Excerpt:
“Haven’t you seed the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other men. One thinks he is greater than another because he has more children. Both exaggerate the number of women who have borne them children, neither is doing anything a father should for his children, and the master who is indifferently selling off his own brown children is laughing and saying, ‘You see? Niggers are just like animals!’ Slavery down here opens one’s eyes, Doro. How could I want such a life for my son?” (Wild Seed, 195)
In this passage Anyanwu is pleading with Doro about her son. She is drawing a connection between how slave owners treat their slaves and how Doro treats the people he breeds. She is particularly trying to point out the effects of that treatment. She first refers to how the slaves are used for “breeding”, which is the word Doro uses to describe his own work. She then claims they are not even real men because they are never permitted to be real fathers to their children. Doro’s practices are similar. For example, Anyanwu herself was forced to mate with many men that were not her husband and conceive a child that would never know their biological father.
Anyanwu goes on to say that children are the most important thing to her and her people. This is something Doro should understand well, for the only people he appears to care about are his children. Only a select few of them are chosen to be his confidants but for them he feels something like love, if not love itself. Anyanwu claims that the slaves are “warped and twisted by their masters”, implying those that Doro breeds are similarly manipulated. These words “warped” and “twisted” have particularly bad connotations, being associated with the idea of being against nature or god. Anyanwu next says that the slave father’s indifference toward their children reinforces the cultural myth upheld at the time that slaves were no better than animals. This myth dehumanized slaves, justifying the treatment of slaves for slave owners. But through dehumanizing treatment, slaves were conditioned to act in ways that reinforced the myth, making it a kind of a self-fulfilling cultural myth. This realization, for me, demonstrates further what an incredible uphill battle the abolitionist movement had and how amazingly strong the leaders of it must have been.
I think Anyanwu’s underlying warning is that people live up to their expectations; they are influenced by how people treat them. Anyanwu’s argument is that there is nothing inherently anti-fatherly about a male slave, but that they are conditioned to animalistic indifference to their children through animalistic breeding. She accuses Doro of tampering with the very humanness of his people in a similar way.
The practice of slavery shows up throughout the story. It is set in a historical time when slavery runs rampant throughout the world and particularly in America. But, Doro can also be seen as a slave master to his people or his slaves. He is the embodiment of power and uses fear tactics, like traditional slave owners, to keep control over his people. Furthermore, the majority of his people are merely means to an end for him; much like a traditional slave owner he completely uses them.
Discussion Question:
If Doro embodies the slave master, does Anyanwu embody the abolitionist movement because she continuously opposes Doro throughout the novel? Is my reading way to ‘good vs. evil’ here? Are there any redeeming qualities of Doro?
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