Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler

  “Give in,” my mother said to the adults of Acorn. “Do as you’re told and keep your own council. Don’t give them excuses to hurt you. Bide your time. Watch your captors. Listen to them. Collect information, pool it, and use it against them.” But we kids never heard any of this. We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.

  So much agony caused, so much evil done in God’s name.

  And yet, Christian America had begun by trying to help and to heal as well as to convert. Long before Jarret was elected President, his church had begun to rescue children. But in those early days, they only rescued kids who really needed help. Along the Gulf Coast where Jarret began his work, there were several Christian American children’s homes that were over a decade old by 2032. These homes collected street orphans, fed them, cared for them, and raised them to be “the bulwark of Christian America.” Only later did the fanatics take over and begin stealing the children of “heathens” and doing terrible harm.

  In preparation for this book, I spoke with several people who were raised in “CA” children’s homes or were adopted from CA homes into CA families. What they told me reminded me of my own life with the Alexanders. The homes and adoptive families were not meant to be cruel. Even in the homes, there were no collars except as punishment for the older children, and then only after warnings and lesser punishments had failed. The homes weren’t kept by sadists or perverts but by people who believed deeply in what they were doing—or at least by workers who wanted very much to please their employers and keep their jobs. The believers wanted “their” children to believe absolutely in God, in Jarret and in being good Christian American soldiers ready to do battle with every sort of anti-American heathenism. The mercenaries were easier to please. They wanted no children injured or killed while they were on duty. They wanted the required lessons learned, the required tests passed. They wanted peace.

  The Alexanders were like a combination of the believer and the mercenary. The Alexanders wanted me to believe, and if they did not love me, at least they took care of me. By the time I was old enough for school—Christian American school, of course—I had learned to be quiet and keep out of their way. When I succeeded at this, Kayce and Madison would reward me by letting me alone. Kayce took a break from telling me how much inferior I was to Kamaria. Madison took a break from trying to get his sweaty hands under my dress. I would take a book to a quiet corner of the house or yard and read. My earliest books were all either Bible stories or stories of Christian American heroes who, like Asha Vere, did great deeds for the faith. These influenced me. How could they not? I dreamed of doing great deeds myself. I dreamed of making Kayce so proud of me, making her love me the way she loved Kamaria. Both my biological parents were big, strong people. Thanks to them, I was always big for my age, and strong—one more strike against me, since Kamaria had been “small and dainty.” I dreamed of doing great, heroic things, but all I really tried to do was hide, vanish, make myself invisible.

  It should have been hard for an oversized kid like me to hide that way, but it wasn’t. If I did my chores and my homework, I was encouraged to vanish—or rather, I wasn’t encouraged to do anything else. In my neighborhood there were only a few kids, and they were all older than I was. To them I was either a nuisance or a pawn. They ignored me or they got me into trouble. Kayce and her friends didn’t appreciate any attempts I made to join in their adult conversation. Even when Kayce was alone, she wasn’t really interested in anything I had to say. She either told me more than I wanted to know about Kamaria, or she punished me for asking questions about anything else.

  Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ’s flock—or Jarret’s flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, my childhood was at least physically comfortable.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  SUNDAY, MARCH 4, 2035

  So much has happened…

  No, that’s wrong. Things haven’t just happened. I’ve caused them to happen. I must get back to normal, to knowing and admitting, at least to myself, when I cause things. Slaves are always told that they’ve caused something bad, done something sinful, made stupid mistakes. Good things were the acts of our “teachers” or of God. Bad things were our fault. Either we had done some specific wrong or God was so generally displeased with us that He was punishing the whole camp.

  If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it. You weight yourself down with blame for all the world’s pain. Or you decide that you’re an innocent victim. Your masters are at fault or God is or Satan is—or maybe things just happen on their own. Slaves protect themselves in all sorts of ways.

  But we’re not slaves anymore.

  I’ve done this: I sent my people away. We survived slavery together, but I didn’t believe that we could survive freedom together. I broke up the Earthseed community and sent its parts in all directions. I believe it was the right thing to do, but I can hardly bear to think about it. Once I’ve written this, perhaps I can begin to heal. I don’t know. All I know now is that I’ve torn a huge hole in myself. I’ve sent away those who mean most to me. They were all I had left, and I know I may not see them ever again.

  On Tuesday we escaped from Camp Christian, burning the camp and our keepers as we went. We left behind the bones of our dead and the dream of Acorn as the first Earthseed community. The Sullivans and the Gamas went their own ways. We would not have asked them to leave us, but I was glad they did. We had between us only the money in our caches and the money we had taken from our “teachers.” Since we are all now homeless, jobless, and on foot, that money won’t go far.

