Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,88

it chooses to spread. Perhaps our friends outside have been told believable lies. Or perhaps they’ve just been frightened into silence, given to know that they shouldn’t ask too many questions lest they get into trouble themselves. Or maybe it’s just that none of us has powerful enough friends. We were nobodies, and our anonymity, far from protecting us, had made us vulnerable.

We at Acorn were told that we were attacked and enslaved because we were a heathen cult. But the Gamas and the Sullivans aren’t cultists. I’ve asked women from both families why they were attacked, but they don’t know either.

The Gamas and the Sullivans owned their land just as we did, and unlike the Dovetrees, the Gamas and the Sullivans had never raised marijuana or sold alcoholic beverages. They worked their land and they took jobs in the towns whenever they could find them. They worked hard and behaved themselves. And in the end, what did it matter? All their hard work and ours, all Bankole’s attention to dead-and-gone laws, and all my hopes for my Larkin and for Earthseed… I don’t know what’s going to happen. We will get out of this! We’ll do that somehow! But what then? From what I’ve been able to hear, some of our “teachers” come from important families in the Churches of Christian America in Eureka, Arcata, and the surrounding smaller towns. This land is mine now. Bankole, with his trust in law and order, made a will, I’ve read it. The copy we kept here has been destroyed, of course, but the original and other copies still exist. The land is mine, but how can I take it back? How can we ever rebuild what we had?

When we break free of our “teachers,” we will kill at least some of them. I see no way to avoid this. If they have to, and if they can, they’ll kill us to stop our escape. The way they rape us, the way they lash us, the way they let some of us die—all that tells me they don’t value our lives. Do their families know what they’re doing? Do the police know? Are some of these “teachers” cops themselves or relatives of cops?

A great many people must know that something is going on. Each shift of our “teachers” stays with us for at least a week, then goes away for a week. Where do they tell people they’ve been? The area must be full of people who know, at least, that something unusual is happening. That’s why once we’ve freed ourselves, I don’t see how we can stay here. Too many people here will hate us either because we’ve killed their men in our escape or because they won’t be able to forgive us for the wrongs that they, their families, or their friends have done us.

Earthseed lives. Enough of us know it and believe it for it to live on in us. Earthseed lives and will live. But Jarret’s Crusaders have strangled Acorn. Acorn is dead.

I keep saying that I need to write about Bankole, and I keep not doing it. I was a zombie for days after I saw his body thrown into the bare hole they made Lucio Figueroa dig. They said none of their prayers over him, and, of course they refused to allow us to have services for him.

I saw him alive on the day the Crusaders invaded. I know I did. What happened? He was a healthy man, and no fool. He would not have provoked armed men to kill him. We’re not allowed to talk to our men, but I had to find out what happened. I kept trying until I found a moment to talk to Harry Balter. I wanted it to be Harry so I could tell him about Zahra.

We managed to meet in the field as we worked with only our own community members nearby. We were harvesting—often in the rain—salad greens, onions, potatoes, carrots, and squashes, all planted and tended by Acorn, of course. We should also have been harvesting acorns—should already have harvested them—but we weren’t permitted to do that. Some of us were being made to cut down both the mature live oak and pine trees and the saplings that we had planted. These trees not only commemorated our dead and provided us with much protein, but also they helped hold the hillside near our cabins in place. Somehow, our “teachers” have gotten the idea that we worshipped trees,