear yourself, Anyanwu. Better yet, you should see yourself when you find a man that you want.”
“I am not like that!” Anyanwu had been indignant.
“Of course not. You are very much better—and very much older.”
And Anyanwu, being Anyanwu, had gone from angry silence to easy laughter. “No doubt he will be a better husband someday for having known her,” she said.
“Or perhaps he will surprise you and marry her,” Luisa countered. “Despite their ages, there is more than the ordinary pull between them. She is like him. She has some of what he has, some of the power. She cannot use it, but it is there. I can feel it in her sometimes—especially in those times when she is hottest after him.”
Anyanwu had ignored this, preferring to believe that eventually her son would make a suitable marriage. Even now, Luisa did not know whether Anyanwu knew of the child coming. There was nothing showing yet, but Iye had told Luisa. She would not have told Anyanwu.
Now, Anyanwu went to the body, bent to touch the cold flesh of the throat. Iye saw her and started to move away, but Anyanwu caught her hand. “We both mourn,” she said softly. Iye hid her face and continued to weep. It was her youngest child, a boy of eight years, whose scream stopped both her crying and Anyanwu’s more silent grief.
At the boy’s cry, everyone looked at him, then upward at the gallery where he was looking. There, Helen was slowly climbing over the railing.
Instantly, Anyanwu moved. Luisa had never seen a human being move that quickly. When Helen jumped, Anyanwu was in position beneath her. Anyanwu caught her in careful, cushioning fashion, so that even though the girl had dived off the railing head first, her head did not strike the ground. Neither her head nor her neck were injured. She was almost as large as Anyanwu, but Anyanwu was clearly not troubled by her size or weight. By the time Luisa realized what was happening, it was over. Anyanwu was calming her weeping daughter.
“Why did she do it?” Luisa asked. “What is happening?”
Anyanwu shook her head, clearly frightened, bewildered.
“It was Joseph,” Helen said at last. “He moved my legs again. I thought it was only a dream until …” She looked up at the gallery, then at her mother who still held her. She began to cry again.
“Obiageli,” Anyanwu said. “Stay here with Luisa. Stay here. I’m going up to see him.”
But the child clung to Anyanwu and screamed when Luisa tried to pry her loose. Anyanwu could have pried her loose easily, but she chose to spend a few moments more comforting her. When Helen was calmer, it was Iye, not Luisa, who took her.
“Keep her with you,” Anyanwu said. “Don’t let her go into the house. Don’t let anyone in.”
“What will you do?” Iye asked.
Anyanwu did not answer. Her body had already begun to change. She threw off her cloak and her gown. By the time she was naked, her body was clearly no longer human. She was changing very quickly, becoming a great cat this time instead of the familiar large dog. A great spotted cat.
When the change was complete, she went to the door, and Luisa opened it for her. Luisa started to follow her in. There would be at least one other door that needed opening, after all. But the cat turned and uttered a loud coughing cry. It barred Luisa’s path until she turned and went outside again.
“My God,” whispered Iye as Luisa returned. “I’m never afraid of her until she does something like that right in front of me.”
Luisa ignored her, went to Stephen and straightened his neck and body, then covered him with Anyanwu’s discarded cloak.
“What’s she going to do?” Iye asked.
“Kill Joseph,” Helen said gently.
“Kill?” Iye stared uncomprehending into the small solemn face.
“Yes,” the child said. “And she ought to kill Doro too before he brings us somebody worse.”
In leopard form, Anyanwu padded down the hall and up the main stairs, then up the narrower stairs to the attic. She was hungry. She had changed a little too quickly, and she knew she would have to eat soon. She would control herself, though; she would eat none of Joseph’s disgusting flesh. Better to eat stinking meat crawling with maggots! How could even Doro have brought her human vermin like Joseph?
