Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
For people like my mother, Jarret’s fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret’s first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability, the fanatics set up the camps. Meanwhile, Jarret himself was busy with the ridiculous, obscene Al-Can war. If Jarret’s thugs weren’t locking poor people into collars, Jarret himself was seducing them into the military and feeding them into what turned out to be a useless, stupid exercise in destruction. The already-weakened country all but collapsed. Too many Americans, whether or not they belonged to CA, had family and friends in both Canada and Alaska. People deserted or left the country to avoid the draft—there was one, at last—and the saying was, during the war, that healthy young men were America’s biggest export.
There was much slaughter on both sides of the Canadian border and there were air and naval attacks on the coastal cities of Alaska. The war was like an exaggeration of the attempted breakout at Camp Christian. Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitterness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide.
Then the war just petered out. At first, there was much fighting, much destruction, much screaming and flag-waving. Then, gradually, over 2034, a terrible, bitter weariness seemed to creep over people. Poor families saw their sons drafted and killed, as they said, “for nothing!” It was harder than ever to buy decent food. Much of our grain over the past few years of climate change and chaos had been imported from Canada, after all. In the end, in late 2034, peace talks began. After that, except for a lot of hard feelings and occasional nasty incidents, the war was over. The border between Canada and America stayed where it had been, and Alaska remained an independent country. It was the first state to officially, completely, successfully secede from the union. People were saying that Jarret’s home state of Texas would be next.
In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, almost the Second Coming in some people’s minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn’t matter. I don’t mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did. My adopted parents never did, even though he cost them a beautiful, intelligent, loving daughter. I grew up hearing about that daughter endlessly. Her name was Kamaria, and she was perfect. I know this because my mother told me about her at least once during every day of my childhood. I could never look as good as Kamaria did or straighten my room as well or do as well with my studies or even clean a toilet as well—although I find it difficult to believe the perfect little bitch ever cleaned a toilet—or used one.
I didn’t know I was still bitter enough to write a thing like that. I shouldn’t be. It’s foolish to hate someone you’ve never met, someone who’s never harmed you. I believe now that I shifted my resentment safely onto Kamaria, who wasn’t there, so that at least until my adolescence, I could love Kayce Alexander. She was, after all, the only mother I knew.
Kamaria Alexander died in a missile attack on Seattle when she was 11 years old, and my adopted parents never stopped blaming—and hating—the Canadians in their grief for her. But they never blamed Jarret—“that good man,” “that fine man,” “that man of God.” Kayce talked that way. So did her friends when she finally moved back to them in Seattle where her neighborhood and her church were scarred, but still standing. Madison Alexander barely spoke at all. He murmured agreement with whatever Kayce said, and he felt me up a lot, but apart from that, he was quiet. My strongest memory of him, when I was four or five, was of his picking me up, putting me in his lap, and feeling me. I didn’t know why I didn’t like this. I just learned early to stay out of his way as much as I could.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2035
I’ve been too cold and too miserable, and too sick to do much writing. We’ve all had flu. We’re made to work anyway. Four people died last week during a long, cold rain. One was pregnant. She gave birth alone in the mud. No one was allowed to help her. She and her baby both died. Two were worked until they dropped. When they dropped, the teachers called them lazy parasites and lashed them. During the night, they died—two men. They were all strangers, highway paupers—“vagrants” who had been forced to come here. They were sick and half-starved when they arrived. Thanks to the cold, wet weather, the lack of heat in our barracks, and the bad diet, we all catch any contagious disease brought to us from the highway or from the towns. Even our “teachers” are suffering with colds and flu. And when they suffer, they take their misery out on us.
All this, and one other thing has made us decide that the time has come to make our own break—or die trying.
We have information—some of us have learned things from our rapists, others just from keeping our eyes and ears open. Also, we have 23 knives—that is, Earthseed, the Sullivans and the Gamas have 23 knives. That’s more than one for each guard. Some we’ve stolen from the trash heap where our “teachers” teach us wastefulness and slovenliness. Other knives are just sharp bits of metal that we’ve found and wrapped with tape or cloth to protect our hands. They’re crude, but they’ll cut a human throat. As soon as we’ve shut our collars off, we’ll use the knives. If we’re quick and if we move together as we’ve planned, we should be able to surprise several of our guards before they even think to use their maggots against us.
We know some of us will die in this. Maybe we’ll all die. But the way things are going, we’ll die anyway. None of us know how long we’re to be kept collared. No one who’s come here has been released. Even the few people who try to suck up to the “teachers” when they don’t have to are still here, still collared. None of us have heard anything about what’s happened to our children. And most of us are sick. None of Earthseed has died since Day’s rebellion, but we’re sick. And Allie… Allie might die. Or she might be permanently brain damaged. She’s one of the reasons I’ve decided we’ve got to risk a breakout soon.
