Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,85

unless we leave our “heathenism” behind and prove that we’ve become people who can be trusted near Christian children. Out of kindness and love, our captors—we are required to address them each as “Teacher”—have provided for our children. They have put our children’s feet on the pathway to good, useful American citizenship here on Earth, and to a place in heaven when they die. Now we, the adults and older kids, must be taught to walk that same path. We must be reeducated. We must accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, Jarret’s Crusaders as our teachers, Jarret as God’s chosen restorer of America’s greatness, and the Church of Christian America as our church. Only then will we be Christian patriots worthy to raise children.

We do not struggle against this. Our captors order us to kneel, to pray, to sing, to testify, and we do. I’ve made it clear to the others through my own behavior that we should obey. Why should anyone resist and risk torture or death? What would be the good of that? We’ll lie to these murderers, these kidnappers, these thieves, these slavers. We’ll tell them anything they want to hear, do all that they require us to do. Someday they’ll get careless or their equipment will malfunction or we’ll find or create some weakness, some blind spot. Then we’ll kill them.

But even though we obey, the Crusaders must have their amusements. In their loving kindness, they use the collars to torment us. “This is nothing compared to the fires of hell,” they tell us. “Learn your lessons or you’ll suffer like this for all eternity!” How can they do what they do if they believe what they say?

They eat our food and feed us their leavings, either as bowls of obvious table scraps or boiled up in a watery soup with turnips or potatoes from our gardens. They live in our houses and sleep in our beds while we sleep on the floor of the school, men in one room, women in another, no communication between the two permitted.

None of us is decently married, it seems. We were not married by a minister of the Church of Christian America. Therefore, we have been living in sin—“fornicating like dogs!” I heard one Crusader say. That same Crusader dragged Diamond Scott off to his cabin last week and raped her. She says he told her it was all right. He was a man of God, and she should be honored. Afterward, she kept crying and throwing up. She says she’ll kill herself if she’s pregnant.

Only one of us has done that so far—committed suicide. Only one: Emery Mora. She took revenge for what happened to her husband and for the abduction of her two little boys. She seduced one of the Crusaders—one of those who had moved into her own cabin. She convinced him that she was willing and eager to sleep with him. Then sometime during the night, she cut his throat with a knife she had always kept under her mattress. Then she went to the Crusader sleeping in her daughters’ room and cut his throat. After that, she lay down in her bed beside her first victim and cut her own wrists. The three of them were found dead the next morning. Like Gray, Emery had taken substantial revenge.

For her own sake and the sake of her daughters, I wish she had chosen to live. I knew she was depressed, and I tried to encourage her to endure. At night when we were locked up together, we all talked, exchanged news, and tried to encourage one another. But the truth is, if Emery had to die, she chose the best possible way to do it. She’s let us know that we can kill our captors. Our collars would not stop us. If Emery had not been confined by her collar to that one cabin, she might have killed even more of them.

But why had her collar not stopped her from killing? According to what Marc told me about his captivity, collars protected holders of control units. Was this a matter of a different kind of collar? Perhaps. We couldn’t know that. None of the information we had collected and shared in the night had to do with different kinds of collars. What we had learned was that all our collars were linked together somehow in a kind of collar network. All could be controlled by the units that our captors wore as belts, but the