Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
It does hurt. It’s terrible. I know that. But I know Adela, too. She needs to be needed. I remember she hated being pregnant the first time, hated the men who had gang-raped her. But she loved taking care of her baby. She was an attentive, loving mother, and she was happy. What’s in store for her now, I don’t know.
And yet in spite of my fears for my friends, my people, in spite of my longing to hold together a community that must divide, all this was easier than I had thought it would be—easier than I thought it could be. We’d all worked so well together for six years, and we’d endured so much as slaves. Now we were dividing ourselves, deciding how to go our separate ways. I don’t mean that it was easy—just that it wasn’t as hard as I expected. God is Change. I’ve taught that for six years. It’s true, and I suppose it’s paved the way for us now. Earthseed prepares you to live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want. But none of it is really easy.
We spent the rest of the day going around to the other caches and parceling out the supplies we’d left in them and gathering the other sets of children’s hand and foot prints. Then we had one more night together. Once we had gone to all the caches—one had been raided, but the rest were intact—we spent the night in another shallow cave. It was raining again, and cold. That was good because it would make tracking us pretty much impossible. On that last night, when we’d eaten, we dropped off quickly to sleep. We’d been tramping through the mountains all day, carrying packs that got heavier with each stop, and we were tired. But the next morning before we parted, we held a final Gathering. We sang Earthseed verses, to the tunes that Gray Mora and Travis had written. We Remembered our dead, including our dead Acorn. Each of us spoke of it, Remembering.
“You are Earthseed,” I said to them, at last. “You always will be. I love you. I love you all.” I stopped for a moment, struggling to hold on to what was left of my self-control.
Somehow, I went on. “Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret,” I said. “We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have survived. We have tools that other people don’t have, and that they need. The time will come again when we can share what we know.” I paused, swallowed. “Stay well,” I told them. “Take care of one another.”
We agreed to visit the newly designated Humboldt Redwoods information drop every month or two for a year—at least that long. We agreed that it was best that each group not know yet where the other groups were going—so that if one group was caught, it couldn’t be forced to betray the others. We agreed it was best not to live in the Eureka and Arcata area because that’s where most of our jailers lived, both the dead ones and the off-shift ones who were still alive. Each city was home to a big Christian American church and several affiliated organizations. We might have to go to these cities to look for our children, but once we’ve found them and taken them back, we should go elsewhere to live.
“And change your names,” I told them. “As soon as you can, buy yourselves new identities. Then relax. You’re honest people. If anyone says otherwise, attack their credibility. Accuse them of being secret cultists, witches, Satanists, thieves. Whatever you think will endanger your accusers the most, say it! Don’t just defend yourselves. Attack. And keep attacking until you scare the shit out of your accusers. Watch them. Pay attention to their body language. Their own reactions will tell you how best to damage them or scare them off.
“I don’t think you’ll have to do much of that kind of thing. The chances of any of us running into someone who knew us at Camp Christian are small. It’s just that we need to be mentally prepared for it if it happens. God is Change. Look after yourselves.”
And we went our separate ways. Travis said we would be better off not walking on the highway unless we could lose ourselves in a crowd. If there were no crowds, he said, we should walk through the hills. It would be harder, but safer. I agreed.
We hugged one another. It took a lot of hugging. It took the possibility of coming together again someday in another state or another country or a post-Jarret America. It took tears and fear and hope. It was terrible, that final leavetaking. Deciding to do it was easier than I thought. Doing it was much harder. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
Then I was alone with Allie, Harry, and Nina. We four slogged through the mud, heading north. We traveled through the familiar hills, to the outskirts of Eureka, and finally, to Georgetown. I was the one who suggested Georgetown once we had separated from the others.
“Why?” Harry demanded in a cold voice that didn’t sound much like Harry.
“Because it’s a good place to pick up information,” I said. “And because I know Dolores Ramos George. She may not be able to help us, but she won’t talk about our being there.”
Harry nodded.
“What’s Georgetown?” Nina asked.
“A squatter settlement,” I told her. “A big, nasty one. We went there when we were looking for you and your sister. You can get lost in there. People aren’t nosy, and the Georges are all right.”
“They’re all right.” Allie agreed. “They don’t turn people in.” These were her first voluntary sentences since her lashing. I looked at her, and she repeated, “They’re all right. We can look for Justin from Georgetown.”
SIXTEEN
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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
The Destiny of Earthseed
Is to take root among the stars.
It is to live and to thrive
On new earths.
It is to become new beings
And to consider new questions.
It is to leap into the heavens
Again and again.
It is to explore the vastness
Of heaven.
It is to explore the vastness
Of ourselves.
MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY is of a doll. I was about three years old, maybe four. I don’t know where the doll came from. I still don’t know. I had never seen one before. I had never been told that they were sinful or forbidden or even that they existed. I suspect now that this doll had been thrown over our fence and abandoned. I found it at the foot of the big pine tree that grew in our backyard.
The doll had been made in the image of an adolescent blond-haired blue-eyed girl. I remember that it was very straight and thin. It was dressed in a scrap of pink cloth. I remember feeling the knot in the back of it where three ends of the scrap were tied over one shoulder and around the waist. The knot was an oddly soft lump against the hard plastic of the doll’s body, and as soon as my fingers found it, I began to pick at it. Then I chewed on it. Then I examined the coarse, yellow hair. It looked like hair, but when I touched it, it didn’t feel right. And it bothered me that the legs didn’t move. They just stuck out stiff, the feet shaped in permanent tiptoes. I didn’t know how to play with a doll, but I knew how to look at it, feel it, taste it, file it away in my memory as one of the new, strange things to come into my world.
Then Kayce was there, snatching the doll from me. When I reached for it, wanting it back, she slapped me. She had come up behind me, seen what was in my hands, and in her sudden rage, lost control. She was a stern disciplinarian, but she rarely hit me. To give her her due, this was the only time I remember her just lashing out at me that way in anger. Maybe that’s why I remember it so well.
A man who grew up at the Pelican Bay Christian American Children’s Home told me about a Matron who went into a similar rage and killed a child.
Her victim was a seven-year-old boy who had Tourette’s syndrome. My informant said, “We kids didn’t know anything about Tourette’s syndrome, but we knew this particular kid couldn’t help yelling insults and making noises. He didn’t mean it. Some of us didn’t like him. Some of us thought he was crazy. But we all knew he didn’t mean the things he yelled out. We knew he couldn’t help it. But Matron said he had a devil in him, and she was always screaming at hi
“Then one day she hit him, knocked him into the edge of a kitchen cabinet. He hit the cabinet with his head, and he died.
“I don’t believe Matron was sentenced and collared, but she was fired. I just hope that she couldn’t find another professional job and had to indenture herself. One way or another, a person like her should wind up wearing a collar.”
There was a mindless rigidity about some Christian Americans—about the ones who did the most harm. They were so certain that they were right that, like medieval inquisitors, they would kill you, even torture you to death, to save your soul. Kayce wasn’t that bad, but she was more rigid and literal-minded than any human being with normal intelligence should have been, and I suffered for it.
Anyway, she snatched the doll from me and began slapping my face. All the while, she was shouting at me. I was so scared, and screaming so loud myself that I didn’t know what she was saying. Looking back now, I know it must have been something to do with idolatry, heathenism, or graven images. Christian America had created whole new categories of sin and expanded old ones. We were not permitted pictures of any kind. Movies and television were forbidden, but somehow Dreamasks were not—although only religious topics were permitted. Later, when I was in school, older kids would pass around secular masks that offered stories of adventure, war, and sex. I had my first pleasurable sexual experience, wearing a deliberately mislabeled Dreamask. The label said “The Story of Moses.” In fact, it was the story of a girl who had wild sex with her pastor, the deacons, and anyone else she could seduce. I was eleven years old when I discovered that Mask. If Kayce had ever known what it was, she might have done more than just slap my face. I kept the dirty Mask well hidden.
But at three, I hadn’t known enough to hide the doll. Only Kayce’s reaction told me what a terrible thing it was. She made me watch while she dug a hole in our backyard, put the doll in, covered it with cooking oil and old papers, and burned it. This, she said, was what would happen to me if I went on defying God and working for Satan. I would go down to hell, and what she had done to the doll, the devil would do to me. I remember she made me look at the shapeless blackened plastic lump that the doll had become. She made me hold it, and I cried because it was still hot, and it burned my hand.
“If you think that hurts,” she said, “you just wait until you get to hell.”
Years later, when I was a grown woman, the small daughter of a friend showed me her doll. I managed to stand up quickly and get out of the house. I didn’t scream or thrust the doll away. I just ran. I panicked at the sight of a little girl’s doll—real panic. I had to think and remember for a long time before I understood why.
The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. I think about a little girl’s doll and I try to banish the shadows of panic that I still can’t help feeling when I see one.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2035
We have found Justin Gilchrist—or rather, he has found us. In the weeks we’ve been at Georgetown, this is the best thing that’s happened to us.
