Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,57
continued, “no one around here has a teaching credential. The older people who do have college degrees do not want second or third careers teaching school. Just install some reading, writing, math, history, and science in these kids’ heads, and everyone will be happy. You should be able to do it in your sleep after what you’ve had to put up with in Acorn.”
“In my sleep,” I said. “That sounds like one definition of life in hell.”
He took his hand off my stomach.
“This place is wonderful,” I said. “And I love you for trying to provide it for the baby and me. But there’s nothing here but existence. I can’t give up Acorn and Earthseed to come here and install a dab of education into kids who don’t really need me.”
“Your child will need you.”
“I know.”
He said nothing more. He turned over and lay with his back to me. After a while I slept. I don’t know whether he did.
Later, back at home, we didn’t talk much. Bankole was angry and unforgiving. He has not yet said a firm “No” to the people of Halstead. That troubles me. I love him and I believed he loves me, but I can’t help knowing that he could settle in Halstead without me. He’s a self-sufficient man, and he truly believes he’s right. He says I’m being childish and stubborn.
Marc agrees with him, by the way, not that either of us has asked Marc what he thinks. But he’s still staying with us, and he can’t help hearing at least some of our disagreement. He could have avoided mixing in, but I don’t think that ever occurred to him.
“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded of me this morning just before Gathering. “Why do you want to have a baby in this dump? Just think, you could live in a real house in a real town.”
And I got so angry so fast that my only choices were either to be very quiet or to scream at him. He, of all people should have known better than to say such a thing. We had reached out from our dump with money made at our dump. We had found him and freed him. But for us and our dump, he would still be a slave and a whore!
“Come to Gathering,” I said in almost a whisper. And I walked out of the house away from him.
He followed me to Gathering, but he never apologized. I don’t think he ever realized that he had said something vile.
After Gathering, Gray Mora came up to me and said, “I hear you’re leaving.”
I was surprised. I don’t suppose I should have been. Bankole and I don’t scream at one another and broadcast our troubles the way the Figueroas and the Faircloths do, but no doubt it’s clear to everyone that there’s something wrong between us. And then there was Marc. He might tell people—just out of a need to be important. He does have a consuming need to be important, to reassert his manhood.
“I’m not leaving,” I told Gray.
He frowned. “You sure? I heard you were moving to Halstead.”
“I’m not leaving.”
He drew in a long breath and let it out. “Good. This place would probably go to hell without you.” And he turned and walked away. That was Gray. I thought back when he joined us that he might be trouble, or that he wouldn’t stay. Instead, he turned out to be dependability itself—as long as you didn’t want a lot of conversation or demonstrative friendliness. If you were loyal to Gray and his family, he was loyal to you.
Later, after dinner, Zahra Balter pulled me out of a set of dramatic readings that three of the older kids were giving of their own work or of published work that they liked. I was enjoying Gray’s stepdaughter Tori Mora’s reading of some comic poetry that she had written. The more laughter in Acorn, the better. And I was drawing Tori, tall and lean and angular, a handsome girl rather than a pretty one. I had discovered that drawing was so different from everything else I did that it relaxed me, and at the same time, it roused me to a new alertness—a new kind of alertness. I’ve begun to perceive color and texture, line and shape, light and shadow with new intensity. I go into these focused, trancelike states and draw really terrible stuff. My friends laugh at the drawings, but they tell me they’re getting better, getting recognizable.