Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,24

the coast and in the hills—the local people call these coastal hills “mountains”—was cooler when I was a boy. It was foggy and rainy—a soft, green climate, friendly to most growing things. I believe it was already changing nearly 30 years ago when I bought the land that became Acorn. In the not-too-distant future, I suppose it will be little different from the way coastal southern California was a few decades ago—hot, semiarid, more brown than green most of the time. Now we are in the middle of the change. We still get a few substantial fall and winter storms each year, and there are still morning fogs in the spring and early summer.

Nevertheless, young redwood trees—those only about a century old, not yet mature—are withering. A few miles to the north and south of us in the old national and state parks, the groves of ancient giants still stand. A few hundred acres of them here and there have been released by the government, sold to wealthy, usually foreign interests, and logged. And squatters have cut and burned a number of individual trees, as usual, to build shelters and feed cooking fires, but the majority of the protected ones, millennia old, resistant to disease, fire, and climate change, still stand. If people let them alone, they will go on, childless, anachronistic, but still alive, still reaching futilely skyward.

My father, perhaps because of his age, seems to have been a loving pessimist. He saw little good in our future. According to his writing, our greatness as a country, perhaps even the greatness of the human species, was in the past. His greatest desire seems to have been to protect my mother and later, to protect me—to somehow keep us safe.

My mother, on the other hand, was a somewhat reluctant optimist. Greatness for her, for Earthseed, for humanity always seemed to run just ahead of her. Only she saw it, but that was enough to entice her on, seducing her as she seduced others.

She worked hard at seducing people. She did it first by adopting vulnerable needy people, then by finding ways to make those people want to be part of Earthseed. No matter how ridiculous Earthseed must have seemed, with its starry Destiny, it offered immediate rewards. Here was real community. Here was at least a semblance of security. Here was the comfort of ritual and routine and the emotional satisfaction of belonging to a “team” that stood together to meet challenge when challenge came. And for families, here was a place to raise children, to teach them basic skills that they might not learn elsewhere and to keep them as safe as possible from the harsh, ugly lessons of the world outside.

When I was in high school, I read the 1741 Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Its first few words sum up the kinds of lessons so many children were forced to learn in the world outside Acorn. Edwards said, “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.” You’re worthless. God hates you. All you deserve is pain and death. What a believable theology that would have been for the children of the Pox. No wonder, some of them found comfort in my mother’s God. If it didn’t love them, at least it offered them some chance to live.

If my mother had created only Acorn, the refuge for the homeless and the orphaned… If she had created Acorn, but not Earthseed, then I think she would have been a wholly admirable person.

FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2032

Dan is much better. He’s still limping, but he’s healing fast. He sat through Gathering today for the first time. We held it indoors at the school because it’s been raining—a good steady cold rain—for two days.

Dan sat through a welcoming and a discussion that his family’s truck had helped to provoke. The welcoming was for Adela Ortiz’s baby, Javier Verdugo Ortiz. Javier was the child of a brutal highway gang rape, and Adela, who came to us pregnant only seven months ago, had not known whether she wanted us to welcome him, had not even known whether or not she wanted to keep him. Then he was born