Parable of the Sower (39 page)

“A thing like that should serve the living,” Bankole said when she offered it.

“You are living,” Natividad said. “I like you. I wish I could have met your sister.”

He looked at her for a while. Then he took the shawl and hugged her. Then, beginning to cry, he went off by himself into the trees, out of our sight. I let him alone for an hour or so, then went after him.

I found him, sitting on a fallen log, wiping his face. I sat with him for some time, saying nothing. After a while, he got up, waited for me to stand, then headed back toward our camp.

“I would like to give them a grove of oak trees,” I said. “Trees are better than stone—life commemorating life.”

He glanced back at me. “All right.”

“Bankole?”

He stopped, looked at me with an expression I could not read.

“None of us knew her,” I said. “I wish we had. I wish I had, no matter how much I would have surprised her.”

He managed a smile. “She would have looked at you, then looked at me, then, right in front of you, I think she would have said, ‘Well, there’s no fool like an old fool.’ Once she got that out of her system, I think she would have gotten to like you.”

“Do you think she could stand…or forgive company now?”

“What?”

I drew a deep breath and wondered about what I meant to say. It could go wrong. He could misunderstand. It still needed to be said.

“We’ll bury your dead tomorrow. I think you’re right to want to do it. And I think we should bury our dead as well. Most of us have had to walk away—or run—away from our unburned, un-buried dead. Tomorrow, we should remember them all, and lay them to rest if we can.”

“Your family?”

I nodded. “Mine, Zahra’s, Harry’s, Allie’s—both her son and her sister—maybe Emery’s sons, maybe others that I don’t know about. Mora doesn’t talk about himself much, but he must have losses. Doe’s mother, perhaps.”

“How do you want to do it?” he asked.

“Each of us will have to bury our own dead. We knew them. We can find the words.”

Words from the Bible, perhaps?

“Any words, memories, quotations, thoughts, songs… My father had a funeral, even though we never found his body. But my three youngest brothers and my stepmother had nothing. Zahra saw them die, or I wouldn’t have any idea what happened to them.” I thought for a moment. “I have acorns enough for each of us to plant live oak trees to our dead—enough to plant one for Justin’s mother, too. I’m thinking about a very simple ceremony. But everyone should have a chance to speak. Even the two little girls.”

He nodded. “I don’t have any objection. It isn’t a bad idea.” And a few steps later: “There’s been so much dying. There’s so much more to come.”

“Not for us, I hope.”

He said nothing for a while. Then he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder to stop me. At first he only stood looking at me, almost studying my face. “You’re so young,” he said. “It seems almost criminal that you should be so young in these terrible times. I wish you could have known this country when it was still salvageable.”

“It might survive,” I said, “changed, but still itself.”

“No.” He drew me to his side and put one arm around me. “Human beings will survive of course. Some other countries will survive. Maybe they’ll absorb what’s left of us. Or maybe we’ll just break up into a lot of little states quarreling and fighting with each other over whatever crumbs are left. That’s almost happened now with states shutting themselves off from one another, treating state lines as national borders. As bright as you are, I don’t think you understand—I don’t think you can understand what we’ve lost. Perhaps that’s a blessing.”

“God is Change,” I said.

“Olamina, that doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means everything. Everything!”

He sighed. “You know, as bad as things are, we haven’t even hit bottom yet. Starvation, disease, drug damage, and mob rule have only begun. Federal, state, and local governments still exist—in name at least—and sometimes they manage to do something more than collect taxes and send in the military. And the money is still good. That amazes me. However much more you need of it to buy anything these days, it is still accepted. That may be a hopeful sign—or perhaps it’s only more evidence of what I said: We haven’t hit bottom yet.”

“Well, the group of us here doesn’t have to sink any lower,” I said.

He shook his shaggy head, his hair, beard, and serious expression making him look more than a little like an old picture I used to have of Frederick Douglass.

“I wish I believed that,” he said. Perhaps it was his grief talking. “I don’t think we have a hope in hell of succeeding here.”

I slipped my arm around him. “Let’s go back,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

So today we remembered the friends and the family members we’ve lost. We spoke our individual memories and quoted Bible passages, Earthseed verses, and bits of songs and poems that were favorites of the living or the dead.

Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees.

Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn.

A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And others fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit an hundredfold.

The Bible
Authorized King James Version
St. Luke
8: 5-8

1. What attracted you to writing?

I’ve been telling myself stories since I was four years old. I was an only child, shy and often alone. Telling myself stories was my way of entertaining myself. It didn’t occur to me to begin to write down my stories until I was ten, when I realized I was forgetting some of my early stories. One day while my mother was combing my hair, I sat writing a story in an old half-used notebook. My mother asked me what I was doing. When I told her I was writing a story, she said, “Oh. Maybe you’ll be a writer.”

This was absolutely my first indication that people could be “writers,” but I understood the idea and accepted it at once. People could earn a living writing stories. People had been paid to write the books I enjoyed reading. The Pasadena Public Library had been one of my favorite places for years. I loved not only reading books, but being surrounded by them. For the first time in my life, I considered seriously that I might be able to do something that I enjoyed for a living—and I did enjoy writing stories. They were terrible, but I had fun with them. Until that day, “work” had been, to me, something tiresome that adults made me do. Adult work was something even more tiresome that a boss made the adult do. Work was, by definition, unpleasant. But if writing were my work…!

