Butler, Octavia - Parable of the Sower

“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?”

“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 just 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 other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold.

The Bible

Authorized King James Version

St. Luke 8: 5-8