I hugged Harry because neither of us had anyone left. Then he and I stood together watching the others, probably feeling the same mixture of relief and pain. Zahra was gone. Bankole was gone. And where were our children?
But there was no time for joy or grief.
"We've got to get into the cabins now," I said, all but herding them before me. "We've got to stop them from fixing the collars. We've got to get their guns before they know what's going on. They'll waste time trying to lash us. Groups of four or more to a cabin. Do it!"
We all know how to work together. We've spent years working together. We separated and went to the houses. Travis, Natividad, and I grabbed the Mora girls and we burst into what had been the Kardos house just as the screaming began outside.
Some of our "teachers" came rushing out of their cabins to see what was wrong, and they were torn to pieces by the people they had so enjoyed tormenting.
Some of the captives, desperate to escape while they could, tried to find their way through the Lazor wire in the dark, and the wire cut their flesh to the bone when they ran into it.
Earthseed made no such lethal mistake. We went into the cabins to arm ourselves, to rid ourselves of our "teachers," and to cut off our damned collars.
My group piled onto the two "teachers" who were there, out of bed, one with his pants and shirt on, and one in long underwear. They could have shot us. But they were so used to depending on their belts to protect them that it was the belts they tried to reach.
One stood and said, "What's going on?" The other lunged at Natividad and me with a wordless shout.
We grappled with them, dragged them down, and strangled them. That simple. Even simple for me. It hurt when they hit me. It hurt when I hit them. And it didn't matter a good goddamn! Once I had my hands on one of them, I just shut my eyes and did it. I never felt their deaths. And I have never been so eager and so glad to kill people.
We couldn't see them very well anyway in the dark cabin, but we made sure they were dead. We didn't let go of them until they were very, very dead. Our makeshift knives were still in the walls and floor of our barracks, but our hands did the job.
And then we had guns. We used a chair, then a night table to smash open a gun cabinet.
More important, then we had wire cutters.
Tori Mora found the cutters in what had once been Noriko Kardos's silverware drawer. Now it was full of small hand tools. We took turns cutting one another's collars off. As long as we wore them, we were in terrible danger. I was afraid every minute, anticipating the convulsing agony that could end our freedom, begin our final torture. Our "teachers" would kill us if they regained control of us. They would kill us very, very slowly. The collars alone would kill us if they somehow switched back on while we were trying to cut through them and twist them off. I had learned over the months that nothing was more tamper-proof than a functioning collar.
I cut the Mora girls' collars off, and Tori cut off mine. Travis and Natividad did the same for one another. And then we were free. Then, no matter what, we were truly free. We all hugged one another again. There was still danger, still work to do, but we were free. We allowed ourselves that moment of intense relief.
Then we went out to find that our people and some of the others had finished the job. The teachers were all dead. I saw that some of the inmates still wore their collars, so I went back into the Kardos cabin for the wire cutters. Once people realized what I was doing—cutting off collars— both outsiders and members of the Earthseed community made a ragged line in front of me. I spent the next several minutes cutting off collars. It was cold, the wind was blowing, but at least it had stopped raining. The eastern sky was beginning to brighten with the dawn. We were free people, all of us.
Now what?
************************************
We stripped what we could from the cabins. We had to. The outsiders were running around grabbing things, tearing or smashing whatever they didn't want, screaming, cheering, ripping curtains from windows, breaking windows, grabbing food and liquor. Amazing how much liquor our "teachers" had had.
We took guns first. We didn't try to stop the outsiders from their orgy of destruction, but we did guard the things we collected: guns, ammunition, clothing, shoes, food. Outsiders understood that. We were like them, taking what we wanted and guarding it. Some of them had found guns, too, but there was a respectful wariness between us. Even people who got crazy drunk didn't come after us.
Someone shot the locks off the gate, and people began to leave.
Several people tried to shoot their way into the single unburied maggot, but it was locked and impervious to any effort we could make. In fact, if even one of our "teachers" had slept in the maggot, he could have defeated our escape. He could have killed us all.
Our own trucks were long gone. One had been destroyed when Gray Mora said his final "no" to slavery. The other had been taken and driven away. We had no idea where. When it was light, I counted seven people dead on the Lazor wire. I suspect most had bled to death, although two had opened their own abdomens, even slicing into their intestines propelled by their mindless lunge for freedom. Lazor wire is impossible to see at night in the rain, and even the lowest street pauper should know the dangers of it. When we were ready to leave, I collected Allie, who had stayed inside the school and just stood at a window, staring out at us. I cut off her collar, then I thought about the Faircloths. I had not cut off their collars. They had not come to me. The two Faircloth boys, of course, had been taken away with the rest of our young children. Alan Faircloth, the father of Beth and Jessica, must have taken his daughters and slipped away—or perhaps the Sullivans had found them and taken their revenge.
