Parable of the Talents p-2

by Butler, Octavia

  We can't bathe often enough. We get no hot water and lit­tle soap unless we get kitchen duty. If we ask to be allowed to bathe, it's called vanity. Yet we are viewed with disgust and contempt if we stink. We are said to "stink with sin."

  So be it.

  I have decided to stink like a corpse. I have decided that I would rather get a disease from being filthy than go on at­tracting 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.

  Chapter 14

  □ □ □

  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. 1 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 stand through when we were almost too tired to live. I think a few of the women did it so the guards would treat them better in bed. Some guards liked to hurt you. So for us, talking was dangerous even if no guard saw you do it.

  "Anyway, it didn't seem that anyone gave Day Turner away. Lauren Olamina just told her people that when it hap­pened, they should lie face-down on the ground with their hands behind their necks. Some of them didn't want to. They thought Day was right. But she kept at them, pushing them, asking them about lashings they had seen—one guard lashing eight or nine people at the same time with just one finger.... She got herself lashed over and over, try­ing to talk to them—to the men in her group especially. I think Day worked on them at night when men and women were locked up separate. You know the kind of shit men say to one another when they want to stop other men from lis­tening to a woman. From what I heard, Travis Douglas was the one who kept Olamina's men in line. He wasn't all that big, but he had a force to him. People trusted him, listened to him, liked him. And for some reason, Travis trusted Olam­ina. He didn't like what she was telling them to do, but he ... like he believed in her, you know.

  "When the break came, most of Olamina's people did what she had told them to do. That saved them from being shot or from being beaten as badly as the ones like me who didn't get on the ground fast enough. Day's people started grabbing guards, and the Acorn people dropped like stones. When the pain hit, they were already getting down on the ground, all but a guy named King—Jeff King—big, good-looking blond guy—and three women. Two were named Scolari—sisters or something—and Channa Ryan. I knew Channa Ryan. She just couldn't stand it anymore. She was pregnant, but not showing much yet. She figured if she died taking one of the guards and a guard's baby with her, it would be a good deal. There was this one particular guy— ugly son of a bitch who washed himself maybe once a week. But he used to make her go to his cabin two or three times a week. He had his fun with her. She wanted to get him. She didn't, though.

  "Day's people killed one guard. Just one, and it was a woman who got him—that evil bitch Crystal Blair. She died for it, but she got him. I don't know why she hated the guards so much. They didn't rape her, didn't pay that much attention to her. 1 guess it was just that they took her free­dom. She was a big pain in the ass while she was alive, but people kind of respected her after she was dead. She ripped that guard's throat out with her teeth!

  "Day's people hurt a couple of other guards, but it cost them 15 of their own. Fifteen dead just to start with. Some others were lashed to death or almost to death later. Some were kicked and stomped as well as lashed. I was because I was too close to Crystal Blair when she killed that one guard. Day got killed too, but not until later. Later, they hanged him. By then, he was so busted up, I doubt he knew what was going on. The rest of us got hurt, but not so bad. The ones who could walk had to go out the next day to work. If we had headaches or teeth kicked in or bad gashes or bruises from being kicked with boots, it didn't matter. The guards said if they couldn't beat the devil out of us, they'd work him out of us. The ones who couldn't walk dis­appeared. I don't know what happened to them—maybe killed, maybe taken away for medical treatment. We never saw them again. Everyone else worked for sixteen hours straight. They lashed you if you stopped to pee. You had to just do it on yourself and keep working. They did that for three days straight. Work sixteen hours—
dig a hole. Fill it up. Chop trees. Make firewood. Dig another hole. Fill it up. Paint the cabins. Chop weeds. Dig a hole. Fill it up. Drag rocks from the hills. Break them to gravel. Dig a hole. Fill it up.

  "A couple of people went crazy. One woman just fell down on the ground and started screaming and crying. She wouldn't stop. The other one, a big man with scars all over his face, he started running and screaming—going nowhere, running in circles. They disappeared too. Three days. We didn't get enough to eat. You never got enough to eat unless you got kitchen duty. Every night they preached hellfire and damnation at us and made us memorize Bible verses for at least an hour before they'd let us sleep. Then it was like we hadn't slept at all and they were getting us up to do it all again. It was hell. Plain hell. No devil could have made a better one."

  Cody Smith. She was an old woman when I met her—il­literate, poor, and scarred. If her version of the break and its aftermath is true, it's no wonder my mother never wrote much about it after her captivity. I've never found anyone who heard her talk much about it.

  But at least she got most of her own people through the rebellion. She lost only three, and two others—the Mora sisters—had given away their status as sharers. I wonder that all the sharers hadn't given themselves away. On the other hand, when everyone is screaming, I suppose sharers' screams don't draw special attention. 1 don't know how the Moras gave themselves away, but Cody Smith and other in­formants have told me they did. It may have been the rea­son that after the rebellion, they were raped more often than the other women were. They never gave any other sharer away.

  That was my mother's 2034. I wouldn't have wished it on her. I wouldn't have wished it on anyone.

  ************************************

  What was done to my mother and to many other interned people of her time was illegal in almost every way. It was never legal to collar non-criminals, never legal to confiscate their property or separate husband from wife or to force ei­ther to work without pay of some kind. The matter of sepa­rating children from parents, however, might have been managed almost legally.

  Vagrancy laws were much expanded, and vagrant adults with children could lose custody of the children, unless they were able to establish homes for them within a specified period of time. In some counties, job-placement help was available from churches and local businesses, and the jobs had to provide at least room and board for the family, even if there were no salary. Vagrant women often became un­salaried household help or poorly paid surrogate mothers. In other counties, there was no help at all for vagrants. They had to make a proper home for their children or their chil­dren would be rescued from their inadequate, unfit hands.

