Parable of the Talents p-2

by Butler, Octavia

  Problem is, we didn't dare take any of the phones from Camp Christian. The outsiders took some of them, but we were afraid we could somehow be traced if we used them. We can't take the chance of being collared again. We might be enslaved for life or executed because we've killed good Christian American citizens. The fact that those citizens had stolen our homes, our land, our freedom, and our children just might be overlooked if the citizens were influential enough. We believe it could happen. Look what had already happened! We're all afraid.

  Among ourselves—Earthseed only—we've agreed on a place that we can use as a message drop. It's down near what's left of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There any of us can leave information to be read, copied, and acted on by the rest of us. It's a good place because we all know where it is and because it's isolated. Getting to it isn't easy. We don't dare leave information or meet in groups in some more convenient place near the highway or near local roads, and we need a way of reaching one another without depending on the Hollys. We'll check with them, but who knows how they'll feel about us now. We'll communicate among ourselves by leaving messages at our secret place, and perhaps by meeting there.

  But I'm going too fast. We had some time together after leaving Camp Christian.

  We walked deeper into the mountains, away from paved roads, south and west to the largest of our caches where we knew there was the cold shelter of a small cave. At the cave, we rested and shared the food that we had brought from Camp Christian. Then we dug out the supplies that we had stored in heavy, heat-sealed plastic sacks and stored there. That gave us all packets of dried foods—fruit, nuts, beans, eggs, and milk—plus blankets and ammunition. Most im­portant, I passed out the infant foot and hand prints that had been stored at this particular cache to the parents present. I gave the Mora girls their younger brothers' prints and they sat staring at them, each holding one. Both their parents were dead. They have only each other and their little broth­ers, if they can find them.

  "They should be with us!" Doe muttered. "No one has the right to take them from us."

  Adela Ortiz folded her son's prints and put them inside her shirt. Then she folded her arms in front of her as though cradling a baby. Larkin's prints and those of Travis and Natividad's kids were at a different location, but I found the prints of Harry's kids, Tabia and Russell, and I gave them to Harry. He just sat looking at them, frowning at them and shaking his head. It was as though he were trying to read an explanation in them for all that had happened to him. Or maybe he was seeing the faces of his children, and Zahra's face, long gone.

  We sat warming ourselves around the fire we had finally dared to start. We had collected wood outside during the last hour of daylight, but we waited until it was dark to try to use it. The wood was wet and wouldn't burn at first. When we did get a small fire going, it seemed to make more smoke than heat. We hoped no one would see the smoke sliding up and out of the cave, or that if people did see it, they would think it was from one of the many squatter camps in the mountains. In winter, these mountains are cold, wet, uncomfortable places, difficult places in which to live without modern conveniences, but they're also places where sensible people mind their own business.

  I sat with Harry, and he went on staring at the prints and shaking his head. Then he began to rock back and forth. His expression in the firelight seemed to crack, to break down, somehow, unable to hold itself together.

  I pulled him to me and held him while he cursed and cried in a harsh, strained, whisper. I realized at some point that I was crying too. I think that within ourselves, we both howled, but somehow, we never got much above a whisper, a rasp. I could feel the howling straining to get out of my throat, the screams that came out as small, ragged cries, his and mine. I don't know how long we sat together, holding one another, going mad inside ourselves, wailing and moaning for the dead and the lost, unable to contain for one more minute 17 months of humiliation and pain.

  We wept ourselves to sleep like tired children. The next day Natividad told me she and Travis had done much the same thing. The others, alone or in groups, had found their own comfort in cathartic weeping, deep sleep, or frantic, furtive lovemaking at the back of the cave. We were to­gether at last, comforting one another, and yet I think each of us was alone, straining toward the others, some part of ourselves still trapped back in the uncertainty and fear, the pain and desolation of Camp Christian. We strained toward some kind of release, some human contact, some way into the normal, human grieving that had been denied us for so long. It amazes me that we were able to behave as sanely as we did.

  The next morning Lucio Figueroa and Adela Ortiz awoke tangled together at the back of the cave. They stared at one another first in horror and confusion, then in deep embarrassment, then in resignation. He put his arm around her, pulled one of the blankets we had salvaged around her, and she leaned against him.

  Jorge Cho and Diamond Scott awoke in a similar tangle, although they seemed both unsurprised and unembarrassed.

  Michael and Noriko awoke together and lay still against one another for a long time, saying nothing, doing nothing. It seemed enough for each of them that at last they could wake up in each other's arms.

  The Mora girls awoke together, their faces still marked with the tears they had shed the night before.

  Somehow Aubrey Dovetree and Nina Noyer had found one another during the night, although they had never paid much attention to one another before. Once they were awake, they moved apart in obvious discomfort.

  Only Allie awoke alone, huddled in fetal position in her blanket. I had forgotten her. And hadn't she lost even more than the rest of us?

