Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,97

the attentions of these men. I will be filthy. I will stink. I will pay no attention to my hair or my clothing.

I must do this, or I will kill myself.

2035

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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Self is.

Self is body and bodily perception. Self is thought, memory, belief. Self creates. Self destroys. Self learns, discovers, becomes. Self shapes. Self adapts. Self invents its own reasons for being. To shape God, shape Self.

FOURTEEN

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From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

Take comfort.

Each move toward the Destiny,

Each achievement of the Destiny,

Must mean new beginnings,

New worlds,

A rebirth of Earthseed.

Alone,

Each of us is mortal.

Yet through Earthseed,

Through the Destiny,

We join.

We are purposeful

Immortal

Life!

SOMEHOW, MY MOTHER ENDURED more than a year of slavery at Camp Christian. How she did it, how she survived it, I can only guess from her writings of 2033 and 2035. Her record of 2034 has been lost. She did write during 2034. I have no doubt of that. She couldn’t have gone for a year without writing. I’ve found occasional references to notes made then. No doubt by then, she was writing on whatever scraps of paper she could find.

She obviously liked to keep her writing when she could, but I suspect that somehow it helped her just to do it, whether she was able to keep it or not. The act of writing itself was a kind of therapy.

The most important loss is this: There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. I know this because I’ve spoken to people who were there, who survived the effort, and who remember the suffering.

My best informant was a plainspoken woman named Cody Smith, who in December of 2034 had been arrested for vagrancy in Garberville and transported to Camp Christian. She was one of the survivors of the rebellion, although as a result of it, she suffered nerve damage and eventual blindness. She was beaten and kicked as well as electronically lashed. Here’s her story as she told it to me:

“Day Turner’s people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one. They believed they could kill the guards before their collars disabled them. Lauren Olamina said no. She said the guards were never all together, were never all outside at the same time. She said one guard missed was one guard who could kill all of us with just one finger. Day liked her. I don’t know why. She was big like a man and not pretty, but he liked her. He just didn’t believe she was right. He thought she was scared. But he forgave her because she was a woman. That drove her crazy. The more she tried to talk him out of it, the more determined he was to do it. Then he asked her if she was going to give him away, and she got really quiet and so mad he actually took a step back from her. She could do that. She didn’t get loud when she got mad, she got real quiet. She scared people.

“She asked him who the hell did he think she was, and he said he was starting to not be sure. There was some bad feeling after that. She stopped talking to him and began talking to her own people. It was hard to talk, dangerous to talk. It was against the rules. People had to whisper and mutter and talk without moving their lips and not look at the people they were talking to. They got lashed if they were caught. Messages got passed from one person to another. Sometimes they got changed or messed up and you couldn’t tell what people were trying to tell you. Sometimes someone told the guards. New people brought in from the road would do that—tell what they had no business telling. They got a little extra food for it or a warm shirt or something. But if we caught them at it, they never did it again. We saw to that. There were always a few, though. They did it for a reward or because they were scared or because they had started to believe all those sermons and Bible classes and prayer meetings and the other stuff they made us sit through or