Wild Seed

More than 50 years later, Doro comes to visit Wheatley in the form of an old white man on unofficial business. Anyanwu’s youngest daughter, Nweke, is soon to have her painful adolescent transition to power, and Doro feels drawn to bear witness to her change. Isaac is now much older but visibly spry. Though those born under the watchful authority of Doro’s children show little strife or racial animosity, those discovered as “wild seed” sometimes suffer with their gifts and reveal the prejudices of the outside world. Such is the way with the telepathic Sloanes, who cannot defend themselves from the thoughts of others and who buck under the non-racialized authority of Wheatley. “And as soon as they had produced a few more children, Doro intended to take them both” (148); Doro imagines murdering the tortured couple will be a “kindness.”

Isaac and Anyanwu have been peacefully married for several decades, but Anyanwu still holds a begrudging hatred for Doro, who continues to breed them both with other genetically talented people. Puzzled by her intransigence and satisfied with the number of children she has produced for his village; he intends to kill her as soon as Isaac dies. Isaac, sensing Doro’s hostility and unafraid to talk to him openly, mentions her limitless value to him as an immortal companion and associate, which Doro denies. Anyanwu also bridles at the suggestion of compatibility with Doro.

Doro goes to see 18-year-old Nweke, who claims to have read the minds of a teenage couple as they made love, among other disturbing psychic experiences. Doro seduces her with ease, taking her virginity. He understands the act as one which will humiliate Anyanwu. Soon after, Nweke falls into a coma-like swoon as she succumbs to her change, and Doro leaves. “It is easier to doom a child to this than to stay and watch it happen, isn’t it?” she admonishes him (168).

As she cares for Nweke, she thinks of Nweke’s father, a man of mixed white and Native-American ancestry named Thomas. Eighteen years before, as an arbitrary form of humiliation, Doro forced Anyanwu to breed with Thomas, who lived in a cabin in the woods. Thomas is vocally racist against people of African descent and had “long black hair clotted together with the grease and dirt of years of neglect” (171). His body was covered in sores and he stank. He was also among Doro’s most powerful “wild seed,” a telepath of uncommon ability who long ago frightened away anyone who might have loved him, including his former wife. Despite Thomas’s abuse, Anyanwu succeeds in her attempt to heal him, physically and psychically. After many nights she decides to use her total control of her biological function to conceive Thomas’s child, Nweke. Soon after, Doro returns. Infuriated to find that Anyanwu’s punishment resulted not in despair but in healing, Doro kills Thomas, taking his body.

For his part, as Doro hears Nweke’s transitional screams, he remembers his own past. He was born thousands of years before, near the Nile river, among people later called Nubians. He was the twelfth son of his parents, and the only one to survive into adolescence. During his own painful transition, the first life he took was his own mother’s, then his father’s. He then went on a 50-year rampage of murder that he later erased from his memory. As he regained his identity, he came to understand that killing was a pleasure and a need, and that such a need was the only earthly restraint to his complete freedom to act and take what he would.

Later, Isaac joins Doro and tells him, with a frankness only allowed to the most beloved of Doro’s sons, that Doro should reconsider killing Anyanwu. “Send her away and let her make her own life,” he says (198). They are interrupted by new screams, not by Nweke, but Anyanwu. Nweke has awoken to her full power, telekinetically injuring Anyanwu’s internal organs. She is murderously insane, and attacks Isaac next, who reflexively lashes out with his own power, killing Nweke. Anyanwu heals her own injuries, but Isaac dies a slow death. Among his final words are, “You must live...you must make your peace with Doro” (207). On the day of the funeral, Anyanwu takes to the sky as a bird, escaping Doro’s telepathic grasp. She later swims with the dolphins.