I sighed. Either the girls were dead or they were with Alan. Best to say nothing. There had been enough killing.
I gathered what was left of the Earthseed community around me. The sun wasn't visible through the clouds, but the wind had died down, and the sky was pale gray. It was cold, but for once, with our fresh clothing, we were warm enough.
"We can't stay here," I told my people. "We'll have to take as much as we can carry and go. The church will send people here sooner or later."
"Our homes," Noriko Kardos said in a kind of moan.
I nodded. "I know. But they're already gone. They've been gone for a long time." And a particular Earthseed verse occurred to me.
In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
It was an apt Earthseed verse, but not a comforting one. The problem with Earthseed has always been that it isn't a very comforting belief system.
"Let's take one last look through the houses," I said. "We need to look for evidence of what they've done with our children. That's the most important thing we can do next: find the children."
I left Michael and Travis to guard the goods we had collected, and the rest of us went in groups to search the ruins of the houses.
But we found nothing that related to the children. There was money hidden here and there around the cabins, missed by the marauding inmates. There were piles of religious tracts, Bibles, lists of "inmates" brought from Garberville, Eureka, Arcata, Trinidad, and other nearby towns. There was a plan for spring planting, a few books written by President Jarret, or by some ghostwriter. There were personal papers, but nothing about our children, and no addresses. None. Nothing. This could only be deliberate. They feared being found out. Was it us they feared, or someone else?
We searched until almost midday. Then we knew we had to go, too. The roads were mud and water, and it was unlikely that anyone would try to drive up today, but we needed to get a good start. In particular, I wanted to go to our secret caches where we had not only the necessities but copies of records, journals, and in two places, the hand and foot prints of some of our children. Bankole took hand and foot prints of every child he delivered. He labeled them, g
ave a copy to the parents, and kept a copy. I had distributed these copies among two of our caches—the two that only a few of us knew about. I don't know whether the prints will help us get our children back. When I let myself think about it, I have to admit that I don't know even whether our children are alive. I only know that now I have to get to those two caches. They are back in the mountains toward the sea, not toward the road. We can disappear in that country. There are places there where we can shelter and decide what to do. It's one thing to say that we must find our children, and another to figure out how to do that, how to begin.
Who to trust?
************************************
We burned Acorn. No. No, we burned Camp Christian. We burned Camp Christian so that it couldn't be used as Camp Christian anymore. If Christian America still wants the land it stole from us, it will have some serious rebuilding to do. We spread lamp oil and diesel fuel inside the cabins that we built from the trees we cut and the stone and concrete we hauled. We spread oil in the school Grayson Mora had designed and we had all worked so hard to build and make beautiful. We spread it on the bodies of our "teachers." All that we could not take with us, all that the other inmates had not taken or destroyed, we burned. The buildings might not burn to the ground because the rain had soaked everything, but they would be gutted and unsafe. The furniture that we had built or salvaged would burn. The hated flesh would burn.
So, once more, we watched our homes burn. We went into the hills, separating from the last of the other inmates, who went their own ways back to the highway or wherever else they might want to go. From the hills, for a time, we watched. Most of us had seen our homes burn before, but we had not been the ones to set the fires. This time, though, it's too late for fire to be the destroyer that we remembered. The things that we had created and loved had already been destroyed. This time, the fires only cleansed.
Chapter 15
□ □ □
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
We have lived before.
We will live again.
We will be silk,
Stone,
Mind,
Star.
We will be scattered,
Gathered,
Molded,
Probed.
We will live
And we will serve life.
We will shape God
And God will shape us
Again,
Always again,
Forevermore.
THE CRUSADERS DELIBERATELY divided siblings because if they were together, they might support one another in secret heathen practices or beliefs. But if each child was isolated and dropped into a family of good Christian Americans, then each would be changed. Parent pressure, peer pressure, and time would remake them as good Christian Americans.
Sometimes it did, even among the older children of Acorn. Look at the Faircloth boys. One became a Christian American minister. The other rejected Christian America completely. And sometimes the division was utterly destructive. Some of us died of it. Ramon Figueroa Castro committed suicide because, according to one of his foster brothers, "He was too stubborn to try to fit in and forget about his sinful past." Christian America was, at first, much more a refuge for the ignorant and the intolerant than it should have been. Even people who would never beat or burn another person could treat suddenly orphaned or abducted children with cold, self-righteous cruelty.
"Give in," my mother said to the adults of Acorn. "Do as you're told and keep your own counsel. Don't give them excuses to hurt you. Bide your time. Watch your captors. Listen to them. Collect information, pool it, and use it against them." But we kids never heard any of this. We were snatched away and given alone into the hands of people who believed that it was their duty to break us and remake us in the Christian American image. And, of course, breaking people is much easier than putting them together again.
