Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,149
she could accomplish her purpose by creating Earthseed communities where children would grow up learning the “truths” of Earthseed and go on to shape the human future according to those “truths.” This was her first attempt, as she put it, to plant seeds.
But she had the bad luck to begin her work at almost the same time that Andrew Steele Jarret began his, and he was, at least in the short term, much the stronger. Her only good luck was that he was so much stronger than she was that he never noticed her. His fanatical Crusaders, very much one of the fingers of his hand, utterly destroyed her first effort, but there’s no record at all of her ever having come to Jarret’s attention. She was just an ant that he happened to step on.
If she had been anything more than that, she would not have survived.
It is interesting, however, to see that after Acorn, she seemed to lose her direction until she found Belen Ross. She had written about wanting to find me, then begin her Earthseed work again—but begin it how? By establishing another Acorn? One even more hidden away and low-key?
Surely, a new Acorn would be just as vulnerable as the first one. One gesture of authority could erase it completely. What then? She needed a different idea, and, in fact, she had one. She knew that she had to teach teachers. Gathering families had not worked. She had to gather single people, or at least independent people—people who would learn from her, then scatter to preach and teach as, in effect, her disciples. Instead, she was still, reflexively, looking for me. I’m not sure there was much left of that search but reflex by the time Belen Ross came into the picture. I’ve wondered whether Allison Gilchrist—Allie—guessed this and brought her together with Len just to shake her up.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
TUESDAY, JUNE 19, 2035
There are three of us now, in a way. We’ve had an interesting time becoming three, and I’m not altogether comfortable with the way I brought it about. It isn’t exactly what I expected to do, but I’ve found it interesting. We’re on the road again, just north of a shiny, new company town called Hobartville. We bought supplies outside of the walls of Hobartville at the inevitable squatter settlement. Then we circled around the town and moved on. It’s good to be moving again. We’ve been three days in one place.
Until three days ago, we had been walking and making no lingering contacts on the road—which is an odd way for me to behave. Back in ʼ27 when I was walking from Los Angeles to Humboldt County, I gathered people, gathered a small community. I thought then that Earthseed would be born through small, cooperating communities. Once Acorn was established, I invited others to join us. This time, I haven’t felt that I could invite anyone other than Len to join me.
This time, after all, I was only going to Portland to look for my daughter and to get my brother to help me find her whether he wanted to or not.
And was that any more realistic a goal than Len’s intention to walk to Alaska to rejoin her family? It was, perhaps less suicidal, but…no more sensible.
It is my uneasiness, my fear that perhaps this is true, that has kept me from reaching out to people. I’ve fed a few ragged parent-child groups because it’s hard for me to see hungry children and do nothing at all. Yet I couldn’t do much. What’s a meal, after all? With Acorn, I had done more. With Earthseed, I had hoped to do much more. So much more… I still have hopes. Even during the 17 months of Camp Christian, I never forgot Earthseed, although there were times when I thought I might not survive to teach it or use it to shape our future.
But all I’ve been able to do on this trip is to feed a mother and child here, a father and child there, then send them on their ways. They don’t always want to go.
“How do you know they won’t lie in wait and rob us later?” Len asked as we tramped along I-5 after leaving a father and his two small, ragged boys eating what I suspected was their first good meal in some time.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s unlikely, but it could happen.”