Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

Wild Seed (c. 1980) is one of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels. It tells the story of Anyanwu, the wild seed of the title. Wild seed is the name Doro has given to people with the sort of mental powers he has been seeding among his human descendents. Doro calls them wild seed, because they have the powers without having Doro as a progenitor.

Doro is a character in some of the other Patternist novels, particularly Mind of My Mind. He is an immortal spirit/being, who lives in the bodies of his conquests. He has other strong mental powers, but his greatest power is the ability to kill people by mentally consuming them. Their bodies don't die; Doro moves into their bodies.

Anyanwu was the first wild seed that Doro encountered who was a challenge to him. She had already been living for about 300 years when Doro found her. She was living as a village elder and witch among her descendents in an African village. Doro convinced Anyanwu to leave her village as his wife.

Anyanwu traveled with Doro to the coast of Africa, where Doro had a slave trader working to collect interesting humans for his gene pool. Doro would take the humans he collected to the New World, where he was building a community of his descendents.

Anyanwu struggled against Doro as she learned more of his nature, and she eventually escaped his control, while in the shape of an animal. After many years of estrangement, Doro and Anyanwu were finally reconciled to each other's existence. As the novel ends, Anyanwu has adopted the name Emma (which means grandmother) and moved with her extended family to California.

Some time after the establishment of Emma's family in California, the story is continued in Mind of My Mind.