The other women were brought out of the school and made to watch us dig. I knew that because my attention was caught by the sudden movement of silent, approaching people. I looked up, saw the women shepherded toward us by three black-tunic-and-cross-wearing men. Sometime later, I realized that the men had also been marched out They were kept separate, and it seemed that some of them were digging too.
I froze, staring at them, looking for Bankole ... and for Harry.
The sudden pain tore a grunt from me. I fell to my knees in the hole I was digging.
"Work!" my slave driver said. "It's time you heathens learned to do a little work."
I had not seen whom the men were burying. I saw Travis, shirt off, swinging a pick into the hard ground. I saw Lucio Figueroa digging another hole and Ted Faircloth digging a third. So they had three dead to our two. Who were their dead? Which of our men had these bastards killed?
Where was Bankole?
I hadn't spotted him. I had had such a quick look. I managed to look again and again as I shoveled dirt out of the hole. In the cluster of men, I spotted Michael, then Jorge, then Jeff King. Then the pain hit again. I didn't fall this time. I held on to the shovel and leaned back against the side of the hole I was digging.
"Dig!" the son of a bitch above me said. "Just dig!"
What would he do if I passed out? Would he go on triggering the collar until I died like Teresa? Was he enjoying himself? He didn't smile as he hurt me. But he did keep hurting me, even though I had shown no signs of rebellion.
Submission was no protection. If any of us were to survive, we must escape these people as quickly as possible.
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The big, bearded slaver and perhaps three dozen of his kind stood around us as we stood around the graves. We were made to parade past each grave and look down at the dead. That was how Harry learned that Zahra was dead and how Lucio Figueroa, who had only this year begun to take an interest in Teresa Lin, came to know of her death. That was how I learned that Vincent Scolari was dead, as his wife and sister believed. And Gray Mora was dead—bloody and broken and dead. And that was how I learned that my Bankole was dead.
There was chaos. Emery Mora and both her daughters began to scream when they saw Gray's mangled body. Natividad and Travis ran into each other's arms. Lucio Figueroa dropped to his knees beside Teresa's grave, and his sister Marta tried to comfort him. Both Scolari women tried to go down into the grave to touch Vincent, to kiss him, to say good-bye. We were all lashed electronically for talking, screaming, crying, cursing, and demanding answers.
And I was lashed into unconsciousness for trying to kill my bearded keeper with a pickax. It would have been worm any amount of pain if only I could have succeeded.
Chapter 12
□ □ □
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Beware:
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.
I MISS ACORN. Of course, I have no memory of being there, but it was where my parents were together and happy during their brief marriage. It was where I was conceived, born, and loved by them both. It could have been, should have been, where I grew up—since it was where my mother had insisted on staying. And even if, in spite of my father's intentions and my mother's dreams, the place had gone on looking more like a nineteenth-century fanning village than a stepping-stone toward the Destiny, I wouldn't have minded. It couldn't have been as grim as where I did grow up.
From the coming of Jarret's Crusaders—that is what they called themselves—my life veers away from Acorn and from my mother. The only surprising thing is that we ever met again.
My mother was right about the gas. It was intended to be used to stop riots, to subdue masses of violent people. Unlike poison gases that kill or maim or gases that caused tears and choking, or nausea, this gas was supposed to be merciful. It was called merciful. It was a paralysis gas. Most of the time, it worked fast and caused no pain and had no nasty aftereffects. But occasionally, children and small adults died of it. For that reason, an antidote was developed to be administered to small people who were overcome. It was given to me, to the rest of the little children of Acorn. For some reason it wasn't given to Zahra Balter. She was obviously an adult, in spite of her small size. Maybe the Crusaders thought age was more important than size. There were no physicians among them. There were no health workers of any land. These were God's people come to bring the true faith to the cultist heathens. I suppose if some of the heathens died of it, that wasn't really very important
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
thursday, november 24, 2033
Thanksgiving Day.
Should I be thankful still to be alive? I'm not sure.
