to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
I'M NOT CERTAIN how to write about the next episode in my parents' lives and in my life. I'm glad to have no memory of it. I was only two months old when it happened.
It's all very strange, very bad, very confused. If only my mother had agreed to go with my father to live peacefully, normally in Halstead, it wouldn't have happened. Or at least, it wouldn't have happened to us.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
monday, september 26, 2033
They didn't shoot their way in. It seems that they don't intend to kill us. Yet. Since Dovetree, they have changed. Their leader has come to power. They have acquired... if not legitimacy, at least a shadow of sophistication. Roaring in, shooting everyone, and burning everything is perhaps too crude for them now. Or maybe it's just not as much fun.
I write, not knowing how long I will be able to write. I write because they have not yet robbed us of everything. Our freedom is gone, our two trucks, our land, our business, our homes are gone, stolen from us. But somehow, I still have paper, pens, and pencils. None of our captors values these things, so no one has yet taken them from me. I must keep them hidden or they will be taken. All possessions will be taken. They will strip us. They've made that all too clear. They will break us down, reshape us, teach us what it means to love their country and fear their God.
Our several secret caches of food, weapons, money, clothing, and records have not been found. At least, I don't believe they have been. No one has heard that they have.
We're shut up in two of the rooms of the school. Our books are still here on their shelves. The various projects of our students are still here. Our several phones and our five new teaching computers are gone. They have hard-currency value. Also, they were a means of communicating with the outside. We are not permitted to do that. That would inhibit our reeducation.
I must make a record of all this. I don't want to, but I must. And I must hide that record so that, someday, Earth-seed will know what Earthseed has survived.
We will do that We will survive. I don't yet know how. How is always a problem. But, in fact, we will survive.
************************************
Here is what happened.
Late Tuesday afternoon last week, I was sketching two of the Faircloth kids and talking with them about the project they wanted to work on for school. They had, in their required study of history, just discovered World War II, and they wanted to build models of the battleships, submarines, and airplanes of the time. They wanted to report on the big battles and find out more about the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were fascinated by all of the loud, explosive events of the War, but they had no idea what a huge subject they had chosen or, beyond the barest outline, why the War had been fought. I had decided to sketch them while the three of us talked about it and narrowed things down.
The Faircloth family had always been poor, had lived in a squatter settlement before they came to us. Alan Faircloth had small, badly creased, paper photos of the boys as babies, but nothing recent. He had pleased me more than I would have been willing to admit by asking me to draw the two of them. I had become vain about my drawing. It was finally somewhere near good. Even Harry, Zahra, and Allie had said so, and they were the ones who had the most fun with my earlier efforts.
The boys and I were outside behind the school, enjoying a warm, easy day. Larkin lay next to me, asleep in her crib in spite of the noise the boys made. She was already used to noise. The boys were 11 and 12, small for their age, always loud, and unlikely to be still for more than two or three minutes at a time. First they peeked at Larkin, then they lost interest and shouted first at each other, then at me about weapons and battles, dive-bombers and aircraft carriers, Hitler, Churchill, Tojo, London, Stalingrad, Tokyo, on and on. Interesting that a thing as terrible and as massive as a worldwide war could seem so wonderful and exciting to a pair of preadolescent boys whose grandparents weren't born in time for it—although they did have paternal grandparents who were born and raised in London.
I sketched the boys quickly while listening to their enthusiasm and making suggestions. I was just finishing the sketches when the maggots arrived.
A maggot, nicknamed in its ugly shape, is something less than a tank, and something more than a truck. It's a big, armed and armored, all-terrain, all-wheel-drive vehicle. Private cops and military people use them, and people with plenty of money drive them as private cars. Maggots can go almost anywhere, over, around, or through almost anything. The people of Halstead have one. They've used it now and then to collect Bankole. Several small local towns have one or two for their cops or for search and rescue in the hills. But the things are serious fuel eaters—expensive to run.
That Friday, seven maggots came crawling out of the hills and through our thorn fence toward us. There had been no warning from the watchers. Nothing at all. That was my first thought when I saw them coming: Where were Lucio Figueroa and Noriko Kardos? Why hadn't they warned us? Were they all right?
Seven maggots! That was three or four times as much firepower as we could muster if we brought out every one of our guns. Only our truck guns would have even a ghost of a chance of stopping a maggot, anyway.
Seven of the damned things!
"Go home!" I said to the two boys. "Tell your father and sisters to get the hell out No drill. The real thing! Get out, fast and quiet! Run!"
Both boys ran.
I took my phone from my pocket and tapped out the emergency bug-out signal. We've had bug-out exercises. Bankole called them that, and the name spread. I thought of them as "melt into the mountains" exercises. Now we faced the real thing. It had to be real. No one came visiting in seven armed and armored maggots.
