Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

  I can’t remember when any of us have had a roof repaired by a professional. We all have Spanish tile roofs, and that’s good. A tile roof is, I suspect, more secure and lasting than wood or asphalt shingles. But time, wind, and earthquakes have taken a toll. Tree limbs have done some damage, too. Yet no one has extra money for anything as nonessential as roof repair. At best, some of the neighborhood men go up with whatever materials they can scavenge and create makeshift patches. No one’s even done that for a while. If it only rains once every six or seven years, why bother?

  Our roof is all right so far, and the barrels and things we put out after services this morning are full or filling. Good, clean, free water from the sky. If only it came more often.

  MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2025

  Still raining.

  No thunder today, though there was some last night. Steady drizzle, and occasional, heavy showers all day. All day. So different and beautiful. I’ve never felt so overwhelmed by water. I went out and walked in the rain until I was soaked. Cory didn’t want me to, but I did it anyway. It was so wonderful. How can she not understand that? It was so incredible and wonderful.

  TUESDAY, MARCH 4, 2025

  Amy Dunn is dead.

  Three years old, unloved, and dead. That doesn’t seem reasonable or even possible. She could read simple words and count to thirty. I taught her. She so much loved getting attention that she stuck to me during school hours and drove me crazy. Didn’t want me to go to the bathroom without her.

  Dead.

  I had gotten to like her, even though she was a pest.

  Today I walked her home after class. I had gotten into the habit of walking her home because the Dunns wouldn’t send anyone for her.

  “She knows the way,” Christmas said. “Just send her over. She’ll get here all right.”

  I didn’t doubt that she could have. She could look across the street, and across the center island, and see her house from ours, but Amy had a tendency to wander. Sent home alone, she might get there or she might wind up in the Montoya garden, grazing, or in the Moss rabbit house, trying to let the rabbits out. So I walked her across, glad for an excuse to get out in the rain again. Amy loved it, too, and we lingered for a moment under the big avocado tree on the island. There was a navel orange tree at the back end of the island, and I picked a pair of ripe oranges—one for Amy and one for me. I peeled both of them, and we ate them while the rain plastered Amy’s scant colorless hair against her head and made her look bald.

  I took her to her door and left her in the care of her mother.

  “You didn’t have to get her so wet,” Tracy complained.

  “Might as well enjoy the rain while it lasts,” I said, and I left them.

  I saw Tracy take Amy into the house and shut the door. Yet somehow Amy wound up outside again, wound up near the front gate, just opposite the Garfield/Balter/Dory house. Jay Garfield found her there when he came out to investigate what he thought was another bundle that someone had thrown over the gate. People toss us things sometimes—gifts of envy and hate: A maggoty, dead animal, a bag of shit, even an occasional severed human limb or a dead child. Dead adults have been left lying just beyond our wall. But these were all outsiders. Amy was one of us.

  Someone shot Amy right through the metal gate. It had to be an accidental hit because you can’t see through our gate from the outside. The shooter either fired at someone who was in front of the gate or fired at the gate itself, at the neighborhood, at us and our supposed wealth and privilege. Most bullets wouldn’t have gotten through the gate. It’s supposed to be bulletproof. But it’s been penetrated a couple of times before, high up, near the top. Now we have six new bullet holes in the lower portion—six holes and a seventh dent, a long, smooth gauge where a bullet had glanced off without breaking through.

  We hear so much gunfire, day and night, single shots and odd bursts of automatic weapons fire, even occasional blasts from heavy artillery or explosions from grenades or bigger bombs. We worry most about those last things, but they’re rare. It’s harder to steal big weapons, and not many people around here can afford to buy the illegal ones—or that’s what Dad says. The thing is, we hear gunfire so much that we don’t hear it. A couple of the Baiter kids said they heard shooting, but as usual, they paid no attention to it. It was outside, beyond the wall, after all. Most of us heard nothing except the rain.

  Amy was going to turn four in a couple of weeks. I had planned to give her a little party with my kindergartners.

  God, I hate this place.

  I mean, I love it. It’s home. These are my people. But I hate it. It’s like an island surrounded by sharks—except that sharks don’t bother you unless you go in the water. But our land sharks are on their way in. It’s just a matter of how long it takes for them to get hungry enough.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5, 2025

  I walked in the rain again this morning. It was cold, but good. Amy has already been cremated. I wonder if her mother is relieved. She doesn’t look relieved. She never liked Amy, but now she cries. I don’t think she’s faking. The family has spent money it could not afford to get the police involved to try to find the killer. I suspect that the only good this will do will be to chase away the people who live on the sidewalks and streets nearest to our wall. Is that good? The street poor will be back, and they won’t love us for sicking the cops on them. It’s illegal to camp out on the street the way they do—the way they must—so the cops knock them around, rob them if they have anything worth stealing, then order them away or jail them. The miserable will be made even more miserable. None of that can help Amy. I suppose, though, that it will make the Dunns feel better about the way they treated her.

