Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
“But…you won’t try to get in the way of my preaching at the Gathering if I take questions afterward?”
“That’s right.”
“Then I’ll do it.”
“It’s no joke, Marc.”
“I know. It’s no joke to me either.”
“I mean we’re as serious about the discussion as you are about the sermon. Some of our people might probe and dissect in ways you won’t like.”
“Okay, I can handle it.”
No, I didn’t think he could. But an unpleasant thing should be done quickly if it must be done at all. My brother had a sermon ready. He’d been working on it in his spare moments. Since I was scheduled to speak at the Gathering this morning, I was able to step aside for him, let him speak at once.
He didn’t pull his punches. He confronted us, challenged us directly from the Bible—first from Isaiah again, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God will stand for ever.” Then later from Malachi, “For I am the Lord. I change not.” And then from Hebrews, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today, and for ever. Be not carried about with diverse and strange doctrines.”
Marc doesn’t have our father’s impressive voice, and he knows it. He uses what he has skillfully, and, of course, it helps that he’s so good-looking. But once he had preached his sermon on the changelessness of God, Jorge Cho spoke up. Jorge was next to Diamond Scott as usual. He has told me he intends to marry Di, but Di has been looking at my brother in a way that Jorge doesn’t like at all. There’s a rivalry between Marc and Jorge anyway. They’re both young and competitive.
“We believe that all things change,” Jorge said, “even though all things don’t necessarily change in all ways. Why do you believe God doesn’t change?”
My brother smiled. “But even you believe that your God doesn’t change. Your God promotes change, but he stays the same.”
That surprised me. Marc shouldn’t have made such avoidable mistakes. He’s had plenty of time to read, talk, and hear about Earthseed, but somehow, he’s misunderstood.
Travis was the first to point out the error. “God is Change,” he said. “God promotes nothing. Nothing at all.”
And Zahra, of all people, said, “Our God isn’t male. Change has no sex. Marc, you don’t know enough about us yet even to criticize us.”
Jorge began repeating his question before Zahra had finished. “Why do you think your God doesn’t change? How can you prove it?”
“I have faith that it’s true,” Marc said. “Belief must be based on faith as much as on proofs.”
“But there must be some test,” Jorge said. “You must have a way to know when your faith is sensible and when it makes no sense.”
“The test is the Bible, of course. When the Bible tells us something—in this case, it tells us several times—we can believe it. We can have faith that it is true.”
Antonio Cortez, Lucio’s oldest nephew, jumped in. “Look,” he said, “in the Bible, God does things. Things happen and he reacts. He makes things. He gets angry. He destroys things…”
“But he, himself, doesn’t change,” my brother said.
“Oh, come on,” Tori Mora shouted in open disgust. “To take action is to change. It’s to go from action to inaction. And he goes from calmness to anger—he gets angry a lot. And—”
“And in Genesis,” her stepsister Doe said, “he lets some of his favorite men have children with their sisters or daughters. Then in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, he says anyone who does that should be killed.”
“Right,” Jorge said. “I was just reading that last week. It is no good to say that something is true because the Bible says it is true and then forget that a few pages later, the Bible says—or shows—something completely different.”
“Every time any god is accepted by a new group of people, that god changes,” Harry Balter said.
“I think,” Marta Figueroa Castro said in her gentlest voice, “that the verses you read, Marc, mean that God is always God, always there for us, always dependable that way. And, of course, it means that God and God’s word will never die.”
“Yes, so much of the Bible is metaphor,” Diamond Scott said. She, too, spoke very gently. “I remember that my mother used to try to take it absolutely literally, but it just meant she had to ignore some things and twist others.” Beside her, Jorge smiled.
The discussion went on for a while longer. Then other people began to take pity on Marc. They let him end the discussion. They had never been out to humiliate him. Well, maybe Jorge had, but even Jorge had been polite. Things would have gone better for Marc if he had done his homework, and things would have been more interesting and involving for his audience. He might even have won over a Faircloth or a Peralta. I had worried about that.
The truth is, I let him speak today because I wanted him to speak before he was truly ready. I wish I hadn’t had to do that. I wish he had wanted to do something else—anything else—to get his self-respect back and begin to rebuild himself. I have tried to interest him in the several kinds of work we do here. He isn’t lazy. He pulls his weight. But he doesn’t like fieldwork or working with animals or trading or teaching or salvaging or carpentry. He tried repairing salvaged tools, but it bothered him that he had so much to learn even about simple things. He all but ruined a pair of heavy-duty shears that he was supposed to be sharpening. He tried to grind their almost square edges to thin, sharp blades, and Travis gave him the chewing out he deserved.
“If you don’t know, ask,” Travis had shouted. “Nobody expects you to know everything. Just ask! This shit is easy to do if you just take the trouble to learn a few basics. Work with me for a while. Don’t try to go off on your own.”
But my brother needed to “go off on his own,” to have his own turf where he was the one who said yes or no, and where everyone respected him. He needed that more than he needed anything, and he meant to have it all at once.
But now, instead of feeling important and proud, he feels angry and embarrassed. I had to let him inflict those feelings on himself. I couldn’t let him begin to divide Acorn. More important—much more important—I couldn’t let him begin to divide Earthseed.