So much agony caused, so much evil done in God's name.
And yet, Christian America had begun by trying to help and to heal as well as to convert. 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.
In preparation for this book, I spoke with several people who were raised in "CA" children's homes or were adopted from CA homes into CA families. What they told me reminded me of my own life with the Alexanders. The homes and adoptive families were not meant to be cruel. Even in the homes, there were no collars except as punishment for the older children, and then only after warnings and lesser punishments had failed. The homes weren't kept by sadists or perverts but by people who believed deeply in what they were doing—or at least by workers who wanted very much to please their employers and keep their jobs. The believers wanted "their" children to believe absolutely in God, in Jarret and in being good Christian American soldiers ready to do battle with every sort of anti-American heathenism. The mercenaries were easier to please. They wanted no children injured or killed while they were on duty. They wanted the required lessons learned, the required tests passed. They wanted peace.
The Alexanders were like a combination of the believer and the mercenary. The Alexanders wanted me to believe, and if they did not love me, at least they took care of me. By the time 1 was old enough for school—Christian American school, of course—I had learned to be quiet and keep out of their way. When 1 succeeded at this, Kayce and Madison would reward me by letting me alone. Kayce took a break from telling me how much inferior I was to Kamaria. Madison took a break from trying to get his sweaty hands under my dress. I would take a book to a quiet corner of the house or yard and read. My earliest books were all either Bible stories or stories of Christian American heroes who, like Asha Vere, did great deeds for the faith. These influenced me. How could they not? I dreamed of doing great deeds myself. I dreamed of making Kayce so proud of me, making her love me the way she loved Kamaria. Both my biological parents were big, strong people. Thanks to them, I was always big for my age, and strong—one more strike against me, since Kamaria had been "small and dainty." i dreamed of doing great, heroic things, but all I really tried to do was hide, vanish, make myself invisible.
It should have been hard for an oversized kid like me to hide that way, but it wasn't. If i did my chores and my homework, I was encouraged to vanish—or rather, I wasn't encouraged to do anything else. In my neighborhood there were only a few kids, and they were all older than I was. To them I was either a nuisance or a pawn. They ignored me or they got me into trouble. Kayce and her friends didn't appreciate any attempts I made to join in their adult conversation. Even when Kayce was alone, she wasn't really interested in anything I had to say. She either told me more than I wanted to know about Kamaria, or she punished me for asking questions about anything else.
Quiet was good. Questioning was bad. Children should be seen and not heard. They should believe what their elders told them, and be content that it was all they needed to know. If there were any brutality in the way I was raised, that was it. Stupid faith was good. Thinking and questioning were bad. I was to be like a sheep in Christ's flock—or Jarret's flock. I was to be quiet and meek. Once I learned that, my childhood was at least physically comfortable.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
sunday, march 4, 2035
So much has happened....
No, that's wrong. Things haven't just happened. I've caused them to happen. I must get back to normal, to knowing and admitting, at least to myself, when I cause things. Slaves are always told that they've caused something bad, done something sinful, made stupid mistakes. Go
od things were the acts of our "teachers" or of God. Bad things were our fault. Either we had done some specific wrong or God was so generally displeased with us that He was punishing the whole camp.
If you hear nonsense like that often enough for long enough, you begin to believe it. You weight yourself down with blame for all the world's pain. Or you decide that you're an innocent victim. Your masters are at fault or God is or Satan is—or maybe things just happen on their own. Slaves protect themselves in all sorts of ways.
But we're not slaves anymore.
I've done this: I sent my people away. We survived slavery together, but I didn't believe that we could survive freedom together. I broke up the Earthseed community and sent its parts in all directions. I believe it was the right thing to do, but I can hardly bear to think about it. Once I've written this, perhaps I can begin to heal. I don't know. All I know now is that I've torn a huge hole in myself. I've sent away those who mean most to me. They were all I had left, and I know I may not see them ever again.
************************************
On Tuesday we escaped from Camp Christian, burning the camp and our keepers as we went. We left behind the bones of our dead and the dream of Acorn as the first Earthseed community. The Sullivans and the Gamas went their own ways. We would not have asked them to leave us, but I was glad they did. We had between us only the money in our caches and the money we had taken from our "teachers." Since we are all now homeless, jobless, and on foot, that money won't go far.
I did ask both families who were going to stay with relatives or friends to get whatever information they could about the children, about the legality of the camp, about the existence of other camps. We all must find out what we can. I've asked them to leave word with the Holly family. The Hollys were neighbors, more distant than the Sullivans and the Gamas, but neighbors. They were good friends of the Sullivans, and there was no rumor of their having been enslaved. We must be careful not to get them into trouble, but if we are careful, and if we check with them now and then, we can all exchange information.
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