  On Saturday, Dad will preach Amy’s funeral. I wish I didn’t have to be there. Funerals have never bothered me before, but this one does.

  “You cared about Amy,” Joanne Garfield said to me when I complained to her. We had lunch together today. We ate in my bedroom because it’s still raining off and on, and the rest of the house was full of all the kids who hadn’t gone home to eat lunch. But my room is still mine. It’s the one place in the world where I can go and not be followed by anyone I don’t invite in. I’m the only person I know who has a bedroom to herself. These days, even Dad and Cory knock before they open my door. That’s one of the best things about being the only daughter in the family. I have to kick my brothers out of here all the time, but at least I can kick them out. Joanne is an only child, but she shares a room with three younger girl cousins—whiny Lisa, always demanding and complaining; smart, giggly Robin with her near-genius I.Q.; and invisible Jessica who whispers and stares at her feet and cries if you give her a dirty look. All three are Baiters—Harry’s sisters and the children of Joanne’s mother’s sister. The two adult sisters, their husbands, their eight children, and their parents Mr. and Mrs. Dory are all squeezed into one five-bedroom house. It isn’t the most crowded house in the neighborhood, but I’m glad I don’t have to live like that.

  “Almost no one cared about Amy,” Joanne said. “But you did.”

  “After the fire, I did,” I said. “I got scared for her then. Before that, I ignored her like everyone else.”

  “So now you’re feeling guilty?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  I looked at her, surprised. “I mean it. No. I hate that she’s dead, and I miss her, but I didn’t cause her death. I just can’t deny what all this says about us.”

  “What?”

  I felt on the verge of talking to her about things I hadn’t talked about before. I’d written about them. Sometimes I write to keep from going crazy. There’s a world of things I don’t feel free to talk to anyone about.

  But Joanne is a friend. She knows me better than most people, and she has a brain. Why not talk to her? Sooner or later, I have to talk to someone.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. She had opened a plastic container of bean salad. Now she put it down on my night table.

&n
bsp; “Don’t you ever wonder if maybe Amy and Mrs. Sims are the lucky ones?” I asked. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder what’s going to happen to the rest of us?”

  There was a clap of dull, muffled thunder, and a sudden heavy shower. Radio weather reports say today’s rain will be the last of the four-day series of storms. I hope not.

  “Sure I think about it,” Joanne said. “With people shooting little kids, how can I not think about it?”

  “People have been killing little kids since there’ve been people,” I said.

  “Not in here, they haven’t. Not until now.”

  “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it. We got a wake-up call. Another one.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Amy was the first of us to be killed like that. She won’t be the last.”

  Joanne sighed, and there was a little shudder in the sigh. “So you think so, too.”

  “I do. But I didn’t know you thought about it at all.”

  “Rape, robbery, and now murder. Of course I think about it. Everyone thinks about it. Everyone worries. I wish I could get out of here.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “That’s it, isn’t it? There’s nowhere to go.”

  “There might be.”

  “Not if you don’t have money. Not if all you know how to do is take care of babies and cook.”

  I shook my head. “You know much more than that.”

  “Maybe, but none of it matters. I won’t be able to afford college. I won’t be able to get a job or move out of my parents’ house because no job I could get would support me and there are no safe places to move. Hell, my parents are still living with their parents.”

  “I know,” I said. “And as bad as that is, there’s more.”

  “Who needs more? That’s enough!” She began to eat the bean salad. It looked good, but I thought I might be about to ruin it for her.

  “There’s cholera spreading in southern Mississippi and Louisiana,” I said. “I heard about it on the radio yesterday. There are too many poor people—illiterate, jobless, homeless, without decent sanitation or clean water. They have plenty of water down there, but a lot of it is polluted. And you know that drug that makes people want to set fires?”

  She nodded, chewing.

  “It’s spreading again. It was on the east coast. Now it’s in Chicago. The reports say that it makes watching a fire better than sex. I don’t know whether the reporters are condemning it or advertising it.” I drew a deep breath. “Tornadoes are smashing hell out of Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, and two or three other states. Three hundred people dead so far. And there’s a blizzard freezing the northern midwest, killing even more people. In New York and New Jersey, a measles epidemic is killing people. Measles!”

  “I heard about the measles,” Joanne said. “Strange. Even if people can’t afford immunizations, measles shouldn’t kill.”

  “Those people are half dead already,” I told her. “They’ve come through the winter cold, hungry, already sick with other diseases. And, no, of course they can’t afford immunizations. We’re lucky our parents found the money to pay for all our immunizations. If we have kids, I don’t see how we’ll be able to do even that for them.”

  “I know, I know.” She sounded almost bored. “Things are bad. My mother is hoping this new guy, President Donner, will start to get us back to normal.”

  “Normal,” I muttered. “I wonder what that is. Do you agree with your mother?”

