Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,115

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 him—every day.

“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