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But now and then one of them overcame his fear and found reason to try to end her long life.
She knew now how the slaves had felt as they lay chained on the bench, the slaver’s hot iron burning into their flesh. In her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She could no longer deny it.
“I have not the courage to die. I had never thought before that I was a coward, but I am. Living has become too precious a habit.”
“We will marry. You are a good man, Isaac. I am the wrong wife for you, but perhaps, somehow, in this place, among these people, it will not matter.”
They stood before Isaac, who sat on a bench in front of the house he and Anyanwu had built over fifty years before.
One of the reasons Doro came back to a son like Isaac, old and past most of his usefulness, was that Isaac was a friend as well as a son.
But for now, they would go on being abysmal parents, neglecting and abusing their children not out of cruelty, but because they hurt too badly themselves to notice their children’s pain.
near either Isaac or Anyanwu. The depth of his own anger amazed him. Normally, people had only to annoy him to die for their error. He had to think to remember how long it had been since he had felt real anger and left those who caused it alive.
She would make herself young without being told to do so, and she would come to him. Then, satisfied, he would kill her.
Anyanwu the protector, Doro thought with bitterness that surprised him. Anyanwu the defender of anyone who needed her.
Doro wondered what she would do if he told her he needed her.
HE WANTS HER SO BAD
He had not touched her children because from the first, she promised him that if any one of them was harmed, she would bear no more. No matter what he did to her, she would bear no more. Her sincerity was unmistakable; thus he refrained from preying on her least successful children, refrained from breeding her daughters to her sons—or bedding those daughters himself. She did not know what care he had taken to keep her content. She did not know, but Isaac should have.
He was going to let her live. Thomas had bought her life.