  “No. Donner hasn’t got a chance. I think he would fix things if he could, but Harry says his ideas are scary. Harry says he’ll set the country back a hundred years.”

  “My father says something like that. I’m surprised that Harry agrees.”

  “He would. His own father thinks Donner is God. Harry wouldn’t agree with him on anything.”

  I laughed, distracted, thinking about Harry’s battles with his father. Neighborhood fireworks—plenty of flash, but no real fire.

  “Why do you want to talk about this stuff,” Joanne asked, bringing me back to the real fire. “We can’t do anything about it.”

  “We have to.”

  “Have to what? We’re fifteen! What can we do?”

  “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”

  She just stared at me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I was rolling—too fast, maybe. “I’m talking about this place, Jo, this cul-de-sac with a wall around it. I’m talking about the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people outside decide to come in. I’m talking about what we’ve got to do before that happens so that we can survive and rebuild—or at least survive and escape to be something other than beggars.”

  “Someone’s going to just smash in our wall and come in?”

  “More likely blast it down, or blast the gate open. It’s going to happen some day. You know that as well as I do.”

  “Oh, no I don’t,” she protested. She sat up straight, almost stiff, her lunch forgotten for the moment. I bit into a piece of acorn bread that was full of dried fruit and nuts. It’s a favorite of mine, but I managed to chew and swallow without tasting it.

  “Jo, we’re in for trouble. You’ve already admitted that.”

  “Sure,” she said. “More shootings, more break-ins. That’s what I meant.”

  “And that’s what will happen for a while. I wish I could guess how long. We’ll be hit and hit and hit, then the big hit will come. And if we’re not ready for it, it will be like Jericho.”

  She held herself rigid, rejecting. “You don’t know that! You can’t read the future. No one can.”

  “You can,” I said, “if you want to. It’s scary, but once you get past the fear, it’s easy. In LA. some walled communities bigger and stronger than this one just aren’t there any more. Nothing left but ruins, rats, and squatters. What happened to them can happen to us. We’ll die in here unless we get busy now and work out ways to survive.”

  “If you think that, why don’t you tell your parents. Warn them and see what they say.”

  “I intend to as soon as I think of a way to do it that will reach them. Besides… I think they already know. I think my father does, anyway. I think most of the adults know. They don’t want to know, but they do.”

  “My mother could be right about Donner. He really could do some good.”

  “No. No, Donner’s just a kind of human banister.”

  “A what?”

  “I mean he’s like…like a symbol of the past for us to hold on to as we’re pushed into the future. He’s nothing. No substance. But having him there, the latest in a two-and-a-half-century-long line of American Presidents make people feel that the country, the culture that they grew up with is still here—that we’ll get through these bad times and back to normal.”

  “We could,” she said. “We might. I think someday we will.” No, she didn’t. She was too bright to take anything but the most superficial comfort from her denial. But even superficial comfort is better than none, I guess. I tried another tactic.

  “Did you ever read about bubonic plague in medieval Europe?” I asked.

  She nodded. She reads a lot the way I do, reads all kinds of things. “A lot of the continent was depopulated,” she said. “Some survivors thought the world was coming to an end.”

  “Yes, but once they realized it wasn’t, they also realized there was a lot of vacant land available for the taking, and if they had a trade, they realized they could demand better pay for their work. A lot of things changed for the survivors.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The changes.” I thought for a moment. They were slow changes compared to anything that might happen here, but it took a plague to
make some of the people realize that things could change.”

  “So?”

  “Things are changing now, too. Our adults haven’t been wiped out by a plague so they’re still anchored in the past, waiting for the good old days to come back. But things have changed a lot, and they’ll change more. Things are always changing. This is just one of the big jumps instead of the little step-by-step changes that are easier to take. People have changed the climate of the world. Now they’re waiting for the old days to come back.”

  “Your father says he doesn’t believe people changed the climate in spite of what scientists say. He says only God could change the world in such an important way.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  She opened her mouth, looked at me, then closed it again. After a while, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “My father has his blind spots,” I said. “He’s the best person I know, but even he has blind spots.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “We can’t make the climate change back, no matter why it changed in the first place. You and I can’t. The neighborhood can’t. We can’t do anything.”

  I lost patience. “Then let’s kill ourselves now and be done with it!”

  She frowned, her round, too serious face almost angry. She tore bits of peel from a small navel orange. “What then?” she demanded. “What can we do?”

  I put the last bite of my acorn bread down and went around her to my night table. I took several books from the deep bottom drawer and showed them to her. “This is what I’ve been doing—reading and studying these over the past few months. These books are old like all the books in this house. I’ve also been using Dad’s computer when he lets me—to get new stuff.”

  Frowning, she looked them over. Three books on survival in the wilderness, three on guns and shooting, two each on handling medical emergencies, California native and naturalized plants and their uses, and basic living: logcabin-building, livestock raising, plant cultivation, soap making—that kind of thing. Joanne caught on at once.