Parable of the Talents

  My name, eventually, was Asha Vere Alexander, daughter of Madison Alexander and Kayce Guest Alexander. These were middle-class Black members of the Church of Christian America in Seattle. They adopted me during the Al-Can war when they moved from Seattle—which had been hit by several missiles—down to Crescent City, where Kayce’s mother Layla Guest lived. Ironically, Layla Guest was a refugee from Los Angeles. But she was a much richer refugee than my mother had been. Crescent City, a big, booming town among the redwoods, was so near Pelican Bay that Layla volunteered at the Pelican Bay nursery. It was Layla who brought Kayce and me together. Kayce didn’t really want me. I was a big, dark-skinned, solemn baby, and she didn’t like my looks. “She was a grim, stone-faced little thing,” I heard her say later to her friends. “And she was as plain as a stone. I was afraid for her—afraid that if I didn’t take her, no one would.”

  Both Kayce and Layla believed it was the duty of good Christian Americans to give homes to the many orphaned children from squatter settlements and heathen cults. If one couldn’t be an Asha Vere, rescuing all sorts of people, one could at least rescue one or two unfortunate children and raise them properly.

  Five months after Layla introduced her daughter to me, the Alexanders adopted me. I didn’t exactly become their daughter, but they meant to do their duty—to raise me properly and save me from whatever depraved existence I might have had with my biological parents.

  FROM The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2033

  They have begun to let us alone more on Sundays after services. I suppose they’re tired of using up their own Sundays to lash us into memorizing chapters of the Bible. After five or six hours of services and a meal of boiled vegetables, we are told to rest in our quarters and thank God for his goodness to us.

  We aren’t permitted to do anything. To do anything other than Bible study would be, in their view, “work,” and a violation of the Fourth Commandment. We’re to sit still, not speak, not repair our clothing or our shoes—we’re all in rags since all but two sets per person of our clothing have been confiscated. We’re allowed to read the Bible, pray, and sleep. If we’re caught doing anything more than that, we’re lashed.

  Of course, the moment we’re left alone, we do as we like. We hold whispered conversations, we clean and repair our things as best we can, we share information. And I write. Only on Sundays can we do these things in daylight.

  We’re permitted no electric light and no oil lamps, so we have only the window for light. During the week, it’s dark when we get up and dark when we’re shut in to sleep. During the week, we are machines—or domestic animals.

  The only conveniences we’re permitted are a galvanized bucket which we must all use as a toilet and a 20-liter plastic bottle of water fitted with a cheap plastic siphon pump. We each have one plastic bowl from which we both eat and drink. It’s odd about the bowls. They’re bright shades of blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. They’re the only colorful things in our prison room—bright, cheerful lies. They’re what you see first when you walk in. Mary Sullivan calls them our dog dishes. We hate them, but we use them. What choice do we have? Our only “legal” individual possessions are our bowls, our clothing, our blankets—one each—and our Camp Christian-issued paper King James Bibles.

  On Sundays when we’re fortunate enough to be let alone early, I take out paper and pencil and use my Bible as a desk.

  My writing is a way for me to remind myself that I am human, that God is Change, and that I will escape this place. As irrational as the feeling may be, my writing still comforts me.

  Other people find other comforts. Mary Sullivan and Allie combine their blankets and make love to one another late at night. It comforts them. Their sleeping place is next to mine, and I hear them at it. They aren’t the only ones who do it, but they’re the only pair so far that stays together.

  “Do we disgust you?” Mary Sullivan whispered to me one morning with characteristic bluntness. We had been awakened later than usual and we could just see each other in the half-light. I could see Mary sitting up beside a still-sleeping Allie.

  I looked at her, surprised. She’s a tall woman—almost my size—angular and bony, but with an interesting-looking, expressive face. She looked as though she had always had plenty of hard, physical work to do, but not always enough to eat. “Do you love my friend?” I asked her.

  She blinked, drew back as though she was about to tell me to mind my own business or to go to hell. But after a moment, she said in her harsh voice, “Of course I do!”

  I managed a smile, although I don’t know whether she could see it, and I nodded. “Then be good to one another,” I said. “And if there’s trouble, you and your sisters stand with us, with Earthseed.” We’re the strongest single group among the prisoners. The Sullivans and the Gamas have tended to group themselves with us, anyway, although nothing had been said. Well, now I’ve said something, at least to Mary Sullivan.

  After a moment, she nodded, unsmiling. She wasn’t a woman who smiled often.

  I worry that someone will break ranks and report Allie and Mary, but so far, no one has reported anyone for anything, although our “teachers” keep inviting us to report one another’s sins. There has been trouble now and then. Squatter-camp women have gotten into fights over food or possessions, and the rest of us stopped things before they got too loud—before a “teacher” arrived and demanded to know what was going on and who was responsible.