I grabbed my Larkin as fast as I could and ran for the hills. I tried to keep the school building between the two of us and the nearest maggots. They were crawling toward us in what could have been a military formation. They could run us down, shoot us, do whatever they chose to do. The only thing we might be able to do that they couldn't do was vanish into the mountains. But could we even do that? If we kept still, the maggots' sensory equipment would spot us. And if we ran, the rocks and trees and thorn bushes wouldn't give us much protection from the maggots' guns. But what could we do but run? As long as no one came out of the maggots, we had nothing to shoot at.
Where was Bankole? I didn't know. Well, we had rendezvous points. We would find each other. The idea was not to waste time running around looking for relatives. Except for babies and very young children, everyone knew from the drills that a command to get out meant exactly that. "Get out now!"
And we were to go in all directions. We were not to follow one another or group together and provide our enemies with big, easy targets. As much as possible, we were to put trees and geographical features between ourselves and the enemy.
But what were we to do when the enemy was everywhere?
Then, in the same instant, all seven of the maggots began firing. It took me a moment to realize that they were not firing bullets, that, perhaps, we were not about to be killed. They were firing gas canisters. I kept running, hoping that others were doing the same. No matter what the gas was, it was not intended to do us good.
I headed through the young oak grove that was our cemetery toward the fold of a hill that I hoped would both shelter me and give me an easier path up over the first hill.
Then just ahead of me, a canister landed. Before it hit the ground, it began to spew out gas.
And my legs wouldn't hold me. I was running. Then I felt myself begin to fall. It was all I could do to manage not to fall on my baby, instead to have her fall on me. I heard her begin to cry—a thin, un-Larkinlike whimpering. I don't believe I c
ried out. I know I never lost consciousness. It was a terrible gas. I still don't know the name of it. It took away most of my ability to move, but left me wide awake, able to hear and see, able to know that my people were being collected like driftwood, being carried or dragged away by uniformed men.
Someone came to me, bent, and took Larkin from me. I couldn't move my head to see what he did with her. I couldn't struggle or protest or plead. I couldn't even scream.
Someone came for me and took me by the feet and dragged me over the ground, down the hill to the school. I was wearing denims and a light cotton shirt, and I could feel my back scraping over rocks and weeds. I could feel pressure—bumping and thudding. It didn't hurt as it was happening, but I knew it would hurt. All the adults and older kids had been carried or dragged to the school. I could see several of them sprawled on the floor wherever their captors had dropped them. What I could not see were the babies and young children.
I could not see my Larkin.
At one point, I heard shooting outside. It came from the south side of the school, not far away. It sounded like the guns of our older truck. Perhaps one of us had reached the truck and tried to use it as Bankole, Harry, and I had back when Dan and Nina Noyer came home. That was hopeless. Our old housetruck wouldn't have been a match for even one maggot. Then I heard a huge explosion. After that there was silence.
What had happened? Were the children involved? Not knowing was an agonizing torment. Utter helplessness was even worse. I could breathe. I could twitch a hand or a foot. I could blink. Nothing more.
After a while, I could whimper a little.
Sometime later, a man wearing the uniform of the day— black pants and a belted, black tunic with a white cross on its front, came to do something to us, to each of us. I couldn't see what he was doing until he got to me, unbuttoned three buttons of my shirt, raised my head, and fastened the slave collar around my neck.
************************************
It was that simple. They took Acorn. Its name is Camp Christian now. We captives were not able to do more than twitch, blink, or moan for over an hour. That was plenty of time to collar almost all of us.
No one collared Gray Mora. He had been a slave earlier in his life. He had never worn a collar, but he had spent his childhood and young manhood as the property of people who treated him not quite as well as they treated their cattle. They had taken his wife from him and sold her to a wealthy man who had seen her and wanted her. She was, according to Gray, a short, slight, very pretty woman, and she brought a good price. Her new owner made casual sexual use of her and then somehow, by accident or not, killed her. When Gray heard about that, he took his daughter Doe and broke free. He never told us exactly how he got free. I've always assumed he killed one or more of his masters, stole their possessions, and took off. That's what I would have done.
But this time, there was no escape. And yet Gray would not be a slave again.
I found out later that he managed to get to the housetruck, lock himself in, and fire on some of the maggots. That scratched them more than a little. Then, as the maggots began to fire on him and blow the housetruck's armor to hell, he charged one of them. He rammed it. There was an explosion. There shouldn't have been. The housetruck was as safe as it could be. Making it explode had to take a conscious effort—unless it was the maggot that exploded. I don't know for sure. But knowing Gray, I suspect he did something to cause the explosion. I believe he chose to die.
He is dead.
I can't believe that any of this is true. I mean . . . there ought to be a different way to write about these things—a way that at least begins to express the insanity and the terrible, terrible pain of it all. Acorn has always been full of ugly stories. There wasn't an adult among us who didn't have one. But we'd come together, lived together, helped one another, survived, thrived, we'd done that! We'd done all that! We'd made a good home for ourselves, were making an honest living. Now people with crosses have come and put slave collars on us.
And where is my baby? Where is Larkin?
************************************
They separated the women and older girls from the men and older boys while we were paralyzed. They left the men in the larger room of the school and dragged us women into one of the smaller ones. I didn't think about it at the time, but that was an odd thing to do because there were more women than men in the community. We were dumped onto the wooden floor, half atop one another, and left there. The windows were open, and I remember thinking it strange that no one bothered to board them up or even close them.
