Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,146
are like that. But I must think about what she can do instead of dying—what she should be doing. I must think about what she can do for Earthseed, and what it can do for her.
TWENTY
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Are you Earthseed?
Do you believe?
Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.
Belief
Initiates and guides action—
Or it does nothing.
WHEN I WAS 19, I met my Uncle Marc.
He was, by then, the Reverend Marcos Duran, a slight, still-beautiful middle-aged man who had become in English and in Spanish the best-known minister of the Church of Christian America. There was even some talk of his running for president, although he seemed uncomfortable about this. By then, though, the Church was just one more Protestant denomination. Andrew Steele Jarret had been dead for years, and the Church had gone from being an institution that everyone knew about and either loved or feared to being a smaller, somewhat defensive organization with much to answer for and few answers.
I had left home. Even though a girl who left home unmarried was seen by church members as almost a prostitute, I left as soon as I was 18.
“If you go,” Kayce said, “don’t come back. This is a decent, God-fearing house. You will not bring your trash and your sin back here!”
I had gotten a job caring for children in a household where the father had died. I had deliberately looked for a job that did not put me at the mercy of another man—a man who might be like Madison, or worse than Madison. The pay was room, board, and a tiny salary. I believed I had clothing and books enough to get me through a few years of working there, helping to raise another woman’s children while she worked in public relations for a big agribusiness company. I had met the kids—two girls and a boy—and I liked them. I believed that I could do this work and save my salary so that when I left, I would have enough money to begin a small business—a small café, perhaps—of my own. I had no grand hopes. I only wanted to get away from the Alexanders who had become more and more intolerable.
There was no love in the Alexander house. There was only the habit of being together, and, I suppose, the fear of even greater loneliness. And there was the Church—the habit of Church with its Bible class, men’s and women’s missionary groups, charity work, and choir practice. I had joined the young people’s choir to get away from Madison. As it happened, the choir provided relief in three ways. First, I discovered that I really liked to sing. I was so shy at first that I could hardly open my mouth, but once I got into the songs, lost myself in them, I loved it. Second, choir practice was one more excuse that I could use to get out of the house. Third, singing in the choir was a way to avoid having to sit next to Madison in church. It was a way to avoid his nasty, moist little hands. He used to feel me up in church. He really did that. We would sit down with Kayce between us, then he would get up to go to the men’s room and come back and sit next to me with his coat or his jacket on his lap to hide his touching me.
I believe Kayce realized what was happening. In the days before I left, we were enemies, she and I. Neither of us said anything about Madison. We just spent a lot of time hating one another. We didn’t talk unless we had to. Any talk that we couldn’t avoid might become a screaming fight. Then she’d call me a little whore, an ungrateful little bastard, a heathen witch… During my seventeenth year, I don’t think she and I ever had anything like a conversation.
Anyway, I joined the choir. And I discovered that I had a big alto voice that people enjoyed hearing. I even discovered that church wasn’t so bad if I didn’t have to sit between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Because of my singing, I tried to stay with the church after I moved out of Kayce and Madison’s house. I did try. But I couldn’t do it.
The rumors began at once: I was having sex with any number of men. I was pregnant. I had had an abortion. I