  And there is one young squatter-camp woman, Crystal Blair, who seems to be a natural bully. She hits or shoves people, takes their food or their small possessions. She amuses herself by telling lies to cause fights. (“Do you know what she said about you? I heard her! She said…”) She snatches things from people, sometimes making no secret of what she’s doing. She doesn’t want the pitiful possessions. Sometimes she makes a show of breaking them. She wants the other women to know that she can do what she damned well pleases, and they can’t stop her. She has power, and they don’t.

  We’ve taught her to let Earthseed women and our possessions alone. We stood together, and let her know we’re willing to make her life even more of a misery to her than it already is. We discovered by accident that all we had to do was hold her down and tug on her collar. The collar punishes her, and it punishes me and the other sharers among us if we were stupid enough to watch her suffering, but it leaves no marks. If we use her clothing to tie and gag her, then with just an occasional tug on her collar we can give her a hellish night. After we put her through one such night, she let us alone. She tormented other women. Tormenting people was her particular comfort.

  We worry about her. She’s crazier than most of us, and she’s trouble, but she hates our “teachers” more than we do. She won’t go to them for help. In time, though, one of her victims might. We watch her. We try to keep her from going too far.

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2033

  More new people have been brought here—ragged, scrawny people, all strangers. Every day this week, a maggot has arrived to unload new people in groups of three, four, or five. We’ve finished building a long, shedlike extension onto the school with lumber that the “teachers” trucked in. This extension is four bare rooms of shelf beds intended to house 30 people each. Each wall is covered with three layers of shelves plus an access ladder or two. Each shelf is to be a long, narrow bed intended to sleep two people, usually either feet to feet or head to head. The new people are each given what we have: a blanket, a plastic bowl, a Bible, and a shelf where they must sleep and store their things. We still sleep on the floor in our rooms, but everything else is the same.

  Like us, the new people are using buckets as toilets. Some of us are being made to dig a cesspit. I took some lashes for pointing out that it was being put in a bad place. It could contaminate the underground water that feeds our wells. That could make us all sick, including our “teachers.”

  But our “teachers” know everything. They don’t need advice from
a woman, and a heathen woman at that. It was entirely their own decision a few days later to relocate the cesspit downhill and far away from the wells.

  Someone has put up a sign at the logging-road gate: “Camp Christian Reeducation Facility.” The Crusaders have surrounded the place with a Lazor-wire fence, so there’s no safe entry or exit except at the gate. Lazor wire is made up of strands of wire so thin that they’re hard to see. They slice into the flesh of the wild animals who blunder into them.

  I’ve asked some of the strangers what’s happening outside. Do people know what a reeducation camp really is? Are there other camps? Is there resistance? What’s Jarret doing? What’s going on?

  Most of the new people won’t talk to me. They’re weary, frightened, beaten people. Those who are willing to talk know only that they were either arrested or snatched from their lives as squatters, drifters, or petty crooks.

  Several of the new people are sharers. “Bad seed if there ever was bad seed,” our “teachers” say. “The heathen children of drug addicts.” They treat known sharers as objects of suspicion, contempt, and ugly amusement. They’re so easy to torment. No challenge at all.

  We have not given ourselves away, yet, we sharers of Earthseed. We’ve worked hard at concealing ourselves, and, I admit, we’ve been lucky. None of us has been pushed beyond our limits at a time when our “teachers” might notice. All of us have had years of hiding in plain sight to help us. Even the Mora girls, only 14 and 15, have managed to hide what they are.

  I kept up my search for someone who could tell me at least a little about the outside. In the end, I didn’t find my informant. He found me. He was a young Black man, bone thin, scarred, careful, but not beaten down. His name was David Turner.

  “Day,” he said when we found ourselves digging side by side in the stupid, dangerous cesspit that was later abandoned. I think now that he only spoke to me because we weren’t supposed to speak.

  I looked a question at him as I threw a shovelful of dirt out of the hole.

  “Name of David,” he said. “Call me Day.”

  “Olamina,” I said without thinking.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Different kind of name.”

  I sighed, glanced at him, liked the stubborn, unbeaten look of him, and said, “Lauren.”

  He gave me a quick grin. “People call you Laurie?”

  “Not if they expect me to answer,” I said.

  I guess we were a little careless. Above, one of our “teachers” lashed me hard, and I convulsed and fell. I’ve noticed before that if a collared man and woman are talking together, it’s the woman who tends to be lashed. Women are temptresses, you see. We drag innocent men into trouble. From the time of Adam and Eve women have dragged innocent men into trouble. Anyway, I was lashed hard, but only once. After that, I was more careful.

  Being lashed hard several times is enough to induce temporary coordination problems and memory loss. Day told me later that he’d seen a man lashed until the man didn’t know his own name. I believe him. I know that when I saw Bankole’s dead body, and I turned on my bearded guard, I had never in my life been more intent on killing another person. I was dropped where I stood with a hard shock, then lashed several more times, and Allie tells me that the way I jerked and flopped around the ground, she thought I’d break my bones. I woke up very sore, covered in bruises, sprains, abrasions, and bloody rock cuts, but that wasn’t the worst.