Today is like Sunday—better than Sunday. We have been given extra food and extra rest, and once services were over this morning, we were let alone. I am thankful for that. For once, they aren't watching us. They don't want to spend their holiday guarding us or "teaching" us, as they put it. This means that today I can write. On most days, by the time they let us alone, it's too dark to write and we're exhausted. After our work outside, we're watched and made to memorize and recite sections of the Bible until we can't think or keep our eyes open. I'm thankful to be writing and I'm thankful not to hear my own voice chanting something like, "Unto woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
We're not permitted to speak to one another in our "teachers' " presence, and yet not allowed to be quiet and rest
Now I must find a way to write about the past few weeks, to tell what has happened to us—just to tell it as though it were sane and rational. I'll do that, if for no other reason than to give some order to my scattered thoughts. I do need to write about... about Bankole.
All of our young children are gone. All of them. From Larkin, the youngest, to the Faircloth boys, the oldest, they've vanished.
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.
We do not struggle against this. Our captors order us to kneel, to pray, to sing, to testify, and we do. I've made it clear to the others through my own behavior that we should obey. Why should anyone resist and risk torture or death? What would be the good of that? We'll lie to these murderers, these kidnappers, these thieves, these slavers. We'll tell them anything they want to hear, do all that they require us to do. Someday they'll get careless or their equipment will malfunction or we'll find or create some weakness, some blind spot. Then we'll kill them.
But even though we obey, the Crusaders must have their amusements. In their loving kindness, they use the collars to torment us. "This is nothing compared to the fires of hell," they tell us. "Learn your lessons or you'll suffer like thi
s for all eternity!" How can they do what they do if they believe what they say?
They eat our food and feed us their leavings, either as bowls of obvious table scraps or boiled up in a watery soup with turnips or potatoes from our gardens. They live in our houses and sleep in our beds while we sleep on the floor of the school, men in one room, women in another, no communication between the two permitted.
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.
Only one of us has done that so far—committed suicide. Only one: Emery Mora. She took revenge for what happened to her husband and for the abduction of her two little boys. She seduced one of the Crusaders—one of those who had moved into her own cabin. She convinced him that she was willing and eager to sleep with him. Then sometime during the night, she cut his throat with a knife she had always kept under her mattress. Then she went to the Crusader sleeping in her daughters' room and cut his throat. After mat, she lay down in her bed beside her first victim and cut her own wrists. The three of them were found dead the next morning. Like Gray, Emery had taken substantial revenge.
For her own sake and the sake of her daughters, I wish she had chosen to live. I knew she was depressed, and I tried to encourage her to endure. At night when we were locked up together, we all talked, exchanged news, and tried to encourage one another. But the truth is, if Emery had to die, she chose the best possible way to do it She's let us know that we can kill our captors. Our collars would not stop us. If Emery had not been confined by her collar to that one cabin, she might have killed even more of them.
But why had her collar not stopped her from killing? According to what Marc told me about his captivity, collars protected holders of control units. Was this a matter of a different kind of collar? Perhaps. We couldn't know that None of the information we had collected and shared in the night had to do with different kinds of collars. What we had learned was that all our collars were linked together somehow in a kind of collar network. All could be controlled by the units that our captors wore as belts, but the belts themselves were powered or coordinated or somehow controlled from a larger master unit that Diamond Scott believed was kept in one of the two maggots that are always here. Things Di's rapist had said while she was with him waiting to be raped again made her certain that this was true.
A master control unit protected by the guns, locks, and armor of a maggot was beyond our reach, for now. We had to learn more about it. It occurred to me, though, that the reason the belt unit of Emery's rapist had not saved its owner's life was simple: he had taken it off. What man wore his belt to bed? Both of the men Emery had killed had taken their belts off. Why not? Emery was a slender little woman. A man of ordinary size wouldn't doubt his ability to control her with or without the collar.
Once she had killed, Emery would have tried to use the belt units to free herself, either to escape, to try to free us, or to take further revenge. She would have tried. I'm sure of that. And she would have failed either because she had the wrong fingerprints or because she lacked some other necessary key. It was important to know that, but there was more: she had tried the units, no doubt caused herself pain, but she had failed to set off any alarms. Perhaps there were no alarms. That could be very important someday.
************************************
We were all lashed for what Emery did. The men were made to watch.
We were marched out of the school and lashed as we were made to kneel and pray, to scream out our sins, to beg for forgiveness, and quote Bible verses on command. I kept thinking they would make a mistake and kill some of us. This was an orgy of abuse and humiliation. It went on and on for hours with our "teachers" taking turns, trading off, screaming their hate at us, and calling it love. I had no voice at all left by the time it was over. I was sore all over. An actual beating couldn't have left me feeling any worse. And if anyone had been paying attention to me in particular, they would have seen that I was a sharer. I lost control. I couldn't have concealed anything.
