Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2)

by Octavia E. Butler

Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of “heathen houses of devil-worship,” he has a simple answer: “Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again.”

We have, it seems, a few people who think Jarret may be just what the country needs—apart from his religious nonsense. The thing is, you can’t separate Jarret from the “religious nonsense.” You take Jarret and you get beatings, burnings, tarrings and featherings. They’re a package.

Jarret’s supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret’s talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

I’ve heard that in some of the more religious towns, repression of women has become more and more extreme. A woman who expresses her opinions, “nags,” disobeys her husband, or otherwise “tramples her womanhood” and “acts like a man,” might have her head shaved, her forehead branded, her tongue cut out, or, worst case, she might be stoned to death or burned.

He’s had to distance himself from the worst of his followers. But he still knows how to rouse his rabble, how to reach out to poor people, and sic them on other poor people. How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?

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 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.

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.

They’ve burned our books and our papers. They’ve burned all that they could find of our past. It’s all ungodly trash, they say. They made us do most of the fetching and carrying, the stacking and piling of so much that we loved. They watched us, their hands on their belts. All the books on paper and on disk. All the collections that our younger kids had assembled of minerals, seeds, leaves, pictures . . . All the reports, models, sculptures and paintings that our older kids have done. All the music that Travis and Gray wrote. All the plays that Emery wrote. All the bits of my journal that they could find. All the legal papers, including marriage licenses, tax receipts, and Bankole’s deed to the land. All these things, our teachers threw lamp oil on and burned, then raked and stirred and burned again.

Of the four of us, only I was a sharer. Of the four of us, only I endured not only my own pain and humiliation, but the wild, intense pleasure of my rapist. There are no words to explain the twisted, schizoid ugliness of this.

People deserted or left the country to avoid the draft—there was one, at last—and the saying was, during the war, that healthy young men were America’s biggest export.

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.” Kayce talked that way.

They look at us with unmistakable hatred, disgust, and contempt, and they insist that it’s love that they feel. Their God requires them to love us, after all. And it’s only love that makes them try so hard to help us see the light. They say we’re blinded by our own sinful stubbornness to the love and the help that they offer. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” they tell us, and we are, at best, still children as far as morality is concerned. Right.

“They say they like small, ladylike women,” Noriko says with terrible bitterness. “Those flabby, ugly men. They like us because it’s easy for them to hurt us. They like to use their hands, leave bruises, make you beg them to stop.”

My ancestors in this hemisphere were, by law, chattel slaves. In the U.S., they were chattel slaves for two and a half centuries—at least 10 generations. I used to think I knew what that meant. Now I realize that I can’t begin to imagine the many terrible things that it must have done to them. How did they survive it all and keep their humanity? Certainly, they were never intended to keep it, just as we weren’t.

You’re honest people. If anyone says otherwise, attack their credibility. Accuse them of being secret cultists, witches, Satanists, thieves. Whatever you think will endanger your accusers the most, say it! Don’t just defend yourselves. Attack. And keep attacking until you scare the shit out of your accusers. Watch them. Pay attention to their body language. Their own reactions will tell you how best to damage them or scare them off.

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.

There are times when I wish I believed in hell—other than the hells we make for one another, I mean.

He shouldn’t want them to make their insanity part of his political image. On the other hand, one way to make people afraid of you is to have a crazy side—a side of yourself or your organization that’s dangerous and unpredictable—willing to do any damned thing.