Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,69

community whose population grew to more than a thousand should split and ‘parent’ a new community.”

In small communities, she believed, people are more accountable to one another. Serious misbehavior is harder to get away with, harder even to begin when everyone who sees you knows who you are, where you live, who your family is, and whether you have any business doing what you’re doing.

My mother was not a fanciful woman apart from her belief in Earthseed. That, I think, was why the people of Acorn trusted her so. She was practical, straightforward, fair, honest, and she liked people. She enjoyed working with them. She was a better-than-average community leader. But beneath it all was always Earthseed and a longing, an obsession, that was far stronger than anyone seemed to realize. People who are intelligent, ambitious, and at the same time, in the grip of odd obsessions can be dangerous. When they occur, they inevitably upset things.

In The First Book of the Living, my mother says,

Prodigy is, in its essence, adaptability and persistent, positive obsession. Without persistence, what remains is an enthusiasm of the moment. Without adaptability, what remains may be channeled into destructive fanaticism. Without positive obsession, there is nothing at all.

FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2033

On July 20, I turned 24. More important, on that day my daughter Larkin Beryl Ife Olamina Bankole was born.

We’ve named her all that, poor little one. “Larkin” is from the same root as “Lauren” and my father’s name, “Laurence.” All three names derive from “Laurel” and that from the ancient Greek habit of rewarding the victorious by crowning them with wreaths of laurel leaves. And there is a pleasant similarity between “Larkin” and “lark,” the name of a songbird that neither Bankole nor I have ever seen or heard, but whose voice, we have read, is beautiful. I had planned to call our daughter Larkin even before she was born on my and my father’s birthday. What a lovely connection. Three generations of beginning on July 20 is more than just a coincidence. It’s almost a tradition.

“Beryl” was the name of Bankole’s mother. Bankole and I had been bickering over it for months, and I had known that it would show up somewhere in our daughter’s name. As long as it wasn’t her first name, it was endurable. It has a good denotative meaning. A beryl is a very hard clear or cloudy mineral which, when properly shaped and polished, has great potential for beauty. The emerald is a kind of beryl.

“Ife” is the Yoruba personal name we’ve chosen to go with our two Yoruba surnames—since my grandfather and Bankole’s father had chosen to take Yoruba surnames back in the 1960s. “Ife” was Bankole’s idea. I didn’t remember it. We had pooled our memories of Yoruba names, and as soon as Bankole came up with “Ife,” it seemed right to both of us. It means “love,” Bankole says.

And, of course, she was “Olamina” and “Bankole.” So many names for one little girl. When she’s older, she’ll no doubt choose a couple of them and drop the others.

She’s whole and beautiful and healthy, and I love her more than I would have thought possible. I’m still sore and tired, but it doesn’t matter. She weighs three and a half kilos, has a big appetite, and a good loud voice.

Bankole sits, now, holding her as she sleeps—holding her and looking down at her, rocking her in the beautiful, ornate wooden rocking chair that Gray Mora paid Allie Gilchrist to make for him. Gray likes to build big things—cabins, storehouses, buildings of any kind. He designs them, organizes the building, and works on them. As long as he’s building something, he’s a happy man. The school is his doing, and if he were any more proud of it, he’d be impossible. But he leaves the designing and building of small things, furniture in particular, to Allie Gilchrist. She taught herself her craft not only by reading salvaged books, but by taking apart salvaged furniture to see how it was made. Now, at street markets, she sells the chairs, tables, cabinets, chests, toys, tools, and decorative items that she makes, and she gets good prices for them. Her son Justin is only nine, but he’s already pleased her very much by picking the work up from her, learning it and enjoying it. May and the Noyer girls are also beginning to learn the craft, although May is more interested in weaving grasses,