Mora was dead—bloody and broken and dead. And that was how I learned that my Bankole was dead.
There was chaos. Emery Mora and both her daughters began to scream when they saw Gray’s mangled body. Natividad and Travis ran into each other’s arms. Lucio Figueroa dropped to his knees beside Teresa’s grave, and his sister Marta tried to comfort him. Both Scolari women tried to go down into the grave to touch Vincent, to kiss him, to say good-bye. We were all lashed electronically for talking, screaming, crying, cursing, and demanding answers.
And I was lashed into unconsciousness for trying to kill my bearded keeper with a pickax. It would have been worth any amount of pain if only I could have succeeded.
TWELVE
❏ ❏ ❏
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
I MISS ACORN. Of course, I have no memory of being there, but it was where my parents were together and happy during their brief marriage. It was where I was conceived, born, and loved by them both. It could have been, should have been, where I grew up—since it was where my mother had insisted on staying. And even if, in spite of my father’s intentions and my mother’s dreams, the place had gone on looking more like a nineteenth-century farming village than a stepping-stone toward the Destiny, I wouldn’t have minded. It couldn’t have been as grim as where I did grow up.
From the coming of Jarret’s Crusaders—that is what they called themselves—my life veers away from Acorn and from my mother. The only surprising thing is that we ever met again.
My mother was right about the gas. It was intended to be used to stop riots, to subdue masses of violent people. Unlike poison gases that kill or maim or gases that caused tears and choking, or nausea, this gas was supposed to be merciful. It was called merciful. It was a paralysis gas. Most of the time, it worked fast and caused no pain and had no nasty aftereffects. But occasionally, children and small adults died of it. For that reason, an antidote was developed to be administered to small people who were overcome: It was given to me, to the rest of the little children of Acorn. For some reason it wasn’t given to Zahra Balter. She was obviously an adult, in spite of her small size. Maybe the Crusaders thought age was more important than size. There were no physicians among them. There were no health workers of any kind. These were God’s people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn’t really very important.
FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2033
Thanksgiving Day.
Should I be thankful still to be alive? I’m not sure.
Today is like Sunday—better than Sunday. We have been given extra food and extra rest, and once services were over this morning, we were let alone. I am thankful for that. For once, they aren’t watching us. They don’t want to spend their holiday guarding us or “teaching” us, as they put it. This means that today I can write. On most days, by the time they let us alone, it’s too dark to write and we’re exhausted. After our work outside, we’re watched and made to memorize and recite sections of the Bible until we can’t think or keep our eyes open. I’m thankful to be writing and I’m thankful not to hear my own voice chanting something like, “Unto woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”
We’re not permitted to speak to one another in our “teachers’ ” presence, and yet not allowed to be quiet and rest.
Now I must find a way to write about the past few weeks, to tell what has happened to us—just to tell it as though it were sane and rational. I’ll do that, if for no other reason than to give some order to my scattered thoughts. I do need to write about…about Bankole.
All of our young children are gone. All of them. From Larkin, the youngest, to the Faircloth boys, the oldest, they’ve vanished.
Now we are told that our children have been saved from our wickedness. They’ve been given “good Christian homes.” We won’t see them again