Allie and her lover Mary Sullivan were caught last Sunday.
No, I take that back. They weren’t caught. They were betrayed. They were betrayed by Beth and Jessica Faircloth. That’s the worst. They were betrayed by people who were part of us, part of Earthseed. They were betrayed by people whom Allie and the rest of us had helped to rescue from starvation and slavery back when they had nothing. We took them in, and when their family decided to join Earthseed, when they had done their probationary year, we Welcomed them.
I watched the betrayal. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t do anything. I’m worthless these days, just worthless.
Last Sunday, we had the usual six hours of preaching, this time on the evils of sexual sinfulness. First we heard from Reverend Locke, who runs this place. Then we heard from Reverend Chandler Benton, a minister from Eureka who sometimes drives out to inflict himself on us. Benton preached a vicious and weirdly salacious sermon on the evil, depraved wickedness of bestiality, incest, pedophilia, homosexuality, lesbianism, pornography, masturbation, prostitution, and adultery. It went on and on—stories from current news, Bible stories, long quotations of Old Testament laws and punishments including death by stoning, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the life and death of Jezebel, disease, hellfire, on and on.
But there was nothing at all said about rape. The good Reverend Benton himself has, during earlier visits, made use of both Adela Ortiz and Cristina Cho. He goes to the cabin—once the Balter house—that is reserved now for visiting VIPs and has the woman of his choice brought to him.
We endure these sermons. They give us a chance to come in out of the rain. We are allowed to sit down and not work. We aren’t cold because our “teachers” don’t want to be cold. They build a big fire in the school’s fireplace once a week. And so for a few hours on Sundays, we are warm, dry, and almost comfortable in our rows on the floor. We’re hungry, but we know we’ll soon
I didn’t realize it, but the two female Faircloths, it seems, had begun to listen. Worse, they had begun to believe, to be frightened, to be converted. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they had other motives.
We’re always being called upon to testify, to give public thanks for all the kindness and generosity that God has shown us in spite of our unworthiness. And we must confess that unworthiness and make a public repentance and a public appeal for God’s mercy. We have each been required to do this many times. The more you yield, the more you are required to yield. Our teachers know we don’t mean it, know we act out of fear of pain. We simply do as we are told. They hate us for this. They look at us with unmistakable hatred, disgust, and contempt, and they insist that it’s love that they feel. Their God requires them to love us, after all. And it’s only love that makes them try so hard to help us see the light. They say we’re blinded by our own sinful stubbornness to the love and the help that they offer. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” they tell us, and we are, at best, still children as far as morality is concerned.
Right.
Anyway, Reverend Benton issued a call to testify. Three people had been ordered to testify. I was one of them. How I was selected, I don’t know, but a scrawny “teacher” with bad teeth had put his hand on my shoulder before services began and ordered me to give testimony. The other two who had been ordered to testify were Ed Gama and a red-haired, one-armed woman, fresh from the highway. Her name was Teal, she had been with us for less than a week, and she was afraid of her shadow. Ed and I have done it before, so we went first to show the stranger what to do. This was the usual practice. I gave thanks for my many blessings, then I confessed to sinful thoughts, to anger, and to resistance to my teachers who were only trying to help me. I apologized to God and to all present again and again for my wickedness. I begged for forgiveness, begged for the strength and the wisdom to do God’s will.
That’s how you do it. That’s how I’ve done it for over a year.
When I finished, Ed did pretty much the same thing. He had his own scripted list of sins and apologies. Teal was bright enough to do as we had done, but she was very frightened. Her voice trembled, and she all but whispered.
In his loud, nasty voice, Reverend Benton said, “Speak up, sister. Let the church hear your testimony.”
Tears spilled from the woman’s eyes, but she managed to raise her voice and repent and ask forgiveness for “all the things I have done wrong.” She must have forgotten the kind of thing that the sermons had “suggested” she confess to. Then she collapsed to her knees and began to sob, out of control, terrified, begging, “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything.”
If I had tried to go to her, help her up, and take her back to her space on the floor, I would have been lashed. Human decency is a sin here. Ed and I looked at each other, but neither of us dared to touch her. I suspect that some “teacher” would have helped her back to her place. Lashing her back to her place wouldn’t be quite the thing to do under the circumstances.
