Parable of the Sower

by Octavia E. Butler

  Zahra grinned. “Reminds me of me at that age. They’ll both be pains in the ass. I vote we try them. If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.”

  I looked at Travis and Harry, standing together. “What do you guys say?”

  “I say you’re going soft,” Harry said. “You would have raised hell if we’d tried to take in a beggar woman and her child a few weeks ago.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. I would have. And maybe that’s the attitude we should keep. But these two… I think they might be worth something—and I don’t think they’re dangerous. If I’m wrong, we can always dump them.”

  “They might not take to being dumped,” Travis said. Then he shrugged. “I don’t want to be the one to send that little kid out to be one more thief-beggar-whore. But think, Lauren. If we let them stay, and it doesn’t work out, it might be damned hard to get rid of them. And if they turn out to have friends around here—friends that they’re scouting for, we might have to kill them.”

  Both Harry and Natividad began to protest. Kill a woman and a child? No! Not possible! Never!

  The rest of us let them talk. When they ran down, I said, “It could get that bad, I suppose, but I don’t think it will. That woman wants to live. Even more, she wants the kid to live. I think she’d put up with a lot for the kid’s sake, and I don’t think she’d put the kid in danger by scouting for a gang. Gangs are more direct out here, anyway. They don’t need scouts.”

  Silence.

  “Shall we try them?” I asked. “Or shall we turn them away now?”

  “I’m not against them,” Travis said. “Let them stay, for the kid’s sake. But let’s go back to having two watchers at once during the night. How the hell did those two get in here like that, anyway?”

  Jill shrank a little. “They could have gotten in anytime last night,” she said. “Anytime.”

  “What we don’t see can kill us,” I said. “Jill, you didn’t see them?”

  “They could have been there when I took over the watch!”

  “You still didn’t see them. They could have cut your throat—or your sister’s.”

  “Well. They didn’t.”

  “The next one might.” I leaned toward her. “The world is full of crazy, dangerous people. We see signs of that every day. If we don’t watch out for ourselves, they will rob us, kill us, and maybe eat us. It’s a world gone to hell, Jill, and we’ve only got each other to keep it off us.”

  Sullen silence.

  I reached out and took her hand. “Jill.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” she said. “You can’t prove I—”

  “Jill!”

  She shut up and stared at me.

  “Listen, no one is going to beat you up, for heaven sake, but you did something wrong, something dangerous. You know you did.”

  “So what do you want her to do?” Allie demanded. “Get on her knees and say she’s sorry?”

  “I want her to love her own life and yours enough not to be careless. That’s what I want. That’s what you should want, now more than ever. Jill?”

  Jill closed her eyes. “Oh shit!” she said. And then, “All right, all right! I didn’t see them. I really didn’t. I’ll watch better. No one else will get by me.”

  I clasped her hand for a moment longer, then let it go. “Okay. Let’s get out of here. Let’s collect that scared woman and her scared little kid and get out of here.”

  The two scared people turned out to be the most racially mixed that I had ever met. Here’s their story, put together from the fragments they told us during the day and tonight. The woman had a Japanese father, a black mother, and a Mexican husband, all dead. Only she and her daughter are left. Her name is Emery Tanaka Solis. Her daughter is Tori Solis. Tori is nine years old, not seven as I had guessed. I suspect she has rarely had enough to eat in her life. She’s tiny, quick, quiet, and hungry-eyed. She hid bits of food in her filthy rags until we made her a new dress from one of Bankole’s shirts. Then she hid food in that. Although Tori is nine, her mother is only twenty-three. At thirteen, Emery married a much older man who promised to take care of her. Her father was already dead, killed in someone else’s gunfight. Her mother was sick, and dying of tuberculosis. The mother pushed Emery into marriage to save her from victimization and starvation in the streets.

  Up to that point, the situation was dreary, but normal. Emery had three children over the next three years—a daughter and two sons. She and her husband did farm work in trade for food, shelter, and hand-me-downs. Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. Rent was charged for the workers’ shacks. Workers had to pay for food, for clothing—new or used—for everything they needed, and, of course they could only spend their company notes at the company store. Wages—surprise!—were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers.

  Either way, such debt slaves could be forced to work longer hours for less pay, could be “disciplined” if they failed to meet their quotas, could be traded and sold with or without their consent, with or without their families, to distant employers who had temporary or permanent need of them. Worse, children could be forced to work off the debt of their parents if the parents died, became disabled, or escaped.

  Emery’s husband sickened and died. There was no doctor, no medicine beyond a few expensive over-the-counter preparations and the herbs that the workers grew in their tiny gardens. Jorge Francisco Solis died in fever and pain on the earthen floor of his shack without ever seeing a doctor. Bankole said it sounded as though he died of peritonitis brought on by untreated appendicitis. Such a simple thing. But then, there’s nothing more replaceable than unskilled labor.

