Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,8

the process of teaching it to someone else. My mother insisted on this, and it does seem sensible. Public schools had become rare in those days when ten-year-old children could be put to work. Education was no longer free, but it was still mandatory according to the law. The problem was, no one was enforcing such laws, just as no one was protecting child laborers.

My father had the most valuable skills in the group. By the time he married my mother, he had been practicing medicine for almost 30 years. He was a multiple rarity for their location: well educated, professional, and Black. Black people in particular were rare in the mountains. People wondered about him. Why was he there? He could have been making a better living in some small, established town. The area was littered with tiny towns that would be glad to have any doctor. Was he competent? Was he honest? Was he clean? Could he be trusted looking after wives and daughters? How could they be sure he was really a doctor at all? My father apparently wrote nothing at all about this, but my mother wrote about everything.

She says at one point: “Bankole heard the same whispers and rumors I did at the various street markets and in occasional meetings with neighbors, and he shrugged. He had us to keep healthy and our work-related injuries to treat. Other people had their first aid kits, their satellite phone nets, and, if they were lucky, their cars or trucks. These vehicles tended to be old and undependable, but some people had them. Whether or not they called Bankole was their business.

“Then, thanks to someone else’s misfortune, things improved. Jean Holly’s appendix flared up and all but ruptured, and the Holly family, our eastern neighbors, decided that they had better take a chance on Bankole.

“Once Bankole had saved the woman’s life, he had a talk with the family. He told them exactly what he thought of them for waiting so long to call him, for almost letting a woman with five young children die. He spoke with that intense quiet courtesy of his that makes people squirm. The Hollys took it. He became their doctor.

“And the Hollys mentioned him to their friends the Sullivans, and the Sullivans mentioned him to their daughter who had married into the Gama family, and the Gamas told the Dovetrees because old Mrs. Dovetree—the matriarch—had been a Gama. That was when we began to get to know our nearest neighbors, the Dovetrees.”

Speaking of knowing people, I wish more than ever that I could have known my father. He seems to have been an impressive man. And, perhaps, it would have been good for me to know this version of my mother, struggling, focused, but very young, very human. I might have liked these people.

FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2032

I’m not sure how to talk about today. It was intended to be a quiet day of salvaging and plant collecting after yesterday’s uncomfortable Gathering and determined anniversary celebration. We have, it seems, a few people who think Jarret may be just what the country needs—apart from his religious nonsense. The thing is, you can’t separate Jarret from the “religious nonsense.” You take Jarret and you get beatings, burnings, tarrings and featherings. They’re a package. And there may be even nastier things in that package. Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

Nevertheless, some of our people—the Peralta and Faircloth families in particular—might be leaving us soon.

“I’ve got four kids left alive,” Ramiro Peralta said yesterday at Gathering. “Maybe with a strong leader like Jarret running things, they’ll have a chance to stay alive.”

He’s a good guy, Ramiro is, but he’s desperate for solutions, for order and stability. I understand that. He used to have seven kids and a wife. He’d lost three of his kids and his wife to a fire set by an angry, frightened, ignorant mob who decided to cure a nasty cholera epidemic down in Los Angeles by burning down the area of the city where they thought the epidemic had begun. I kept that in mind as I answered him. “Think, Ramiro,” I said. “Jarret doesn’t have any answers! How will lynching people, burning their churches, and starting wars