  I did ask both families who were going to stay with relatives or friends to get whatever information they could about the children, about the legality of the camp, about the existence of other camps. We all must find out what we can. I’ve asked them to leave word with the Holly family. The Hollys were neighbors, more distant than the Sullivans and the Gamas, but neighbors. They were good friends of the Sullivans, and there was no rumor of their having been enslaved. We must be careful not to get them into trouble, but if we are careful, and if we check with them now and then, we can all exchange information.

  Problem is, we didn’t dare take any of the phones from Camp Christian. The outsiders took some of them, but we were afraid we could somehow be traced if we used them. We can’t take the chance of being collared again. We might be enslaved for life or executed because we’ve killed good Christian American citizens. The fact that those citizens had stolen our homes, our land, our freedom, and our children just might be overlooked if the citizens were influential enough. We believe it could happen. Look what had already happened! We’re all afraid.

  Among ourselves—Earthseed only—we’ve agreed on a place that we can use as a message drop. It’s down near what’s left of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There any of us can leave information to be read, copied, and acted on by the rest of us. It’s a good place because we all know where it is and because it’s isolated. Getting to it isn’t easy. We don’t dare leave information or meet in groups in some more convenient place near the highway or near local roads, and we need a way of reaching one another without depending on the Hollys. We’ll check with them, but who knows how they’ll feel about us now. We’ll communicate among ourselves by leaving messages at our secret place, and perhaps by meeting there.

  But I’m going too fast. We had some time together after leaving Camp Christian.

  We walked deeper into the mountains, away from paved roads, south and west to the largest of our
caches where we knew there was the cold shelter of a small cave. At the cave, we rested and shared the food that we had brought from Camp Christian. Then we dug out the supplies that we had stored in heavy, heat-sealed plastic sacks and stored there. That gave us all packets of dried foods—fruit, nuts, beans, eggs, and milk—plus blankets and ammunition. Most important, I passed out the infant foot and hand prints that had been stored at this particular cache to the parents present. I gave the Mora girls their younger brothers’ prints and they sat staring at them, each holding one. Both their parents were dead. They have only each other and their little brothers, if they can find them.

  “They should be with us!” Doe muttered. “No one has the right to take them from us.”

  Adela Ortiz folded her son’s prints and put them inside her shirt. Then she folded her arms in front of her as though cradling a baby. Larkin’s prints and those of Travis and Natividad’s kids were at a different location, but I found the prints of Harry’s kids, Tabia and Russell, and I gave them to Harry. He just sat looking at them, frowning at them and shaking his head. It was as though he were trying to read an explanation in them for all that had happened to him. Or maybe he was seeing the faces of his children, and Zahra’s face, long gone.

  We sat warming ourselves around the fire we had finally dared to start. We had collected wood outside during the last hour of daylight, but we waited until it was dark to try to use it. The wood was wet and wouldn’t burn at first. When we did get a small fire going, it seemed to make more smoke than heat. We hoped no one would see the smoke sliding up and out of the cave, or that if people did see it, they would think it was from one of the many squatter camps in the mountains. In winter, these mountains are cold, wet, uncomfortable places, difficult places in which to live without modern conveniences, but they’re also places where sensible people mind their own business.

  I sat with Harry and he went on staring at the prints and shaking his head. Then he began to rock back and forth. His expression in the firelight seemed to crack, to break down, somehow, unable to hold itself together.

  I pulled him to me and held him while he cursed and cried in a harsh, strained, whisper. I realized at some point that I was crying too. I think that within ourselves, we both howled, but somehow, we never got much above a whisper, a rasp. I could feel the howling straining to get out of my throat, the screams that came out as small, ragged cries, his and mine. I don’t know how long we sat together, holding one another, going mad inside ourselves, wailing and moaning for the dead and the lost, unable to contain for one more minute 17 months of humiliation and pain.

  We wept ourselves to sleep like tired children. The next day Natividad told me she and Travis had done much the same thing. The others, alone or in groups, had found their own comfort in cathartic weeping, deep sleep, or frantic, furtive love-making at the back of the cave. We were together at last, comforting one another, and yet I think each of us was alone, straining toward the others, some part of ourselves still trapped back in the uncertainty and fear, the pain and desolation of Camp Christian. We strained toward some kind of release, some human contact, some way into the normal, human grieving that had been denied us for so long. It amazes me that we were able to behave as sanely as we did.

  The next morning Lucio Figueroa and Adela Ortiz awoke tangled together at the back of the cave. They stared at one another first in horror and confusion, then in deep embarrassment, then in resignation. He put his arm around her, pulled one of the blankets we had salvaged around her, and she leaned against him.

  Jorge Cho and Diamond Scott awoke in a similar tangle, although they seemed both unsurprised and unembarrassed.

  Michael and Noriko awoke together and lay still against one another for a long time, saying nothing, doing nothing. It seemed enough for each of them that at last they could wake up in each other’s arms.

  The Mora girls awoke together, their faces still marked with the tears they had shed the night before.