  Emery and her children became responsible for the Solis debt. Accepting this, Emery worked and endured until one day, without warning, her sons were taken away. They were one and two years younger than her daughter, and too young to be without both their parents. Yet they were taken. Emery was not asked to part with them, nor was she told what would be done with them. She had terrible suspicions when she recovered from the drug she had been given to “quiet her down.” She cried and demanded the return of her sons and would not work again until her masters threatened to take her daughter as well.

  She decided then to run away, to take her daughter and brave the roads with their thieves, rapists, and cannibals. They had nothing for anyone to steal, and rape wasn’t something they could escape by remaining slaves. As for the cannibals…well, perhaps they were only fantasies—lies intended to frighten salves into accepting their lot.

  “There are cannibals,” I told her as we ate that night. “We’ve seen them. I think, though, that they’re scavengers, not killers. They take advantage of road kills, that kind of thing.”

  “Scavengers kill,” Emery said. “If you get hurt or if you look sick, they come after you.”

  I nodded, and she went on with her story. Late one night, she and Tori slipped out past the armed guards and electrified fences, the sound and motion detectors and the dogs. Both knew how to be quiet, how to fade from cover to cover, how to lie still for hours. Both were very fast. Slaves learned things like that—the ones who lived did. Emery and Tori must have been very lucky.

  Emery had some notion of finding her sons and getting them back, but she had no idea where they had been taken. They had been driven away in a truck; she knew that much. But she didn’t know even which way the truck turned when it reached the highway. Her parents had taught her to read and write, but she had seen no writing about her sons. She had to admit after a while that all she could do was save her daughter.
>
  Living on wild plants and whatever they could “find” or beg, they drifted north. That was the way Emery said it: they found things. Well, if I were in her place, I would have found a few things, too.

  A gang fight drove her to us. Gangs are always a special danger in cities. If you keep to the road while you’re in individual gang territories, you might escape their attentions. We have so far. But the overgrown park land where we camped last night was, according to Emery, in dispute. Two gangs shot at each other and called insults and accusations back and forth. Now and then they stopped to shoot at passing trucks. During one of these intervals, Emery and Tori who had camped close to the roadside had slipped away.

  “One group was coming closer to us,” Emery said. “They would shoot and run. When they ran, they got closer. We had to get away. We couldn’t let them hear us or see us. We found your clearing, but we didn’t see you. You know how to hide.”

  That, I suppose was a compliment. We try to disappear into the scenery when that’s possible. Most of the time it isn’t. Tonight it isn’t. And tonight we watch two at a time.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2027

  Tori Solis has found us two more companions today: Grayson Mora and his daughter Doe. Doe was only a year younger than Tori, and the two little girls, walking along, going the same way, became friends. Today we turned west on State Highway 20 and were heading back toward U.S. 101. We spent a lot of time talking about settling on Bankole’s land, about jobs and crops and what we might build there.

  Meanwhile, the two little girls, Tori and Doe were making friends and pulling their parents together. The parents were alike enough to attract my attention. They were about the same age—which meant that the man had become a father almost as young as the woman had become a mother. That wasn’t unusual, but it was unusual that he had taken charge of his child.

  He was a tall, thin, black Latino, quiet, protective of his child, yet tentative, somehow. He liked Emery. I could see that. Yet on some level he wanted to get away from her—and away from us. When we left the road to make camp, he would have gone on if his daughter had not begged, then cried to stay with us. He had his own food so I told him he could camp near us if he wanted to. Two things hit me as I talked to him.

  First, he didn’t like us. That was obvious. He didn’t like us at all. I thought he might resent us because we were united and armed. You tend to resent the people you’re afraid of. I told him we kept a watch, and that if he could put up with that, he was welcome. He shrugged and said in his soft, cold voice, “Oh, yeah.”

  He’ll stay. His kid wants it and some part of him wants it, but something’s wrong. Something beyond ordinary traveler caution.

  The second thing is only my suspicion. I believe Grayson and Doe Mora were also slaves. Yet Grayson is now a rich pauper. He has a pair of sleepsacks, food, water, and money. If I’m right, he took them off someone—or off someone’s corpse.

  Why do I think he was a slave? That odd tentativeness of his is just too much like Emery’s. And Doe and Tori, though they don’t look alike at all, seem to understand each other like sisters. Little kids can do that sometimes, without it meaning anything. Just being little kids together is enough. But I’ve never seen any kids but these two both show the tendency to drop to the ground and roll into a fetal knot when frightened.

  Doe did just that when she tripped and fell, and Zahra stepped over to see whether she was hurt. Doe’s body snapped into a trembling ball. Was that, as Jill and Allie supposed, what people did when they expected to be beaten or kicked—a posture of protection and submission both at once?

  “Something wrong about that fellow,” Bankole said, glancing at Grayson as we bedded down next to each other. We had eaten and heard more of Emery’s story, and talked a little, but we were tired. I had my writing to do, and Travis and Jill were on watch. Bankole, who had an early morning watch with Zahra just wanted to talk. He sat beside me and spoke into my ear in a voice so low that if I leaned away from him, I lost words. “Mora’s too jumpy,” he said. “He flinches if someone walks close to him.”