The only good thing was that as I was half lifted and half dragged, I saw Bankole. I don't believe he saw me. He was lying on his back, staring straight up, one scraped, bloody hand on his chest. I saw him blink. I did see that, so I knew he was alive. If only he had gotten away. He would have been more likely than anyone else to find some way to help the rest of us. Besides, what will our captors do to a man his age? Would they care that he was old? No. From the way he looked, it was clear that he had been dragged across the ground just as I was. They didn't care.
Would they care that my Larkin was only a baby?
And where was she? Where was she?
************************************
I was terrified every time someone came near me. All our captors were young men, and I'd seen two or three angry, bloody ones. I didn't know at the time that this was Gray's work. I didn't know anything. All I could think about was Larkin, Bankole, my people, and the damned slave collar around my neck.
As the sun went down, my body began to hurt—my back and my hands and arms burned where they had scraped along the ground as I was dragged. My head felt lumpy and sore. It also ached in a hard, throbbing way that might have had something to do with the gas.
It was dark when I began trying to move. For a long time, all I could do was flop around a little. Someone in the room groaned. Someone else began to cry. Someone gasped, choked, and began to cough. Someone said over and over again, "Ah shit!" and I recognized Allie Gilchrist's voice.
"Allie?" I said. I slurred the word, sounded drunk to my own ears, but she heard me.
"Olamina?"
"Yeah."
"Look, did you see Justin before they dragged you in here?"
"No. Sorry. Did you see Larkin?"
"No. Sorry."
"They took my baby too," Adela Ortiz said in a hoarse whisper. "They took him and I don't know where he is." She began to cry.
I wanted to cry myself. I wanted to just to lie there and cry because I hurt so much in so many ways. I felt too weak and uncoordinated to do anything but cry. Instead, I sat up, bumped someone, apologized, sat stupidly for a while, then found the sense to say, "Who else is here? One by one, say your names."
"Noriko," a voice said just to my left. "They took Deborah and Melissa," she continued. "I had Melissa and Michael had Deborah. We were running. I thought we were going to make it. Then that damned gas. We fell down, and someone came and pulled both girls away from us. I couldn't see anything but hands and arms taking them."
"And my babies," Emery Mora said. "My babies...." She was crying, almost incoherent, "My little boys. My sons. They took my sons again. Again!" She had had two young sons when she was a slave years ago, and they had been sold away from her. She had been a debt slave—a legally indentured person bound for her family's unpaid debts. The debts were accumulated because she worked for an agribusiness corporation that underpaid its workers in company scrip instead of money, then overcharged them for food and shelter so that they could stay in ever-increasing debt. It was against the law for the company to break up families by selling minor children away from their parents or husbands from their wives. It was against both local and federal law, so it shouldn't have happened. Just as what's happened to us now shouldn't have happened.
I thought about Emery's older daughter and stepdaughter. "What about Tori and Doe?" I said. "Are they here? Tori? Doe?"
&nb
sp; At first, there was no answer, and I thought of Nina and Paula Noyer. I didn't want to think of them, but Doe and Tori Mora were 14 and 15—far from babyhood. If they weren't here, where were they?
Then a very small voice said, "I'm here. Get off me."
"I'm trying to get off you," a stronger voice said. "There's no room in here. I can hardly move."
Tori and Doe, alive, and as well as the rest of us were. I shut my eyes and took a long, deep, grateful breath. "Nina Noyer?" I asked.
She began to answer, then coughed several times. "I'm here," she said at last, "but my little sisters ... I don't know what happened to them."
"Mercy?" I called. "Kassi?"
No answer.
"May?"
No answer. She couldn't talk, but she would have made a noise to let us know she was there.
"She had Kassia and Mercy with her," Allie said. "She's strong and fast. Maybe she got them away. She loved them like she gave birth to them."
I sighed. "Aubrey Dovetree?" I asked.
"I'm here," she said. "But I can't find Zoë or the kids ……….Zoë had all three of them with her."
And Zoë had a heart condition, I thought. She might be dead, even if no one meant to kill her. Not knowing what else to do, I went on with my role call. "Marta Figueroa?"
"Yes," she whispered. "Yes, I'm here, all alone. My brother.... My children--------- Gone."
"Diamond Scott? Cristina Cho?"
"I'm here," said two voices at once, one in English and the other in Spanish. Cristina's English was good now, but under stress, she still reverted to Spanish.
"Beatrice Scolari? Catherine Scolari?"
"We're here," Catherine Scolari's voice said. She sounded as though she had been crying. "Vincent is dead." she said. "He fell against a rock, hit his head. I heard them say he was dead." Vincent was her husband and Beatrice's brother. He had only one arm because of an accident that happened before he joined us. He was, perhaps, more likely than most of us to be off balance when the gas collapsed him. But still...
"He might not be dead," I said.
Parable of the Talents p-2 Page 18