2. How did you wind up writing science fiction and fantasy?

I never told myself ordinary stories. I was never interested in fantasizing about the world I was stuck in. In fact, I fantasized to get away from that drab, limited world. I was a little “colored” girl in that era of conformity and segregation, the 1950s, and no matter how much I dreamed about becoming a writer, I couldn’t help seeing that my real future looked bleak. I was supposed to get married and have babies and, if I were lucky, my husband would support me and I could stay home, wash the floor, and mind the babies. If I were a little less lucky, I would have to get a job, but a job that allowed me to dress nicely and stay clean all day. I would become a secretary, perhaps. My mother, who had only been permitted three years of education, was a maid. Housecleaning was all she knew how to do. Her dream for me was that I should become a secretary. My aunt, the nurse, thought I should become a nurse. The other two occupations most open to women during those years were grade-school teacher and social worker. I knew kids who wanted to be social workers, but I wasn’t even sure what a social worker did. I knew enough, though, about secretaries, nurses, and teachers to know that for me, those jobs would be like a life sentence in hell.

I fantasized about traveling and seeing some of the things I found in the secondhand
National Geographic
magazines that my mother brought home. I fantasized living impossible, but interesting lives—magical lives in which I could fly like Superman, communicate with animals, control people’s minds. I became a magical horse on an island of horses. My horse friends and I made fools of the men who came to catch us.

Then when I was twelve, I discovered science fiction. It appealed to me more, even, than fantasy had because it required more thought, more research into things that fascinated me. I was developing an interest in geology and paleontology—the origin of the Earth and the development of life on Earth. The manned space program was getting started, and I was fascinated with that. My favorite class in junior high school was eighth-grade science. Other planets, evolutionary biology, botany, microbiology… I wasn’t a particularly good student, but I was an avid one, I wanted to know about everything, and as I learned, I wanted to play with the knowledge, explore it, think about what it might mean, or where it might lead, write stories about it.

I’ve never lost that fascination.

And science fiction and fantasy are so wide open that I never had to drop them to be able to pick up other things. There doesn’t seem to be any aspect of humanity or the universe around us that I can’t explore.

3. Where did the Earthseed religion come from? What inspired the belief system?

Earthseed is a result of several of my efforts and interests coming together. First, I had a great deal of trouble beginning
Parable of the Sower
. I knew that I wanted to tell the story, the fictional autobiography, of Lauren Olamina, who begins a new religion and who, sometime after her death—after people have had time to forget how human she was—might easily be considered a god. I wanted her to be an intelligent, believable person. I didn’t want to write satire. I didn’t want to write about a hypocrite or a fool. I wanted her to believe deeply in what she taught and I wanted her teachings to be reasonable, intellectually respectable. I wanted them to be something that someone I could admire might truly believe and teach. She didn’t have to be always right, but she had to be reasonable.

I put Earthseed together by asking myself questions and coming up with answers. For instance, I asked what was the most powerful force I could think of? What one thing could we not stop no matter how hard we tried? The answer I came up with after some thought was “change.” We can do a lot of things to influence the ongoing processes of change. We can focus them, alter their speed or impact, in general we can shape change, but we can’t stop it no matter how hard we try. Throughout the universe, the ongoing reality is change.

That’s where I began. I was a bit disconcerted when I read about other religions and was reminded that in Buddhism, change was also very important, although in a different way. To put it simply, in Buddhism, since everything is ephemeral, we can avoid suffering only by avoiding attachment because all things to which we might become attached are bound to pass away. But Lauren Olamina says that since change is the one inescapable truth, change is the basic clay of our lives. In order to live constructive lives, we must learn to shape change when we can and yield to it when we must. Either way, we must learn and teach, adapt and grow.

Once I established Change as Olamina’s god, I had to be true to the idea. That meant I had to work out what such a belief would mean in the various aspects of life. I looked to science, to other philosophies and religions, and to my own observations of how people behave, how the world works.

Writing Olamina’s beliefs in verse somehow helped me get going with the novel. I hadn’t tried to write verse since I was forced to in school. I didn’t do it very well, either. But trying to do it was a good challenge. I had to focus on learning a little about this different kind of writing, and I had to figure out how to use it to do the job I wanted to do. My physical model for my character’s religious book was the
Tao de Ching
. It’s a slender book of a few seemingly simple verses. I didn’t want to copy any of the Taoist verses, but I immediately liked the form.

4. You’ve called
Parable of the Sower
a cautionary tale because the future presented in
Sower
is alarming, but possible. Do you have other ideas about the future that didn’t make it into the book?

The idea in
Parable of the Sower
and
Parable of the Talents
is to consider a possible future unaffected by parapsychological abilities such as telepathy or telekinesis, unaffected by alien intervention, unaffected by magic. It is to look at where we are now, what we are doing now, and to consider where some of our current behaviors and unattended problems might take us. I considered drugs and the effects of drugs on the children of drug addicts. I looked at the growing rich/poor gap, at throwaway labor, at our willingness to build and fill prisons, our reluctance to build and repair schools and libraries, and at our assault on the environment. In particular, I looked at global warming and the ways in which it’s likely to change things for us. There’s food-price driven inflation that’s likely because, as the climate changes, some of the foods we’re used to won’t grow as well in the places we’re used to growing them. Not only will temperatures be too high, not only will there not be enough water, but the increase in carbon dioxide won’t affect all plants in the same ways. Some will grow a little faster while their weeds grow a lot faster. Some will grow faster but not be as nutritious—forcing both their bests and us to need more to be decently nourished. It’s a much more complex problem than a simple increase in temperature. I considered spreading hunger as a reason for increased vulnerability to disease. And there would be less money for inoculations or treatment. Also, thanks to rising temperatures, tropical diseases like malaria and dengue would move north. I considered loss of coastline as the level of the sea rises. I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third world country.