NINE
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
To make peace with others,
Make peace with yourself:
Shape God With generosity
And compassion.
Minimize harm.
Shield the weak.
Treasure the innocent.
Be true to the Destiny.
Forgive your enemies.
Forgive yourself.
MY MOTHER WAS QUITE open in her journal about the fact that she didn’t know what she was doing, and that this was a terrible frustration to her. She meant to make Earthseed a nationwide movement, but she had no idea how to do this. She seemed to have vague plans to someday send out Earthseed missionaries, to use Acorn as a kind of school for such missionaries. Perhaps this is what she would have done if she’d had the chance. It might even have worked. It’s worked for other cults. It might have gained her a larger following, more recognition.
But she didn’t want simple recognition. She wanted people to believe. She had a truth that she wanted to teach and an outer-space Destiny that she wanted taken seriously and someday fulfilled. And it’s obvious from her treatment of Uncle Marc that she was very territorial about the whole thing. I don’t know whether Uncle Marc ever realized how she set him up to fail and to make a bad first impression with her people. Such a simple, subtle thing. He imagined that she had done something much more obvious and complicated.
She didn’t fight people unless she was pretty sure she was going to win. When she wasn’t sure, she found ways to avoid fighting or go along with her opponents until they tripped themselves up or put themselves in a position for her to trip them up. Smart, I suppose—or treacherous, depending on your point of view.
She learned from everyone and everyth
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2033
I feel more strongly than I ever have that there will soon be war. President Jarret is still stirring up bad feelings over Alaska, or as he describes it, “our truant forty-ninth state.” He paints Alaska’s President Leontyev and the Alaskan legislature as the real enemies—as “that gang of traitors and thieves who are trying to steal a vast, rich portion of these United States for themselves. These people want to treat all of Alaska as their own personal, private property. Can we let them get away with it? Can we let them cheat us, rob us, destroy our country, use our sacred constitution as waste paper? Can we forget that ‘If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand?’ Jesus Christ spoke those words 2000 years ago. President Abraham Lincoln paraphrased them in 1858. Was Lincoln wrong? Was—dare we ask it? Dare we imagine it? Was Christ wrong? Was our Lord, wrong?”
He’s so good at asking nasty rhetorical questions—so good at encouraging young men—not young women, only men—to “Do your duty, to your country and to yourselves. Prove yourselves men worthy to be called good Christian American soldiers. Serve your country, now that it has such great need of you.” They’re to do all this by joining the armed services. I’ve never heard a president talk this way—although I have read about presidents and leaders of other nations who talked this way when they were preparing for war. Jarret said nothing about drafting people, but Bankole says that may be next. Bankole was down in Sacramento a couple of days ago, and he says a lot of people think it’s “time we taught that bunch of traitors up in Alaska a lesson.”
It shouldn’t be so easy to nudge people toward what might be their own destruction.
“Who was doing the talking?” I asked him as he unpacked medical supplies. He keeps most of his supplies in our cabin until they’re needed at the clinic. That way they’re less likely to tempt children or thieves. “I mean, was it most of the people you talked to or just a few?”
“Mostly men,” he said. “Some young and some old enough to know better. I think a lot of the younger ones would like a war. War is exciting. A boy can prove himself, become a man—if he lives. He’ll be given a gun and trained to shoot people. He’ll be a powerful part of a powerful team. Chances are, he won’t think about the people who’ll be shooting back at him, bombing him, or otherwise trying to kill him until he faces them.”
I thought about the young single men of Acorn—Jorge Cho, Esteban Peralta, Antonio Figueroa, and even my brother Marc, and shook my head. “Did you ever want to go to war?” I asked.
“Never,” Bankole answered. “I wanted to be a healer. I was damned idealistic about it. Believe me, that was a daunting enough challenge for a young Black boy in the late twentieth century—much harder than learning to kill. It never occurred to me back in the 1990s when I was in medical school that in spite of my ideals, I would have to learn to do both.”
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2033
Marc spoke at Gathering yesterday. This is the third time he’s done it. Each time he learns more about Earthseed and tries harder to convince us that our beliefs are nonsense. He seems to have decided that the unity, the Christianity and the hope that Jarret has brought to the country makes Jarret not the monster we all feared but a potential savior. The country, he tells us, must get back to God or it is finished.
“The Earthseed Destiny,” he said yesterday, “is an airy nothing. The country is bleeding to death in poverty, slavery, chaos, and sin. This is the time for us to work for our salvation, not to divert our attention to fantasy explorations of extrasolar worlds.”
Travis, trying to explain, said, “The Destiny is important for the lessons it forces us to learn while we’re here on Earth, for the people it encourages us to become. It’s important for the unity and purpose that it gives us here on Earth. And in the future, it offers us a kind of species adulthood and species immortality when we scatter to the stars.”
My brother laughed. “If you’re looking for immortality in outer space,” he said, “you’ve been misled. You already have an immortal soul, and where that soul spends eternity is up to you. Remember the Tower of Babel! You can follow Earthseed, build your way to go to the stars, fall down into chaos, and wind up in hell! Or you can follow the will of God. And if you follow God’s will, you can live forever, secure and happy, in God’s true heaven.”