I remember wishing I could die. I remember wondering if in the end they would force us all to go the way Emery did, each of us taking a few of them with us.
************************************
New people have been brought to live among us—men and women from squatter camps and from nearby towns. Most of them seem to be just plain poor people. Some were like the Dovetrees. They produced and sold drugs or homemade beer, wine, or whiskey. And our neighbors the Sullivan and the Gama families have been rounded up and brought here. Some of their children used to attend our school, but none were captured with us. I haven't seen any of them since our capture. Why have they been taken captive and brought here now? No one seems to know.
The new women were stuffed in with us or put into the empty third room of the school—the room that was once our clinic. The men were housed in the big room with our men.
************************************
I need to write about Bankole.
I meant to do that when I began. I need to but I don't want to. It just plain hurts too much.
The Crusaders are making us enlarge our prison and enlarge our cabins, which are now their homes. And we work in the fields as before. We're feeding livestock and cleaning their pens. We're turning compost, we're planting herbs, we're harvesting winter fruits, vegetables and herbs, clearing brush from the hills. We're expected to feed ourselves and our captors. They eat better than we do, of course. After all, we owe them more than we can ever pay, you see, because they're teaching us to forsake our sinful ways. They keep talking about teaching us the meaning of hard work. They tell us that we're no longer squatters, parasites, and thieves. I've earned myself more than one lashing by saying that my husband and I own this land, that we've always paid our taxes on it, and that we've never stolen from anyone.
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 bite 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.
In fact they've only burned copies of the legal papers. I'm not sure that matters, but it's true. Since we got our first truck, we've kept the originals in a safe-deposit box in Eureka—Bankole's idea. And we keep other copies in our various caches, along with a few books, other records, and the usual weapons, food, money, and clothing. I had been scanning Bankole's writing and my journal notebooks and hiding disk copies of them in the caches too. I don't know why I did this. In the case of my journals, it's an indulgence that I've always been a little ashamed of—wasting money copying my own stuff. But I remember I felt much better when I began to do it. Now I only wish I had scanned Emery's plays and Travis's and Gray's music. At least, as far as I know, the caches are still safe.
I've hidden my writing paper, pens, and pencils away in our prison room. Allie and Natividad have helped me loosen a couple of floorboards near the window. With only sharp stones and a couple of old nails as tools, we made a small compartment by scraping a hollow in one of the big lumber girders that supports the floor joists. The joists thems
elves were too slender and too obvious if anyone noticed a loose board. We hoped no "teacher" would peer down into the darkness to see whether anything might be in the girder. Natividad put her wedding ring there too, and Allie put in some drawings that Justin had done. Noriko put in a smooth, oval green stone. She and Michael had found it back when they had gone out salvaging together—back when they could be together.
Interesting that we could scrape into the girder without pain from our collars. Allie thought it meant we might be able to escape by loosening more floorboards and crawling out under the school. But when we got Tori Mora, the slenderest of us, to try to go down, she began to writhe in pain the moment her feet reached the ground. She convulsed and we had to pull her out. So we know one more thing. It's a negative thing, but we needed to know it.
So much is gone. So much has been taken from us and destroyed. If we haven't found a way out, at least we've found a way to keep a few small things. I find myself thinking sometimes that I could bear all this better if I still had Larkin and Bankole, or if I could see Larkin and know that she was alive and all right. If I could only just see her....
************************************
I don't know whether the actions of these so-called Crusaders have any semblance of legality. It's hard to believe they might—stealing the land and freedom of people who've followed the law, earned their own livings, and given no trouble. I can't believe that even Jarret has so mangled the constitution as to make such things legal. At least, not yet. So how could a vigilante group have the nerve to set up a "reeducation" camp and run it with illegally collared people? We've been here for over a month and no one has noticed. Even our friends and customers don't seem to have noticed. The Gamas and the Sullivans aren't rich or powerful, but they've been in these hills for a couple of generations. Hasn't anyone come asking questions about them?
Maybe they have. And who has answered the questions? Crusaders in their other identities as ordinary, law-abiding patriots? I don't think it's too much to assume they have such identities. What lies have they told? Any group wealthy enough to have seven maggots, to support at least several dozen men, and to have what seems to be an endless number of expensive collars must be able to spread any lies 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.
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