Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
With two trucks, the beginnings of a fleet, my mother was looking forward to what she saw as a pleasant, reasonably secure future. She began to think less about Acorn and more about Earthseed—about spreading Earthseed to whole groups of new people. She wrote more than once in her journal that she hoped to use missionaries to make conversions in nearby cities and towns and to build whole new Earthseed communities—clones of Acorn. I think she especially liked this last idea. She even imagined names for the Acorn clones like a girl thinking up names for imaginary children that she hopes to have someday. There was a Hazelnut, a Pine, a Manzanita, a Sunflower, an Almond…“They should be small communities,” she said. “No more than a few hundred people, never more than a thousand. A community whose population grew to more than a thousand should split and ‘parent’ a new community.”
In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you’re doing.
My mother was not a fanciful woman apart from her belief in Earthseed. That, I think, was why the people of Acorn trusted her so. She was practical, straightforward, fair, honest, and she liked people. She enjoyed working with them. She was a better-than-average community leader. But beneath it all was always Earthseed and a longing, an obsession, that was far stronger than anyone seemed to realize. People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous. When they occur, they inevitably upset things.
In The First Book of the Living, my mother says,
Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2033
On July 20, I turned 24. More important, on that day my daughter Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole was born.
We’ve named her all that, poor little one. “Larkin” is from the same root as “Lauren” and my father’s name, “Laurence.” All three names derive from “Laurel” and that from the ancient Greek habit of rewarding the victorious by crowning them with wreaths of laurel leaves. And there is a pleasant similarity between “Larkin” and “lark,” the name of a songbird that neither Bankole nor I have ever seen or heard, but whose voice, we have read, is beautiful. I had planned to call our daughter Larkin even before she was born on my and my father’s birthday. What a lovely connection. Three generations of beginning on July 20 is more than just a coincidence. It’s almost a tradition.
“Beryl” was the name of Bankole’s mother. Bankole and I had been bickering over it for months, and I had known that it would show up somewhere in our daughter’s name. As long as it wasn’t her first name, it was endurable. It has a good denotative meaning. A beryl is a very hard clear or cloudy mineral which, when properly shaped and polished, has great potential for beauty. The emerald is a kind of beryl.
“Ife” is the Yoruba personal name we’ve chosen to go with our two Yoruba surnames—since my grandfather and Bankole’s father had chosen to take Yoruba surnames back in the 1960s. “Ife” was Bankole’s idea. I didn’t remember it. We had pooled our memories of Yoruba names, and as soon as Bankole came up with “Ife,” it seemed right to both of us. It means “love,” Bankole says.
And, of course, she was “Olamina” and “Bankole.” So many names for one little girl. When she’s older, she’ll no doubt choose a couple of them and drop the others.
She’s whole and beautiful and healthy, and I love her more than I would have thought possible. I’m still sore and tired, but it doesn’t matter. She weighs three and a half kilos, has a big appetite, and a good loud voice.
Bankole sits, now, holding her as she sleeps—holding her and looking down at her, rocking her in the beautiful, ornate wooden rocking chair that Gray Mora paid Allie Gilchrist to make for him. Gray likes to build big things—cabins, storehouses, buildings of any kind. He designs them, organizes the building, and works on them. As long as he’s building something, he’s a happy man. The school is his doing, and if he were any more proud of it, he’d be impossible. But he leaves the designing and building of small things, furniture in particular, to Allie Gilchrist. She taught herself her craft not only by reading salvaged books, but by taking apart salvaged furniture to see how it was made. Now, at street markets, she sells the chairs, tables, cabinets, chests, toys, tools, and decorative items that she makes, and she gets good prices for them. Her son Justin is only nine, but he’s already pleased her very much by picking the work up from her, learning it and enjoying it. May and the Noyer girls are also beginning to learn the craft, although May is more interested in weaving grasses, roots, bark, and other fibers into mats, baskets, and bags.
Four years ago, after Bankole delivered Gray’s first son, Gray paid Allie to build a fine rocking chair for “the doctor.” Gray and Bankole hadn’t gotten along very well at first—Gray’s fault, and he knew it. He pretended to be contemptuous of Bankole—“a pussy-whipped old man!”—when, in fact, Bankole’s age, education, and personal dignity intimidated him. Until Gray’s wife had become pregnant with their first son, the two men barely spoke. Then Bankole took care of Emery during her pregnancy and during Joseph’s difficult birth—he was breech. After that, the handsome, oaken chair, given in stolid silence, had served as Gray’s peace offering. Now Bankole sits in it rocking, looking into his daughter’s sleeping face, touching it as though he can’t quite believe it’s real, and yet, as though it’s more real, more important than anything else in his world.
He seems to have taken his cue from Adela Ortiz. He says Larkin looks just like his younger sister did when she was a baby. That’s the sister whose bones we found when we arrived here. Her bones, her husband’s, her children’s. After their deaths, Bankole must have felt cut off from the future, from any immortality of the flesh, the genes. He had no other relatives. Now he has a daughter. I’m not sure he even realizes how much of the time over the past couple of days that he’s been smiling.