Zahra Balter, loyal in spite of her personal beliefs, spoke up before I could. “Marc,” she said, “if we have immortal souls, don’t you think we’ll take them with us even if we go to the stars?”
“Why do you find it so easy,” Michael Kardos asked, “to believe we go to heaven after we die, but so hard to believe we can go into the heavens while we’re alive? Following the Earthseed Destiny is difficult. Massively difficult. That’s the challenge. But if we want to do it, someday we’ll do it. It’s not impossible.”
I had spoken the same words to him shortly after he came to live at Acorn. He had said then with bitter contempt that the Destiny was meaningless. All he wanted to do, he said, was to earn enough money to house, feed, and clothe his family. Once he was able to do that, he said, then maybe he’d have time for science fiction.
Indeed.
SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2033
Marc has gone.
He left yesterday with the Peraltas. They’re gone for good too. They were the ones Marc managed to reach. They’ve always felt that we should be more Christian and more patriotic. They say Andrew Jarret is our elected leader—Ramiro Peralta and his daughter Pilar helped elect him—and a minister of God, so he deserves our respect. Esteban Peralta is going to enlist in the army. He believes—the whole family believes—it’s our patriotic duty, everyone’s duty, to support Jarret in his “heroic” effort to revive and reunify the country. They don’t believe Jarret’s a fascist. They don’t believe that the church burnings, witch burnings, and other abuses are Jarret’s doing. “Some of his followers are young and excitable,” Ramiro Peralta says. “Jarret will put their asses into uniform. Then they’ll learn some discipline. Jarret hates all this chaos the way I hate it. That’s why I voted for him. Now he’ll start putting things right!”
It’s true that there haven’t been any burnings or beatings since Jarret was inaugurated—or none that I’ve heard of, and I’ve been paying attention to the news. I don’t know what this means, but I don’t believe it means everything’s all right. I don’t think the Peraltas believe it either. I think they’re just scared, and getting out of any potential line of fire. If Jarret does crack down on people who don’t fit into his religious notions, they don’t want to be here at Acorn.
My brother on the other hand, used to despise Jarret. Now he says Jarret is just what America needs. And I’m afraid that it’s me he’s begun to despise. He blames me for the failure of his Gathering Day sermons. He’s gained no followers. The Peraltas like him and sort of agree with him. Pilar Peralta is more than half in love with him, but even they don’t see him as a minister. They see him as a nice boy. In fact, that’s the way most people here in Acorn see him. He thinks this is my fault. He believes, he insists, that I coached people to attack and humiliate him at all three Gatherings. And he says with a weary, irritating, honest smile, “I forgive you. I might have done the same thing to protect my turf if I had any turf to protect.”
I think it was the smile that made me say more than I should have. “The truth is,” I told him, “you were given a special privilege. If you were anyone else, you could have been expelled for preaching another belief system. I let you do it because you’ve been through so much hell, and I knew it was important to you. And because you’re my brother.” I would have called back the words if I could have. He would hear pity in them. He would hear condescension.
For a long moment, he stared at me. I watched him get angry—very angry. Then he seemed to push his
“Think of the Gatherings you’ve attended,” I said to him. “Name even one that didn’t involve questions, challenges, argument. It’s our way. I did warn you. Anyone can be questioned on any subject they choose to teach or advocate. I told you that we were serious about it. We learn at least as much by discussion as by lecture, demonstration, or experience.”
“Forget about it,” he said. “It’s done. I don’t blame you. Really. I shouldn’t have tried my hand here. I’ll make a place for myself somewhere else.”
Still no anger expressed. Yet he was furious. He wouldn’t show it and he wouldn’t talk about it, but it came off him like heat. Perhaps that’s what a collar teaches—a horrible kind of self-control. Or perhaps not. My brother was always a self-contained person. He knew how to be unreachable.
I sighed and gave him as much money as I could afford, plus a rifle, a sidearm, and ammunition for both. He’s not a very good shot with anything yet, but he knows the basics, and I couldn’t let him go out and wind up in the hands of someone like Cougar again. The Peralta family had been with us for two years, so they had money and possessions as a result of their work with us. Marc did not. We drove him and the Peraltas into Eureka. There, they might find homes and jobs, or at least they might find temporary shelter until they could decide what to do.
“I thought you knew me,” I said to my brother just before he left us. “I wouldn’t do what you’re accusing me of.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. Don’t keep worrying about it.” He smiled. And he was gone.
I don’t know how to feel about this. So many people have come here and stayed or wanted to stay even if, for some reason, they couldn’t. I had to expel a thief a year ago, and he cried and begged to stay. We had caught him stealing drugs from Bankole’s medical supplies, so he had to go, but he cried.
As they left us, even the Peraltas looked grim and frightened. They were Ramiro, the father; Pilar, 18; Esteban, 17; and Eva, who was only two and whose birth at a rest stop along the highway had cost her mother’s life. They had no other relatives left alive, no friends outside of Acorn who would help them if they got into trouble. And Esteban would be leaving them soon to enlist. They had good reason to look worried.