Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,16
little girls. The girls have been lucky, at least, in having us find them. They’ll be safe with us.
And now, at last, we have something we’ve needed for years. We have a truck.
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2032
With all the work that my Bankole has had to do to help the wounded woman and boy and the wounded Dovetrees, he didn’t get around to shouting at me over the truck incident until last night. And, of course, he didn’t shout. He tends not to. It’s a pity. His disapproval might be easier to take if it were quick and loud. It was, as usual, quiet and intense.
“It’s a shame that so many of your unnecessary risks pay off so well,” he said to me as we lay in bed last night. “You’re a fool, you know. It’s as though you think you can’t be killed. My god, girl, you’re old enough to know better.”
“I wanted the housetruck,” I said. “And I realized we might be able to get it. And we might be able to help a child. We kept hearing one of them crying.”
He turned his head to look at me for several seconds, his mouth set. “You’ve seen children led down the road in convict collars or chains,” he said. “You’ve seen them displayed as enticements before houses of prostitution. Are you going to tell me you did this because you heard one crying?”
“I do what I can,” I said. “When I can do more, I will. You know that.”
He just looked at me. If I didn’t love him, I might not like him much at times like these. I took his hand and kissed it, and held it. “I do what I can.” I repeated, “And I wanted the housetruck.”
“Enough to risk not only yourself, but your whole team—four people?”
“The risk in running away empty-handed was at least as great as the risk of going for the truck.”
He made a sound of disgust and withdrew his hand. “So now you’ve got a battered old housetruck,” he muttered.
I nodded. “So now we have it. We need it. You know we do. It’s a beginning.”
“It’s not worth anyone’s life!”
“It didn’t cost any of our lives!” I sat up and looked down at him. I needed to have him see me as well as he could in the dim light from the window. I wanted to have him know that I meant what I was saying. “If I had to die,” I said, “if I had to get shot by strangers, shouldn’t it be while I was trying to help the community, and not just while I was trying to run away?”
He raised his hands and gave me an ironic round of applause. “I knew you would say something like that. Well, I never thought you were stupid. Obsessed, perhaps, but not stupid. That being the case, I have a proposition for you.”
He sat up and I moved close to him and pulled the blankets up around us. I leaned against him and sat, waiting. Whatever he had to say, I felt that I’d gotten my point across. If he wanted to call my thinking obsessive, I didn’t care.
“I’ve been looking at some of the towns in the area,” he said. “Saylorville, Halstead, Coy—towns that are a few miles off the highway. None of them need a doctor now, but one probably will someday soon. How would you feel about living in one of those towns?”
I sat still, surprised. He meant it. Saylorville? Halstead? Coy? These are communities so small that I’m not sure they qualify as towns. Each has no more than a few families and businesses huddled together between the highway—U.S. 101—and the sea. We trade at their street markets, but they’re closed societies, these towns. They tolerate “foreign” visitors, but they don’t like us. They’ve been burned too many times by strangers passing through—people who turned out to be thieves or worse. They trust only their own and long-established neighboring farmers. Did Bankole think that they would welcome us? Except for a larger town called Prata, the nearest towns are almost all White. Prata is White and Latino with a sprinkling of Asians. We’re you name it: Black, White, Latino, Asian, and any mixture at all—the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a city. The kids we’ve adopted and the ones who have been born to us think of all the mixing and matching as normal. Imagine that.
Bankole and I, both Black, have managed to mix things