SUNDAY, JULY 24, 2033
Today we Welcomed Larkin into the community—into Acorn and into Earthseed.
So far, I’ve been the one to Welcome each new child or adult adoptee. I don’t conduct every Sunday Gathering, but I have Welcomed every newcomer. By now, it’s expected—something I’m supposed to do. This time, though, I asked Travis to perform the ceremony. And, of course, we asked Harry and Zahra to stand with us. Bankole and I are already Change-sister and -brother to them and Change-aunt and -uncle to their children. Now it goes the other way as well. We each stand ready to parent one another’s children. The Balters are my oldest friends and I trust them, but I hope the pledges we’ve given one another will never have to be kept.
It makes us more truly a community, somehow, now that so many of us have had children here…now that I’ve had a child here.
Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole,
We, your people
Welcome you…
SATURDAY, JULY 30, 2033
“I don’t think you can truly understand how I feel,” Bankole said to me last night as he sat down to eat the dinner I had kept warm for him. He had been on evening watch, sitting with binoculars at a mountain overlook where he could see whether some new gang of thugs was approaching to destroy his family. He’s more serious than ever about maintaining our 24-hour watch, but for each of us, standing watch is still a tiresome duty. I didn’t expect him to come home in a good mood, but he was still on enough of a new-daddy high not to be too bad-tempered.
“You just wait until Larkin starts waking him up more,” Zahra has warned me.
No doubt she’s right.
Bankole sat down at the table and sighed. “Before I met you,” h
That again. The people of Halstead had found themselves another doctor, but they didn’t like him. There was some doubt as to whether he really was a doctor. Bankole thought he might have some medical training, but that he was something less than or other than an M.D. He was only about 35, and these days, almost all young physicians—those under 50—were working in privatized or foreign-owned cities, towns, or huge farms. There, they could earn enough to give their families good lives and the company police would keep them safe from marauding thugs or desperate poor people. There had to be something wrong with a 35-year-old doctor who was still looking for a place to hang out his shingle.
Bankole said he thought a sick or injured person would be safer in the hands of Natividad or Michael than with Halstead’s new “Doctor” Babcock. He had warned several of his Halstead friends, and they had let him know that he was still welcome. They didn’t doubt his medical knowledge, and they preferred to have him. And he still wanted to save me by taking me to live among them.
“Acorn is a community of people who have saved one another in all kinds of ways,” I told him. “Acorn is home.”
He looked at me again, then set to work on his dinner. It was late, and I had already eaten. I had taken the baby and gone to eat with Zahra and Harry and their kids. But now, I sat with him, sipping hot mint tea with honey and enjoying the peace. The fire in our antique, salvaged woodstove had burned to almost nothing, but the stove’s cast-iron body was still warm and the July night wasn’t cold. We were using only three small oil lamps for light. No need to waste electricity. The lamplight was soft and flickering.
I stared into the shadows, enjoying the quiet, family togetherness, content and drowsy until Bankole spoke again.
“You know,” he said, “it took me a long time to trust you. You seemed so young—so vulnerable and idealistic, yet so dangerous and knowing.”
“What?” I demanded.
“Truth. You were quite a contradiction. You still are. I thought you would grow out of it. Instead, I’ve gotten used to it—almost.”
We do know one another after six years. I can often hear not only what he says but what he does not say. “I love you too,” I said, not quite smiling.
Nor did he allow himself to smile. He leaned forward, forearms on the table, and spoke with quiet intensity. “Talk to me, girl. Tell me exactly what you want to do in this place, with these people. Leave out the theology this time, and give me some step-by-step plans, some material results that you hope to achieve.”
“But you know,” I protested.
“I’m not sure that I do. I’m not sure that you do. Tell me.”
I understood then that he was looking for reasons to reevaluate his position. He still believed that we should leave Acorn, that we could be safe only in a bigger, richer, longer-established town. “Convince me,” he was saying.
I drew a long, ragged breath. “I want what’s happening,” I said. “I want us to go on growing, becoming stronger, richer, educating ourselves and our children, improving our community. Those are the things that we should be doing for now and for the near future. As we grow, I want to send our best, brightest kids to college and to professional schools so that they can help us and in the long run, help the country, the world, to prepare for the Destiny. At the same time, I want to send out believers who have missionary inclinations—send them in family groups to begin Earthseed Gathering Houses in non-Earthseed communities.