His door was shut, but Anyanwu opened it with a single blow of her paw. There was a hoarse sound of surprise from inside. Then, as she bounded into the room, something plucked at her forelegs, and she went sliding on chin and chest to jam her face against his washstand. It hurt, but she could ignore the pain. What she could not ignore was the fear. She had hoped to surprise him, catch him before he could use his ability. She had even hoped that he could not stop her while she was in a nonhuman form. Now, she gave her tearing, coughing roar of anger and of fear that she might fail.
For an instant, her legs were free. Perhaps she had frightened him into losing control. It did not matter. She leaped, claws extended, as though to the back of a running deer.
Joseph screamed and threw his arms up to shield his throat. At the same moment, he controlled her legs again. He was inhumanly quick in his desperation. Anyanwu knew that because she was inhumanly quick all the time.
Sensation left her legs, and she almost toppled off him. She seized a hold with her teeth, sinking them into one of his arms, tearing away flesh, meaning to get at the throat.
Feeling returned to her legs, but suddenly she could not breathe. Her throat felt closed, blocked somehow.
Instantly, she located the blockage, opened a place beneath it—a hole in her throat through which to breathe. And she got his throat between her teeth.
Utterly desperate, he jammed his fingers in the newly-made breathing hole.
At another time with other prey, she might have collapsed at the sudden, raw agony. But now the image of her dead son was before her, and her daughter nearly dead in the same way. What if he had merely closed their throats as he had just closed hers? She might never have known for sure. He might have gotten away with it.
She ripped his throat out.
He was dying when she gave way to her own pain. He was too far gone to hurt her any more. He died with soft bubbling noises and much bleeding as she lay across him reviving herself, mending herself. She was hungry. Great God, she was hungry. The smell of blood filled her nostrils as she restored her normal breathing ability, and the smell and the flesh beneath her tormented her.
She got up quickly and loped down the narrow stairs, down the main stairs. There, she hesitated. She wanted food before she changed again. She was sick with hunger now. She would be mad with it if she had to change to order food.
Luisa came into the house, saw her, and stopped. The old woman was not afraid of her. There was none of that teasing fear smell to make her change swiftly before she lost her head.
“Is he dead?” the old woman asked.
Anyanwu lowered her cat head in what she hoped would be taken for a nod.
“Good riddance,” Luisa said. “Are you hungry?”
Two more quick nods.
“Go into the dining room. I’ll bring food.” She went through the house and out toward the kitchen. She was a good, steady, sensible friend. She did more than sewing for her keep. Anyanwu would have kept her if she had done nothing at all. But she was so old. Over seventy. Soon some frailty that Anyanwu could not make a medicine for would take her life and another friend would be gone. People were temporary. So temporary.
Disobeying orders, Iye and Helen came in through the front door and saw Anyanwu, still bloody from her kill, and not yet gone to the dining room. If not for the presence of the child, Anyanwu would have roared her anger and discomfort at Iye. She did not like having her children see her at such a time. She loped away down the hall to the dining room. Iye stayed where she was, but allowed Helen to follow Anyanwu. Anyanwu, struggling with fear smell, blood smell, hunger, and anger, did not notice the child until they were both in the dining room. There, wearily, Anyanwu lay down on a rug before the cold fireplace. Fearlessly, the child came to sit on the rug beside her.
Anyanwu looked up, knowing that her face was smeared with blood and wishing she had cleaned herself before she came downstairs. Cleaned herself and left her daughter in the care of someone more reliable.
Helen stroked her, fingered her spots, caressed her as though she were a large house cat. Like most children born on the plantation, she had seen Anyanwu change her shape many times. She was as accepting of the leopard now as she had been of the black dog and the white man named Warrick who had to put in an occasional appearance for the sake of the neighbors. Somehow, under the child’s hands, Anyanwu began to relax. After a while, she began to purr.
“Agu,” the little girl said softly. This was one of the few words of Anyanwu’s language Helen knew. It meant simply, “leopard.” “Agu,” she repeated. “Be this way for Doro. He wouldn’t dare hurt us while you’re this way.”