  Not surprisingly, children were "rescued" this way much more often from vagrants who were considered heathens than from those who were seen as acceptable Christians. And "heathens" who were poor, but not true vagrants, not homeless, might find themselves reclassified as vagrants so that their children could be placed in good Christian Amer­ica homes. The idea, of course, was to make good Christian Americans of them in spite of the wickedness, or at best, the errors of their parents.

  It's hard to believe that kind of thing happened here, in the United States in the twenty-first century, but it did. It shouldn't have happened, in spite of all the chaos that had gone before. Things were healing. People like my mother were starting small businesses, living simply, becoming more prosperous. Crime was down in spite of the sad things that happened to the Noyer family and to Uncle Marc. Even my mother said that things were improving. Yet Andrew Steele Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them. He didn't get to do everything he wanted to do. He was capable of much greater fascism. So were his most avid followers.

  For people like my mother, Jarret's fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret's first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordi­nary citizens who only wanted order and stability, the fa­natics set up the camps. Meanwhile, Jarret himself was busy with the ridiculous, obscene Al-Can war. If Jarret's thugs weren't locking poor people into collars, Jarret himself was seducing them into the military and feeding them into what turned out to be a useless, stupid exercise in destruction. The already-weakened country all but collapsed. Too many Americans, whether or not they belonged to CA, had family and friends in both Canada and Alaska. 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.

  There was much slaughter on both sides of the Canadian border and there were air and naval attacks on the coastal cities of Alaska. The war was like an exaggeration of the attempted breakout at Camp Christian. Much blood was shed, but little was accomplished. The war began in anger, bitter­ness, and envy at nations who appeared to be on their way up just as our country seemed to be on a downward slide.

  Then the war just petered out. At first, there was much fighting, much destruction, much screaming and flag-waving. Then, gradually, over 2034, a terrible, bitter weari­ness seemed to creep over people. Poor families saw their sons drafted and killed, as they said, "for nothing!" It was harder than ever to buy decent food. Much of our grain over the past few years of climate change and chaos had been im­ported from Canada, after all. In the end, in late 2034, peace talks began. After that, except for a lot of hard feelings and occasional nasty incidents, the war was over. The border be­tween Canada and America stayed where it had been, and Alaska remained an independent country. It was the first state to officially, completely, successfully secede from the union. People were saying that Jarret's home state of Texas would be next.

  In less than a year, Jarret went from being our savior, al­most the Second Coming in some people's minds, to being an incompetent son of a bitch who was wasting our substance on things that didn't matter. I don't mean that everyone changed their feelings toward him. Many people never did. My adopted parents never did, even though he cost them a beautiful, intelligent, loving daughter. I grew up hearing about that daughter endlessly. Her name was Kamaria, and she was perfect. I know this because my mother told me about her at least once during every day of my childhood. I could never look as good as Kamaria did or straighten my room as well or do as well with my studies or even clean a toilet as well—although I find it difficult to believe the perfect little bitch ever cleaned a toilet—or used one.

  I didn't know I was still bitter enough to write a thing like that. I shouldn't be. It's foolish to hate someone you've never met, someone who's never harmed you. 1 believe now that I shifted my resentment safely onto Kamaria, who wasn't there, so that at least until my adolescence, I could love Kayce Alexander. She was, after all, the only mother I knew.

  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. So did her friends when she finally moved back to them in Seattle where her neighborhood and her church were scarred, but still standing. Madison Alexander barely spoke at all. He murmured agreement with whatever Kayce said, and he felt me up a lot, but apart from that, he was quiet. My strongest memory of him, when I was four or five, was of his picking me up, putting me in his lap, and feeling me. I didn't know why I didn't like this. I just learned early to stay out of his way as much as I could.

  from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  sunday, february 25, 2035

  I've been too cold and too miserable, and too sick to do much writing. We've all had flu. We're made to work any­way. Four people died last week during a long, cold rain. One was pregnant. She gave birth alone in the mud. No one was allowed to help her. She and her baby both died. Two were worked until they dropped. When they dropped, the teachers called them laz
y parasites and lashed them. Dur­ing the night, they died—two men. They were all strangers, highway paupers—"vagrants" who had been forced to come here. They were sick and half-starved when they ar­rived. Thanks to the cold, wet weather, the lack of heat in our barracks, and the bad diet, we all catch any contagious disease brought to us from the highway or from the towns. Even our "teachers" are suffering with colds and flu. And when they suffer, they take their misery out on us.

  All this, and one other thing has made us decide that the time has come to make our own break—or die trying.

  We have information—some of us have learned things from our rapists, others just from keeping our eyes and ears open. Also, we have 23 knives—that is, Earthseed, the Sul­livans and the Gamas have 23 knives. That's more than one for each guard. Some we've stolen from the trash heap where our "teachers" teach us wastefulness and slovenli­ness. Other knives are just sharp bits of metal that we've found and wrapped with tape or cloth to protect our hands. They're crude, but they'll cut a human throat. As soon as we've shut our collars off, we'll use the knives. If we're quick and if we move together as we've planned, we should be able to surprise several of our guards before they even think to use their maggots against us.

  We know some of us will die in this. Maybe we'll all die. But the way things are going, we'll die anyway. None of us know how long we're to be kept collared. No one who's come here has been released. Even the few people who try to suck up to the "teachers" when they don't have to are still here, still collared. None of us have heard anything about what's happened to our children. And most of us are sick. None of Earthseed has died since Day's rebellion, but we're sick. And Allie... Allie might die. Or she might be permanently brain damaged. She's one of the reasons I've decided we've got to risk a breakout soon.

  Allie and her lover Mary Sullivan were caught last Sunday.