  Somehow Aubrey Dovetree and Nina Noyer had found one another during the night, although they had never paid much attention to one another before. Once they were awake, they moved apart in obvious discomfort.

  Only Allie awoke alone, huddled in fetal position in her blanket. I had forgotten her. And hadn’t she lost even more than the rest of us?

  I put her between Harry and me, and we started a breakfast fire with the wood we had left over from the night. We put together a breakfast of odds and ends, and Harry and I made her eat. I borrowed a comb from Diamond Scott, who had, in her neatness, managed to find one before we left Camp Christian. With it I combed Allie’s hair, then my own. Things like that had begun to matter again, somehow. We all began to try to put ourselves together as respectable human beings again. For so long we had been filthy slaves in filthy rags cultivating filthy habits in the hope of avoiding rape or lashing. I found myself longing for a deep tub of hot, clean water. Thanks to our “teachers,” filth and degradation had become so ordinary that sometimes we forgot that we were in rags and that we stank. In our exhaustion, fear, and pain, we came to treasure those moments when we could just lie down and forget, when no one was hurting us, when we had something to eat. Such animal comforts were all we could afford. Remembering wasn’t safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.

  My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can’t begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren’t.

  “Today or tomorrow, we must separate,” I said. “We must leave here in small groups.” Breakfast was over, and we had all made ourselves a little more presentable. I could see that the others had begun to look at one another, begun to wonder what to do next. I knew what we had to do. I had known almost from the time we were collared that even if we managed to free ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to stay together.

  “Earthseed continues,” I said into the silence, “but Acorn is dead. There are too many of us. We would be too easy to spot, too easy to recapture or kill.”

  “What can we do?” Aubrey Dovetree demanded.

  And Harry Balter said in a dead voice, “We’ve got to split up. We’ve got to go our separate ways and find our kids.”

  “No,” Nina Noyer whispered, and then louder, “No! Everybody’s gone, and now you want me to go away by myself again? No!” Now it was a shout.

  “Yes,” I said to her, only to her, my voice as soft as I could make it. “Nina, you come with me. My family is gone too. Come with me. We’ll look for your sisters and my daughter and Allie’s son.”

  “I want us all to stay together,” she whispered, and she began to cry.

  “If we stay together, we’ll be collared or dead in no time,” Harry said. He looked at me. “I’ll go with you too. You’ll need help. And… I want my kids back. I’m scared to death of what might be happening to them. That’s all I can think about now. That’s all I care about.”

  And Allie put her hand on his shoulder, trying to give comfort.

  “No one should leave alone,” I said. It’s too dangerous to be alone. But don’t gather into groups of more than five or six.”

  “What about us?” Doe Mora said, holding her sister’s hand. It was hard at that moment to remember that the two were not blood relatives. Two lonely, frightened ex-slaves met and loved one another and married, and their daughters Doe and Tori became sisters. And they’re sisters now, orphaned and alone. I envy their closeness, and I fear for them. They’re still kids, and they were abused almost past bearing at Camp Christian. They look starved and haunted. In a way that I can’t quite describe, they look old. Our “teachers” realized that they were sharers back during Day’s rebellion, and abused them all the more for it, but the girls never gave any of the rest of us away. Yet in spite of
their courage, it would be so easy for them to wind up with new collars around their necks. Or they could wind up deciding to prostitute themselves—just to eat.

  “You come with us,” Natividad said. “We intend to find our children. If we can, we’ll find your brothers as well.”

  Doe bit her lips. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Tori isn’t, but I am.”

  “It’s a wonder we all aren’t,” I said. “We were slaves. Now we’re free.” I looked at her. She’s a tall, slender, delicate-looking girl, large-eyed like her namesake. “What do you want to do, Doe?”

  Doe swallowed. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll take care of her,” Travis said. “Whatever she decides to do, we’ll help her. Her father was a good man. He was a friend of mine. We’ll take care of her.”

  I nodded, relieved. Travis and Natividad are two of the most competent, dependable people I know. They’ll survive, and if the girls are with them, the girls will survive too.

  Others began forming themselves into groups. Adela Ortiz, who first thought that she would join Travis, Natividad, and the Moras, decided in the end to stay with Lucio Figueroa and his sister. I’m not sure how she and Lucio wound up in each other’s arms the night before, but I think now that Adela may be looking for a permanent relationship with Lucio. He’s much older than she is, and I think she hopes he’ll want her and want to take care of her. But Adela is pregnant too. She’s not showing yet, but according to what she’s told me, she believes she’s at least two months pregnant.

  Also, Lucio is still carrying Teresa Lin around with him. Her death and the way she died has made him very, very quiet—kind, but distant. He wasn’t like that back in Acorn. His own wife and children were killed before he met us. He had invested all his time and energy in helping his sister with her children. He had only begun to reach out again when Teresa joined us. Now…now perhaps he’s decided that it hurts too much to begin to care for someone, then lose her.