  I put her between Harry and me, and we started a break­fast fire with the wood we had left over from the night. We put together a breakfast of odds and ends, and Harry and I made her eat. I borrowed a comb from Diamond Scott, who had, in her neatness, managed to find one before we left Camp Christian. With it I combed Allie's hair, then my own. Things like that had begun to matter again, somehow. We all began to try to put ourselves together as respectable human beings again. For so long we had been filthy slaves in filthy rags cultivating filthy habits in the hope of avoiding rape or lashing. I found myself longing for a deep tub of hot, clean water. Thanks to our "teach­ers," filth and degradation had become so ordinary that sometimes we forgot that we were in rags and that we stank. In our exhaustion, fear, and pain, we came to trea­sure those moments when we could just lie down and for­get, when no one was hurting us, when we had something to eat. Such animal comforts were all we could afford. Remembering wasn't safe. You could lose your mind, remembering.

  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.

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

  “Today or tomorrow, we must separate," I said. "We must leave here in small groups." Breakfast was over, and we had all made ourselves a little more presentable. I could see that the others had begun to look at one another, begun to wonder what to do next.

  I knew what we had to do. I had known almost from the time we were collared that even if we managed to free our­selves, we wouldn't be able to stay together.

  "Earthseed continues," I said into the silence, "but Acorn is dead. There are too many of us. We would be too easy to spot, too easy to recapture or kill."

  "What can we do?" Aubrey Dovetree demanded.

  And Harry Balter said in a dead voice, "We've got to split up. We've got to go our separate ways and find our kids."

  "No," Nina Noyer whispered, and then louder, "No! Everybody's gone, and now you want me to go away by myself again? No!" Now it was a shout.

  "Yes," I said to her, only to her, my voice as soft as I
could make it. "Nina, you come with me. My family is gone :oo. Come with me. We'll look for your sisters and my daughter and Allie's son."

  "I want us all to stay together," she whispered, and she began to cry.

  "If we stay together, we'll be collared or dead in no time," Harry said. He looked at me. "I'll go with you too. You'll need help. And ... I want my kids back. I'm scared to death of what might be happening to them. That's all I can trunk about now. That's all I care about."

  And Allie put her hand on his shoulder, trying to give comfort.

  "No one should leave alone," I said. It's too dangerous to be alone. But don't gather into groups of more than five or six."

  "What about us?" Doe Mora said, holding her sister's hand. It was hard at that moment to remember that the two were not blood relatives. Two lonely, frightened ex-slaves met and loved one another and married, and their daughters Doe and Tori became sisters. And they're sisters now, or­phaned and alone. I envy their closeness, and I fear for them. They're still kids, and they were abused almost past bearing at Camp Christian. They look starved and haunted. In a way that I can't quite describe, they look old. Our "teachers" realized that they were sharers back during Day's rebellion, and abused them all the more for it, but the girls never gave any of the rest of us away. Yet in spite of their courage, it would be so easy for them to wind up with new collars around their necks. Or they could wind up de­ciding to prostitute themselves—just to eat.

  "You come with us," Natividad said. "We intend to find our children. If we can, we'll find your brothers as well."

  Doe bit her lips. "I'm pregnant," she said. 'Tori isn't, but I am."

  "It's a wonder we all aren't," I said. "We were slaves. Now we're free." I looked at her. She's a tall, slender, delicate-looking girl, large-eyed like her namesake. "What do you want to do, Doe?"

  Doe swallowed. "I don't know."

  "We'll take care of her," Travis said. "Whatever she de­cides to do, we'll help her. Her father was a good man. He was a friend of mine. We'll take care of her."

  I nodded, relieved. Travis and Natividad are two of the most competent, dependable people I know. They'll sur­vive, and if the girls are with them, the girls will survive too.

  Others began forming themselves into groups. Adela Ortiz, who first thought that she would join Travis, Nativi­dad, and the Moras, decided in the end to stay with Lucio Figueroa and his sister. I'm not sure how she and Lucio wound up in each other's arms the night before, but I think now that Adela may be looking for a permanent relation­ship with Lucio. He's much older than she is, and I think she hopes he'll want her and want to take care of her. But Adela is pregnant too. She's not showing yet, but according to what she's told me, she believes she's at least two months pregnant.

  Also, Lucio is still carrying Teresa Lin around with him. Her death and the way she died has made him very, very quiet—kind, but distant. He wasn't like that back in Acorn. His own wife and children were killed before he met us. He had invested all his time and energy in helping his sister with her children. He had only begun to reach out again when Teresa joined us. Now ... now perhaps he's decided that it hurts too much to begin to care for someone, then lose her.

  It does hurt. It's terrible. I know that. But I know Adela, too. She needs to be needed. I remember she hated being pregnant the first time, hated the men who had gang-raped her. But she loved taking care of her baby. She was an at­tentive, loving mother, and she was happy. What's in store for her now, I don't know.