“They’ll teach, they’ll give medical attention, they’ll shape new Earthseed communities within existing cities and towns and they’ll focus the people around them on the Destiny. And I want to establish new Earthseed communities like Acorn—made up of people collected from the highways, from squatter settlements, from anywhere at all. Some people will want to stay where they are and join Earthseed the way they might join the Methodists or the Buddhists. Others will need to join a closer community, a geographical, emotional, intellectual unit.” I stopped and drew a long breath. Somehow I had never dared to say this much about my plans to any one person. I had been working them out in my own mind, writing about them, talking about them in bits and pieces to the group at Gathering, but never assembling it all for them. Maybe that was a mistake. Problem was, we’d been focused for so long on immediate survival, on solving obvious problems, on business, on preparing for the near future. And I’ve worried about scaring people off with too many big plans. Worst of all, I’ve worried about seeming ridiculous. It is ridiculous for someone like me to aspire to do the things I aspire to do. I know it. I’ve always known it. It’s never stopped me. “We are a beginning,” I said, thinking as I spoke. “It’s as though Earthseed is only an infant like Larkin—‘one small seed.’ Right now we would be so very easy to stamp out. That terrifies me. That’s why we have to grow and spread—to make ourselves less vulnerable.”
“But if you went to Halstead,” he began, “if you moved there—”
“If I went to Halstead, the seed here might die.” I paused, frowned, then said, “Babe, I’m no more likely to leave Acorn now than I am to leave Larkin.”
That seemed to rock him back a little. I don’t know why, after all that I’ve already said. He shook his head, sat staring at me for several seconds. “What about President Jarret?”
“What about him?”
“He’s dangerous. His being President is going to make a difference, even to us. I’m sure of it.”
“We’re nothing to him, so small, so insignificant—”
“Remember Dovetree.”
Dovetree was the last thing I wanted to remember. So was that state senate candidate that Marc mentioned. Both were real, and perhaps both meant danger to us, but what could I do about either of them? And how could I let the fear of them stop me? “This country is over 250 years old,” I said. “It’s had bad leaders before. It survived them. We’ll have to watch what Jarret does, change when necessary, adapt, maybe keep a little quieter than we have for a while. But we’ve always had to adapt to changes. We always will. God is Change. If we have to start saying ‘Long live Jarret’ and ‘God bless Christian America,’ then we’ll say it. He’s temporary.”
“So are we. And living with him won’t be that easy.”
I leaned toward him. “We’ll do what we have to do, no matter who’s warming the chair in the Oval Office. What choice do we have? Even if we run and hide in Halstead, we’ll still be subject to Jarret. And we’ll have no good friends around us to help us, lie for us if necessary, take risks for us. In Halstead, we’ll be strangers. We’ll be easy to pick out and blame and hurt. If vigilante crazies or even cops of some kind come asking questions about us or accusing us of witchcraft or something, Halstead might decide we’re more trouble than we’re worth. If things get bad, I want my friends around me. Here at Acorn, if we can’t save everything, we can at least work together to save one another. We’ve done that before.”
“This is like nothing we’ve faced before.” Bankole’s shoulders slumped, and he sighed. “I don’t know that this country has ever had a leader as bad as Jarret or as bad as Jarret might turn out to be: Keep that in mind. Now that you’re a mother, you’ve got to let go of some of the Earthseed thinking and think of your child. I want you to look at Larkin and think of her every time you want to make some grand decision.”
“I can’t help doing that,” I said. “This isn’t about grand decisions. It’s about her and her future.” I drank the last of my tea. “You know,” I said, “for a long time, it terrified me—honestly terrified me—to think that the Destiny itself was so big, so complex, so far from the life I was living or anything that I could ever bring about alone, so far from anything that even seemed possible. I remember my father saying that he thought even the pitiful little space program that we’ve
“He was right,” Bankole said.
“He was not right!” I whispered, my feelings flaring. After a moment, I said, “We need the stars, Bankole. We need purpose! We need the image the Destiny gives us of ourselves as a growing, purposeful species. We need to become the adult species that the Destiny can help us become! If we’re to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars. That’s why the Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars. I know you don’t want to hear verses right now, but that one is…a major key to us, to human beings, I mean. When we have no difficult, long-term purpose to strive toward, we fight each other. We destroy ourselves. We have these chaotic, apocalyptic periods of murderous craziness.” I stopped for a moment, then let myself say what I had never said to anyone. He had a right to hear it. “Early on, when I told people about the Destiny, and most of them laughed, I was afraid. I worried that I couldn’t do this, couldn’t reach people and help them see truth. Later, when the people of Acorn began to accept all the Earthseed teachings except the Destiny, I worried more. People seem to be willing to believe all kinds of stupid things—magic, the supernatural, witchcraft… But I couldn’t get them to believe in something real, something that they could make real with their own hands. Now…now most of the people here accept the Destiny. They believe me and follow me, and…damned if I don’t worry even more.”
“You never said so.” Bankole reached out and took my hands between his.
“What could I say? That I believe in Earthseed, yet I doubt my own abilities? That I’m afraid all the time?” I sighed. “That’s where faith comes in, I guess. It always comes sooner or later into every belief system. In this case, it’s have faith and work your ass off. Have faith and work the asses off a hell of a lot of people. I realize all that, but I’m still afraid.”