We’ve been working for the Georges for room and board while we regained our health, tried to find out where our children might be, caught up on the news, and tried to find ways of fitting ourselves into the world as it is now. Because we’ve worked for our keep, we still have most of the money we arrived with. I’ve even managed to earn a little more by reading and writing for people. Most people in Georgetown are illiterate. I’ve begun to teach reading and writing to some of the few who want to learn. That’s also bringing in a little hard currency. And I sell pencil sketches of people’s children or other loved ones. This last, I must be careful about. It seems that some of the more rabid Christian America types have decided that a picture of your child might be seen as a graven image. That seems too extreme to catch on with most people even though Jarret is much loved in Georgetown. Many people here have sons, brothers, husbands, or other male relatives who have been injured or killed in the Al-Can War, but still, they love Jarret.
In fact, Jarret is both loved and despised here. The religious poor who are ignorant, frightened, and desperate to improve their situations are glad to see a “man of God” in the White House. And that’s what he is to them: a man of God.
Even some of the less religious ones support him. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again.
But those dedicated to other religions, and those who are not religious at all sneer at Jarret and call him a hypocrite. They sneer, they hate him, but they also fear him. They see him for the tyrant that he is. And the thugs see him as one of them. They envy him. He is the bigger, the more successful thief, murderer, and slaver.
The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, tend to be deeply religious and more than willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have. Their employers and their men abuse them. They bear more children than they can feed. They bear everyone’s contempt.
And yet, whether or not extreme Jarretites say it is a sin, they want pictures of their little ones. And I charge less than local photographers. I’m kinder than photographers too. I’ve never drawn a child’s dirt or its sores, or its rags. That isn’t necessary. I’ve made older plain boys handsome and plain girls pretty for their lovers or for their parents. I’ve even managed after many tries to draw the dead, guided by the loving memory of a relative or friend. I don’t know how accurate these drawings are, of course, but they please people.
I think I’ll be able to earn a living sketching, teaching, reading, and writing for people as long as I stick to squatter settlements and the poor sections of towns. And there is a bonus to my becoming acquainted with the people in these places. Many of the people in the squatter settlements work in the yards and homes of somewhat-better-off people in the towns and cities. The squatters do gardening, housecleaning, painting, carpentry, childcare, even some plumbing and electrical work. They serve people who have houses or apartments to live in but can’t afford to support even unsalaried live-in servants. Such people pay small sums of money or provide food or clothing to get their work done. Squatters who do this kind of work get a chance to see and hear any number of useful things. If, for instance, new children have appeared at an employer’s home or at a home nearby, regular day laborers know of it. And if the price is right, they’ll tell what they know. Information is as much for sale here as is anything else.
In spite of my efforts, though, we found Justin not by buying information, but because he escaped from his new family and came looking for us. He’s 11 years old now—old enough to decide for himself what’s true and what isn’t and too old to be told that the woman he’s called mother for eight of his 11 years was evil and worshiped the devil.
I had just finished a pen-and-ink sketch of a woman and her two youngest kids, sitting outside their wood-and-plastic shack. I was headed back up to my room at the hotel. The streets in Georgetown are all dirt tracks or trash-filled ditches—open sewers—where you might step in anything. The Georges were sensible enough to build their collection of businesses upslope from the worst of the mess, but I can only do my work by going down to where most of the people are. I haven’t bought much since I’ve been here, but I have invested in a pair of well-
I was thinking, as I walked, about the woman whom I had just drawn with her three-month-old and her 18-month-old. The mother isn’t 30 yet, but she looks fifty. She has nine kids, sparse, graying hair, and almost no teeth. I felt as though I had gone back in time. Farther back, I mean. We were nineteenth-century in Acorn. What is this, I wondered? Eighteenth? And yet, perversely, I found myself filled with envy.
Sometimes I look at these poor, sad women and I’m almost sick with envy. At least they have their children. If they have nothing else, they have their children. I look at the children and I draw them, and I can hardly stand it.
As I tramped up the hill toward my room at George’s, I saw a little boy squatting by the side of the path, his head in his hands. He was just another scrawny little kid in rags. I thought he might be having a nosebleed, and that made me want to hurry past him. My sharing makes me a coward sometimes. But it also makes me resist being a coward.
I stopped. “Are you all right, honey?” I asked.
He jumped at the sound of my voice, then stared up at me. He was not bleeding, but his lips were cut and swollen and he had an old slash in his cheek and a big black-and-blue swelling on the left side of his forehead. I froze the way I had learned to freeze when confronted with unexpected pain, and the kid mumbled something that I didn’t understand because his mouth was so swollen. Then he just launched himself at me.
I thought at first that it was some kind of attack. I thought he might have a knife or an old-style razor or even a skin patch of some poison or a drug. There’s nothing new about thieving or murderous children. In a big squatter settlement like Georgetown, there were quite a few of them, although they tended to go after the small, the weak, or the sick. And they tended to travel in packs. Then somehow, before the boy touched me, I knew him. I recognized his wounded, distorted face in spite of the pain he was giving me.