  And yet in spite of my fears for my friends, my people, in spite of my longing to hold together a community that must divide, all this was easier than I had thought it would be—easier than I thought it could be. We'd all worked so well together for six years, and we'd endured so much as slaves. Now we were dividing ourselves, deciding how to go our separate ways. I don't mean that it was easy—just that it wasn't as hard as I expected. God is Change. I've taught that for six years. It's true, and I suppose it's paved the way for us now. Earthseed prepares you to live in the world that is and try to shape the world that you want. But none of it is really easy.

  We spent the rest of the day going around to the other caches and parceling out the supplies we'd left in them and gathering the other sets of children's hand and foot prints. Then we had one more night together. Once we had gone to all the caches—one had been raided, but the rest were in­tact—we spent the night in another shallow cave. It was raining again, and cold. That was good because it would make tracking us pretty much impossible. On that last night, when we'd eaten, we dropped off quickly to sleep. We'd been tramping through the mountains all day, carry­ing packs that got heavier with each stop, and we were tired. But the next morning before we parted, we held a final Gathering. We sang Earthseed verses, to the tunes that Gray Mora and Travis had written. We Remembered our dead, including our dead Acorn. Each of us spoke of it, Re­membering.

  "You are Earthseed," I said to them, at last. "You always will be. I love you. I love you all." I stopped for a moment, struggling to hold on to what was left of my self-control.

  Somehow, I went on. "Not everyone in this country stands with Andrew Jarret," I said. "We know that. Jarret will pass, and we will still be here. We know more about survival than most people. The proof is that we have sur­vived. We have tools that other people don't have, and that they need. The time will come again when we can share what we know." I paused, swallowed. "Stay well," I told them. 'Take care of one another."

  We agreed to visit the newly designated Humboldt Red­woods information drop every month or two for a year—at least that long. We agreed that it was best that each group not know yet where the other groups were going—so that if one group was caught, it couldn't be forced to betray the others. We agreed it was best not to live in the Eureka and Arcata area because that's where most of our jailers lived, both the dead ones and the off-shift ones who were still alive. Each city was home to a big Christian American church and several affiliated organizations. We might have to go to these cities to look for our children, but once we've found them and taken them back, we should go elsewhere to live.

  "And change your names," I told them. "As soon as you can, buy yourselves new identities. Then relax. 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. Then-own reactions will tell you how best to damage them or scare them off.

  "I don't think you'll have to do much of that kind of thing. The chances of any of us running into someone who knew us at Camp Christian are small. It's just that we need to be mentally prepared for it if it happens. God is Change. Look after yourselves."

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

  And we went our separate ways. Travis said we would be better off not walking on the highway unless we could lose ourselves in a crowd. If there were no crowds, he said, we should walk through the hills. It would be harder, but safer. I agreed.

  We hugged one another. It took a lot of hugging. It took the possibility of coming together again someday in another state or another country or a post-Jarret America. It took tears and fear and hope. It was terrible, that final leavetaking. Deciding to do it was easier than I thought. Doing it was much harder. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

  Then I was alone with Allie, Harry, and Nina. We four slogged through the mud, heading north. We traveled through the familiar hills, to the outskirts of Eureka, and finally, to Georgetown. I was the one who suggested George­town once we had separated from the others.

  "Why?" Harry demanded in a cold voice that didn't sound much like Harry.

  "Because it's a good place to pick up information,'' I said. "And because I know Dolores Ramos George. She may not be able to help us, but she won't talk about our being there."
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  Harry nodded.

  "What's Georgetown?" Nina asked.

  "A squatter settlement," I told her. "A big, nasty one. We went there when we were looking for you and your sister. You can get lost in there. People aren't nosy, and the Georges are all right."

  "They're all right." Allie agreed. "They don't turn people in." These were her first voluntary sentences since her lash­ing. I looked at her, and she repeated, "They're all right. We can look for Justin from Georgetown."

  Chapter 16

  □ □ □

  From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  The Destiny of Earthseed

  Is to take root among the stars.

  It is to live and to thrive

  On new earths.

  It is to become new beings

  And to consider new questions.

  It is to leap into the heavens

  Again and again.

  It is to explore the vastness

  Of heaven.

  It is to explore the vastness

  Of ourselves.

  MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY is of a doll. I was about three years old, maybe four. I don't know where the doll came from. I still don't know. I had never seen one before. I had never been told that they were sinful or forbidden or even that they ex­isted. I suspect now that this doll had been thrown over our fence and abandoned. I found it at the foot of the big pine tree that grew in our backyard.

  The doll had been made in the image of an adolescent blond-haired blue-eyed girl. I remember that it was very straight and thin. It was dressed in a scrap of pink cloth. I remember feeling the knot in the back of it where three ends of the scrap were tied over one shoulder and around the waist. The knot was an oddly soft lump against the hard plastic of the doll's body, and as soon as my fingers found it, I began to pick at it Then I chewed on it Then I examined the coarse, yellow hair. It looked like hair, but when I touched it it didn't feel right And it both­ered me that the legs didn't move. They just stuck out stiff, the feet shaped in permanent tiptoes. I didn't know how to play with a doll, but I knew how to look at it feel it taste it, file it away in my memory as one of the new, strange things to come into my world.