Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

by Octavia E. Butler

we are Earthseed. We’re “that cult,” “those strange people in the hills,” “those crazy fools who pray to some kind of god of change.” We are also, according to some rumors I’ve heard, “those devil-worshiping hill heathens who take in children. And what do you suppose they do with them?” Never mind that the trade in abducted or orphaned children or children sold by desperate parents goes on all over the country, and everyone knows it. No matter. The hint that some cult is taking in children for “questionable purposes” is enough to make some people irrational.

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.

Interesting that they fear Edward Jay Smith’s supposed incompetence more than they fear Jarret’s obvious tyranny.

What I’d like to see is a state of the union where slavery isn’t being practiced.

None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once.

“There was a time, Christian Americans, when our country ruled the world,” he said. “America was God’s country and we were God’s people and God took care of his own. Now look at us. Who are we? What are we? What foul, seething, corrupt heathen concoction have we become?

Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it

“Someone was clearing out a room so that relatives could move into it,” he told me. “The owner of the books had died. He was considered the family eccentric, and no one else in the household shared his enthusiasm for reading big, bulky books made of

They’re nice people, but they can’t wait to get out of the United States. They say it just doesn’t work anymore. The election of Jarret was, for them, the last straw.

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.

Strong female characters were out of fashion in the fiction of the time. President Jarret and his followers in Christian America believed that one of the things that had gone wrong with the country was the intrusion of women into “men’s business.” I’ve seen recordings of him saying this and large audiences

Most people don’t know about the camps, Day says. He’s learned from talking to other collared men that there are a few small camps like Camp Christian and at least two big ones—much bigger than Camp Christian.

Kamaria Alexander died in a missile attack on Seattle when she was 11 years old, and my adopted parents never stopped blaming—and hating—the Canadians in their grief for her. But they never blamed Jarret—“that good man,” “that fine man,” “that man of God.”

Long before Jarret was elected President, his church had begun to rescue children. But in those early days, they only rescued kids who really needed help. Along the Gulf Coast where Jarret began his work, there were several Christian American children’s homes that were over a decade old by 2032. These homes collected street orphans, fed them, cared for them, and raised them to be “the bulwark of Christian America.” Only later did the fanatics take over and begin stealing the children of “heathens” and doing terrible harm.

The purpose of Christian America was to make America the great, Christian country that it was supposed to be, to prepare it for a future of strength, stability, and world leadership, and to prepare its people for life everlasting in heaven. Yet sometimes now when I think about Christian America and all that it did when it held power over so many lives, I don’t think about order and stability or greatness or even places like Camp Christian or Pelican Bay. I think about the other extremes, the many small, sad, silly extremes that made up so much of Christian American life. I think about a little girl’s doll and I try to banish the shadows of panic that I still can’t help feeling when I see one.

The religious poor who are ignorant, frightened, and desperate to improve their situations are glad to see a “man of God” in the White House. And that’s what he is to them: a man of God. Even some of the less religious ones support him. They say the country needs a strong hand to bring back order, good jobs, honest cops, and free schools. They say he has to be given plenty of time and a free hand so he can put things right again.

The working poor who love Jarret want to be fooled, need to be fooled. They scratch a living, working long, hard hours at dangerous, dirty jobs, and they need a savior. Poor women, in particular, tend to be deeply religious and more than willing to see Jarret as the Second Coming. Religion is all they have. Their employers and their men abuse them. They bear more children than they can feed. They bear everyone’s contempt.

The school had closed 15 years after she began teaching. That was during the early twenties when so many public school systems around the country gave up the ghost and closed their doors. Even the pretense of having an educated populace was ending. Politicians shook their heads and said sadly that universal education was a failed experiment. Some companies began to educate the children of their workers at least well enough to enable them to become their next generation of workers. Company towns began then to come back into fashion. They offered security, employment, and education. That was all very well, but the company that educated you owned you until you paid off the debt you owed them. You were an indentured person, and if they couldn’t use you themselves, they could trade you off to another division of the company—or another company.