But there was an interruption. Beth and Jessica Faircloth had gotten up and were picking their way through the congregation, trying not to step on anyone, heading for the altar. When they reached the altar, they fell to their knees. People did this sometimes, gave voluntary testimony in hope of currying favor with the “teachers.” It was harmless—or had always been harmless before. And it might buy you a piece of bread or an apple later. In fact, the Faircloths had done it several times. Some of us sneered at them for it, but it had never seemed important to me. Stupid me.
“We’ve sinned too,” Beth cried. “We didn’t mean to. We didn’t know what to do. We knew it was wrong, but we were afraid.”
They were not lashed. I saw Reverend Benton hold up his hand, no doubt telling the “teachers” to let them alone. “Speak, sisters,” he said. “Confess your sin. God loves you. God will forgive.”
They didn’t follow the form this time. Instead they spoke the way they do when they’re afraid, when they know they’ve done something other people might not like, when they’re standing together against others. They’re not twins. In fact, they’re 18- and 19-year-old sisters, but under stress, they act much younger, and they act like twins, finishing one another’s sentences, speaking in unison, or repeating one another’s words. Their testimony was like that.
“We saw them doing it,” Beth said.
“They’ve been doing it for a long time now,” Jessica added. “We saw them.”
“At night,” Beth continued. “We knew it was wrong.”
“It’s dirty and filthy and perverted!” Jessica said.
“You can hear them kissing and making noises,” Beth said, making a face, to show her disgust. “Perverted!”
“I never knew Allie was like that, but even before you came to teach us, she lived with another woman,” Jessica said. “I thought she was okay because she had a little boy, but now I know she wasn’t.”
“She must have been doing it with women all the time,” Beth echoed.
“Now she does it with Mary Sullivan.” Jessica had begun to cry. “It’s wrong, but we were afraid to tell before.”
“She’s strong like a man, and she’s mean,” Beth said. “We’re afraid of her.”
And I thought, Oh no, damnit, no! Our “teachers” have mistreated us every day, humiliated us and harangued us. But the misery has gone on for so long, and the sermons have gone on for so long, and we’ve stood together against it all…
But I suppose something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. I only wish the traitors had been strangers from outside. That’s happened before in lesser ways, but after a night or two, we’ve always managed to teach outsiders to keep their mouths shut about anything they’ve seen among their fellow inmates. No member of Earthseed has ever betrayed us in any way—until now.
As Allie was dragged to the front of the room to be punished, she shouted at Beth and Jessica, “They’ll still rape you, and they’ll still lash you and when they’re done with you they’ll still kill you!”
And I screamed at them, “She gave you food when you were hungry!”
So the “teachers” lashed me too.
But what they did to Allie and to Mary Sullivan, that went on and on. Mary Sullivan’s father Arthur begged them to stop, managed to hit one of them and knock him down. So, of course he was lashed. But he bought no mercy for his daughter. Mary was having terrible convulsions, and they went on lashing her. They lashed both women until neither could scream anymore. They made us watch. I didn’t watch. To survive, I kept my head down, my eyes half shut. I’ve been lashed for this behavior from time to time, but not today. Today, all attention was on the two “sinners.”
They lashed Allie and Mary until Mary died.
They lashed them until Allie was lost somewhere within herself. She hasn’t spoken a full sentence since the lashing.
Because I spoke for Allie, I was made to dig Mary’s grave. Better me than Mary’s father. He isn’t in his right mind either. He was forced to watch his child tortured to death. He just wanders around, staring. Our teachers lash him, and he screams from the pain, but when they finish, he’s no different. They seem to think they can torture him into forgetting his terrible grief and his hate.
I can’t stand this. I can’t. I don’t care if they kill me. I will break free of this or I will be dead.
The Faircloth girls have been given a room in what used to be the King house. They have a whole room to themselves now instead of a room shared with thirty other women. They still wear collars, but they’re on permanent cooking duty now. They don’t have to chop wood or do fieldwork or construction work or clear brush or d
We’ve learned that the master unit, the unit that powers or controls all the collars in Camp Christian, is in my old cabin. For months it was kept in one of the maggots—or we heard that’s where it was kept. We’ve had to put together hints, rumors, and overheard comments, any of which might be misinterpreted, or untrue. But at long last, I believe we have it right.
Reverend Locke’s two assistants live in my cabin, and from time to time, some of us are taken there for the night. The next time that happens, we’ll make our break.
The women who have been taken there most often are Noriko, Cristina Cho, and the Mora girls.
“They say they like small, ladylike women,” Noriko says with terrible bitterness. “Those flabby, ugly men. They like us because it’s easy for them to hurt us. They like to use their hands, leave bruises, make you beg them to stop.”