Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,55

have left Acorn and gone to live in Halstead as my father asked? Of course she should have! And if she had, would she, my father, and I have managed to have normal, comfortable lives through Jarret’s upheavals? I believe we would have. My father called her immature, unrealistic, selfish, and shortsighted. Shortsighted, of all things! If there are sins in Earthseed, shortsightedness, lack of forethought, is the worst of them. And yet shortsighted is exactly what she was. She sacrificed us for an idea. And if she didn’t know what she was doing, she should have known—she who paid so much attention to the news, to the times and the trends. As an adolescent, she saw her father’s error when he could not see it—his dependence on walls and guns, religious faith, and a hope that the good old days would return. Yet what more than that did she have? If her good days were to be in the future on some extra-solar world, that only made them more pathetically unreal.

FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

SUNDAY, JANUARY 16, 2033

People keep pet dogs in Halstead, as they do in most local cities and towns.

I know that, but I grew up down south, where poor people and dogs didn’t run together. They ate one another. Dogs ran in packs, and they were one of the things we were glad our walls kept out. Some of the very rich used vicious dogs to guard their property. They were the only ones who could afford to buy meat, then feed it to a dog. The rest of us, if we got meat, were glad to eat it ourselves.

Even now, it startles me every time I see people and dogs together and peaceful. But the people of local towns and family farms, while not rich, have food enough to share with dogs—even dogs who do no work and only lie around all day with their mouths open and their long, sharp teeth showing. Children play with them. More than once in the past few days, I’ve had to quell my impulse to snatch a child away from those teeth and beat off the dog.

It’s interesting to see that dogs don’t like me any more than I like them. We keep out of one another’s way. Bankole, on the other hand, likes dogs. He scratches their ears and talks to them. They like him. When he was a boy down south, he kept two or three big ones as pets. Hard to believe that people did that in San Diego or Los Angeles, even thirty or forty years ago.

To please Bankole, I went with him into cold, windy Halstead for a couple of days. I told him it would do no good, but he wanted me to go anyway. I’ve pleased him so little recently that I agreed to go. He’s in love with the place. It’s just what he wants: long established, yet modern, familiar, and isolated. There are comfortable big houses—three and four bedrooms. And, thanks to the wind turbines in the hills, along the ridges, there’s plenty of electricity most of the time. And there’s modern plumbing. We have a little of that now, but it’s been a long struggle. Halstead, except for its crumbling coastline, is about as well protected as any town could be. Its population is about 250. That includes the nearest farm families.

Bankole and I have been promised the home of a family who is emigrating—going to homestead in Siberia. Two young-adult sons and the husband of the family have already gone to prepare a place for the women, the younger children, and the grandparents. For this family named Cannon, Bankole’s protected, promised land of Halstead is just one more piece of the worn-out, unlivable “old country” that they want to leave behind. They’re nice people, but they can’t wait to get out of the United States. They say it just doesn’t work anymore. The election of Jarret was, for them, the last straw.

And yet the Halstead trip was a good experience for me. I don’t get to travel as much as I did before I got pregnant—no salvaging and not as much trading. Bankole nags me to stay home and “behave myself,” and most of the time, I give in.

I had forgotten what living in a big modern house was like. Even the cold and the wind weren’t that bad. I kind of liked them. The house rattled and creaked, but it was warmed both by