  The worst was the way I felt afterward. I don’t mean the physical pain. This place is a university of pain. I mean what I wrote before. I was a zombie for several days after the lashing. At first I couldn’t even remember that Bankole was dead. Natividad and Allie had to tell me that all over again more than once. And I couldn’t remember what had happened to Acorn, why we were all shut up in one room of our own school, where the men were, where the children were…

  I haven’t written about this until now. When I understood it, it scared me to death. It scared me into mewling in a corner like a terrorized three-year-old.

  After surviving Robledo, I knew that strangers could appear and steal or destroy everything and everyone I loved. People and possessions could be snatched away. But somehow, it had not occurred to me that…that bits of my own mind could be snatched away too. I knew I could be killed. I’ve never had any illusions about that. I could be disabled. I knew that too. But I had not thought that another person, just by pushing a small button, then smiling and pushing it again and again…

  He did smile, my bearded teacher. That came back to me later. All of it came back to me. When it did… Well, that’s when I retreated to my corner, whimpering and moaning. The son of a bitch smiled and pressed his button over and over as though he were fucking me, and he grinned while he watched me groaning and thrashing.

  My brother said a collar makes you envy the dead. As bad as that sounds, it didn’t, couldn’t, convey to me, how a collar makes you hate. It teaches you whole new magnitudes of utter hatred. I knew almost nothing about hate until this thing was put around my neck. Now, sometimes it’s all I can do to stop myself from trying again to kill one of them and then dying the way Emery did.

  I’ve been talking off and on to Day Turner. Whenever we can, when we pass one another or are put to work in the same general area, we’ve talked. I’ve encouraged Travis and Harry and the other men to talk to him. I think he’ll tell us anything he can that will help us. This is a summary of what he’s passed on to us so far:

  Day had walked over the Sierras from his last dead-end, low-paying job in Reno, Nevada. He had drifted north and west, hoping to find at least a chance to work his way out of poverty. He had no family, but for protection, he walked with two friends. All had been well until he and his friends reached Eureka. There, they had heard that one of the churches offered overnight shelter and meals and temporary work to willing men. The church was, no surprise, the Church of Christian America.

  The work was helping to repair and paint a couple of old houses that the church intended to use as part of their orphaned-children’s home. There were no orphans on site—or none that Day saw, or I suppose we would all have badgered him to death about our own children. You would think that there were enough real orphans in this filthy world. How dare anything that calls itself a church create new orphans with its maggots and its collars?

  Anyway, Day and his friends liked the idea of doing something for kids and earning a few dollars as well as a bed and a few meals. But they were unlucky. While they slept on their first night in the church’s men’s dormitory, a small group of the men there tried to rob the place. Day says he had nothing to do with robbery. He says he doesn’t give a damn whether we believe him or not, but that he’s never stolen, except to eat, and he’d never in his life steal from a church. He was raised by a very religious uncle and aunt, now dead, and thanks to their early training, there were some things he just wouldn’t do. But the thieves were said to be Black, and Day and his friends were Black, so Day and his friends were presumed guilty.

  I found myself believing him. That may be stupid of me, but I like him, and he doesn’t strike me as a liar or a church robber.

  He says the church’s security people swarmed over the dormitories, and the men awoke and ran in all directions. They were all free poor men. When trouble erupted, and there was no real profit to be had, most of them never thought of doing anything other than getting away—especially when the shooting started.

  Day didn’t have a gun. One of his friends did, but the three of them got separated. Then they all got caught.

  He and 18 or 20 other men were caught, and all the Black ones went to jail. Some were charged with violent crimes—armed robbery and assault. The rest were charged with vagrancy—which is a far more serious crime than it once was. The vagrants were found guilty and indentured to the Church of Christian America. Day’s friends were charged with felonies as part of the first group because they were found together and one had a gun. Day was in t
he vagrant group. He had been indentured to work for 30 days for the church. He had already been shifted around and forced to work for more than two months. They lashed him when he complained that his sentence was up. At first they said he could go free if he could prove he had a job waiting for him outside. Of course since he was a stranger to the area, and since he had no free time to look for a job, it was impossible for him to get outside work. Local vagrants, on the other hand, were, one by one, rescued by relatives and friends, who promised to either give them jobs or feed and house them so that they would no longer be vagrant.

  Day had done construction work, painting, groundskeeping, and janitorial work. He had been given a thorough physical examination, then been required to donate blood twice. He had been encouraged to offer to donate a kidney or a cornea, after which he could heal and go free. This terrified him. He refused, but he couldn’t help knowing that his organs, and, in fact, his life could be taken from him at any time. Who would know? Who would care? He wondered why they had not killed him already.

  Then they moved him to Camp Christian for reeducation. He was told that there was hope for him—that he could, if he chose, learn to be a servant of God and God’s true church and a loyal citizen of the greatest country in the world. He said he was already a Christian. They said, in effect, “Prove it.” They said he would be accepted among them when they judged him truly penitent and educated in the truths of the Bible.

  Then Day quoted them Exodus 21:16—“And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” Day was lashed for his choice of scripture, of course, and he was told that the people of Christian America well knew that the devil could quote scripture.