Wild Seed

One hundred years have passed. Doro arrives in Avoyelles parish in Louisiana seeking a man named Edward Warrick. A great deal has changed in America since 1741, including the War of Independence and the War of 1812. Doro has expanded his reach and has thought often of Anyanwu. His alien tracking sense for power has brought him to Louisiana. He finds many special people among the parishioners in Avoyelles, including stories of the inhospitableness of Warwick, and the fact that a large black wolf haunts the nearby area. Doro intends to take Anyanwu by stealth and kill her before she can transform into an animal, escaping his killer telepathic grasp.

He meets Stephen, a young man with the demeanor of a former slave, and confronts him about his abnormally foreshortened arms. The boy very willingly confesses that he lost his arms in a combine and is in the middle of using his extraordinary healing ability “to grow new ones” (220). Anyanwu then appears as a giant wolf but transforms into her natural state in order to converse with Doro. The three enter into a delicate bargain. Doro is compelled by the “breeding program” established by Anyanwu, though she prefers to think of it as a free society of equals. Stephen, her son, has been primed to understand his role as a bargaining chip in this negotiation, and Anyanwu fears that he will either be killed or made a breeding slave for Doro if she runs.

Anyanwu explains that she has been periodically posing as a white man in order to better secure resources and avoid trouble. Occasionally, she would free a slave of common ancestry or ability, including the man who was Stephen’s father. “Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything,” she says (229). Eventually, she works out a lopsided trade in which Doro will send his servants to Doro’s more egalitarian village to mate with select members. Doro is back in control of Anyanwu’s fate.

Doro sends a beautiful young man named Joseph Toler, who makes a connection with Doro’s daughter Margaret. Joseph is narcissistic and lazy, and he possesses the power to control people’s minds. After attempting to rape Anyanwu’s youngest daughter—11-year-old Helen—Stephen thrashes him half to death. That night, Stephen walks in his sleep off a balcony and breaks his neck. As they discover the body, Anyanwu acts in time to catch a falling Helen as she tumbles from the balcony. Crying, she describes Joseph's influence within her mind, urging her towards suicide. Anyanwu transforms into a leopard and rips out Joseph’s throat.

A month later, Doro arrives with two boys of Helen’s age, the brothers of Joseph. Though largely indifferent to Joseph's fate, he interrogates Anyanwu and Margaret about the deaths. Anyanwu resists taking in the boys, but Doro leaves her with no choice. Soon after he leaves, Margaret hangs herself.

During her grief, Anyanwu is cared for by a woman named Luisa. Luisa is an older woman, a psychic who had lived a life of great suffering, and who never learned about other people of her kind until Anyanwu discovered her when she was in her 60’s. She advises Anyanwu to run away for a while. “Those of us who can feel your pain as you feel it need a rest from you,” she says (264).

Anyanwu disappears for a month, becoming a bird, and then a dolphin. When she returns, ready for human company, she spies a handsome new man among the villagers. She takes on an attractive human form for him but is disappointed when she realizes the new man is Doro. He has brought a pregnant woman named Susan with him. Anyanwu discovers that Luisa has died of natural causes while she was away. As she mourns, Doro comforts her and tells her that he, too, now has a new respect for life, at least as it concerns Anyanwu. “I want you alive for as long as you can live,” he says (270). They make love, and Doro, with Anyanwu’s consent, enters her soul in much the way he would if he were killing her. It is an intense and nearly fatal experience.

Doro and Anyanwu live as lovers for a while, though her people silently disapprove. Susan has her baby. Anyanwu particularly likes Doro’s current body, though Doro knows that being black in America and therefore subject to potential, arbitrary violence, he will have to eventually trade out bodies. Instead, one day he decides that the body he’s in is “used up,” and that, when this happens, his hunger will grow, and he will become a danger to others. He takes the body of Susan, buries the body of Anyanwu’s lover, and then disappears for two weeks, knowing the extent of Anyanwu’s potential anger.

When he returns, Anyanwu’s daughter Helen informs him that Anyanwu is pregnant with Doro’s child and intends to kill herself after the child is born in order to escape his grasp. He finds her concocting natural cures in her garden with the intention of teaching her children how to care for themselves when she is gone. He pleads with her to live, but she insists that he is an “abomination,” and that such a course of action is her only freedom.

She has a baby boy. The villagers come to Doro, asking him to convince Anyanwu not to kill herself. He goes to her, alarmed by his own feelings for her. “The human part of you is dying. It is almost dead,” she says (293). As she triggers a poison within herself and begins to die, he weeps, pleading with her. A night passes, and he wakes to find Anyanwu still alive. In the following years, Anyanwu commands greater freedom, though not complete independence, from Doro. She moves to California.