  “I think he’s another ex-slave,” I said in a voice just as low. “That might not be his only problem, but it’s his most obvious one.”

  “So you picked up on that, too.” He put his arm around me and sighed. “I agree. Both he and the child.”

  “And he doesn’t love us.”

  “He doesn’t trust us. Why should he? We’ll have to watch all four of them for a while. They’re…odd. They might be stupid enough to try to grab some of our packs and leave some night. Or it might just be a matter of little things starting to disappear. The children are more likely to get caught at it. Yet if the adults stay, it will be for the children’s sake. If we take it easy on the children and protect them, I think the adults will be loyal to us.”

  “So we become the crew of a modern underground railroad,” I said. Slavery again—even worse than my father thought, or at least sooner. He thought it would take a while.

  “None of this is new.” Bankole made himself comfortable against me. “In the early 1990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this—holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latins in the south… Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”

  “But Emery says there’s a new law—that forcing people or their children to work off debt that they can’t help running up is legal.”

  “Maybe. It’s hard to know what to believe. I suppose the politicians may have passed a law that could be used to support debt slavery. But I’ve heard nothing about it. Anyone dirty enough to be a slaver is dirty enough to tell a pack of lies. You realize that that woman’s children were sold like cattle—and no doubt sold into prostitution.”

  I nodded. “She knows, too.”

  “Yes. My God.”

  “Things are breaking down more and more.” I paused. “I’ll tell you, though, if we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it. We need better guns, though. And we need to be so careful… It keeps getting more dangerous out here. It will be especially dangerous with those little girls around.”

  “Those two know how to be quiet,” Bankole said. “They’re little rabbits, fast and silent. That’s why they’re still alive.”

  24

  ❏ ❏ ❏

  Respect God:

  Pray working.

  Pray learning,

  planning,

  doing.

  Pray creating,

  teaching,

  reaching.

  Pray working.

  Pray to focus your thoughts,

  still your fears,

  strengthen your purpose.

  Respect God.

  Shape God.

  Pray working.

  EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2027

  WE READ SOME VERSES and talked about Earthseed for a while this morning. It was a calming thing to do—almost like church. We needed something calming and reassuring. Even the new people joined in, asking questions, thinking aloud, applying the verses to their experiences.

  God is Change, and in the end, God does prevail. But we have something to say about the whens and the whys of that end.

  Yeah.

  It’s been a horrible week.

  We’ve taken both today and yesterday as rest days. We might take tomorrow as well. I need it whether the others do or not. We’re all sore and sick, in mourning and exhausted—yet triumphant. Odd to be triumphant. I think it’s because most of us are still alive. We are a harvest of survivors. But then, that’s what we’ve always been.

  This is what happened.

  At our noon stop on Tuesday, Tori and Doe, the two little girls, went away from the group to urinate. Emery went with them. She had kind of taken charge of Doe as well as her own daughter. The night before, she and Grayson Mora had slipped away from the group and stayed a
way for over an hour. Harry and I were on watch, and we saw them go. Now they were a couple—all over each other, but at arm’s length from everyone else. Strange people.

  So Emery took the girls off to pee—not far away. Just across the hill face and out of sight behind a patch of dead bushes and tall, dry grass. The rest of us sat eating, drinking, and sweating in what shade we could get from a copse of oak trees that looked only half dead. The trees had been robbed of a great number of branches, no doubt by people needing firewood. I was looking at their many jagged wounds when the screaming began.

  First there were the high, needle thin, needle sharp shrieks of the little girls, then we heard Emery shouting for help. Then we heard a man’s voice, cursing.

  Most of us jumped up without thinking and ran toward the noise. In midstride, I grabbed Harry and Zahra by the arms to get their attention. Then I gestured them back to guard our packs and Natividad and Allie who had stayed with the babies. Harry had the rifle and Zahra had one of the Berettas, and in that moment, they both resented the hell out of me. No matter. For the moment, I was just glad to see them go back. They could cover us if necessary, and keep us from being overwhelmed.

  We found Emery fighting with a big bald man who had grabbed Tori. Doe was already running back to us, screaming. She ran straight into her father’s arms. He swept her up and ran off toward the highway, then he veered back toward the oaks and our people. There were other bald people coming up from the highway. Like us, they ran toward the screams. I saw metal gleaming among them—perhaps only knives. Perhaps guns. Travis spotted the group, too, and yelled a warning before I could.

  I fell back, dropped to one knee, aimed my .45 two-handed, and waited for a clear shot at Emery’s attacker. The man was much taller than Emery, and his head and shoulders were exposed except where he held Tori against him. The little girl looked like a doll that he was clutching in one arm. Emery was the problem. She, small and quick, was darting at the man, tearing at his face, trying to reach his eyes. He was trying to protect his eyes and to knock or throw her away from him. With both hands free, he might have been quick enough to bat her aside, but he wouldn’t let go of the struggling Tori, and Emery wouldn’t be beaten off.