Parable of the Talents (30 page)
We women lost all modesty and offered ourselves in the streets, and the men who should have controlled us became our pimps.
That's the short version of how evil we are and why we deserve to be in collars. The other side of this picture is how our hardworking, long-suffering "teachers" are trying to
"help" us.
One of the men who has been after Jorge's sister Cristina specialized in this strange, self-pitying attitude. He talked to her about his wheelchair-bound wife, about his disrespectful children, about how poor they all are. She says she begged him to let her alone, and he threw her down and forced her.
He said he was a loyal, hardworking Christian American, and he was entitled to some pleasure in his life. But when he had finished, he begged her to forgive him. Insanity.
My rape happened at the end of a very cold, rainy day. I had been given cooking duties. This meant I got to clean myself up, stay warm and dry, and, for once, get enough to eat I was feeling both grateful for this and ashamed of my gratitude. I worked with Natividad and two of the Gama women, Catarina and Joan, and at the end of the day, we were all taken away to the cabins and raped.
Of the four of us, only I was a sharer. Of the four of us, only I endured not only my own pain and humiliation, but the wild, intense pleasure of my rapist. There are no words to explain the twisted, schizoid ugliness of this.
We can't bathe often enough. We get no hot water and lit-tle soap unless we get kitchen duty. If we ask to be allowed to bathe, it's called vanity. Yet we are viewed with disgust and contempt if we stink. We are said to "stink with sin."
So be it.
I have decided to stink like a corpse. I have decided that I would rather get a disease from being filthy than go on at-tracting the attentions of these men. I will be filthy. I will stink. I will pay no attention to my hair or my clothing.
I must do this, or I will kill myself.
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2035
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Self
is.
Self
is body and
bodily
perception.
Self is
thought,
memory,
belief. Self
creates. Self
destroys. Self
learns,
discovers,
becomes. Self
shapes. Self
adapts. Self
invents its
own reasons
for being. To
shape God,
shape Self.
? ? ?
From EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING
Take comfort.
Each move toward the Destiny,
Each achievement of the
Destiny,
Must mean new beginnings,
New worlds,
A rebirth of Earthseed.
Alone,
Each of us is mortal.
Yet through Earthseed,
Through the Destiny,
We join.
We are purposeful
Immortal
Life!
SOMEHOW, MY MOTHER ENDURED more than a year of slav-ery at Camp Christian. How she did it, how she survived it, I can only guess from her writings of 2033 and 2035. Her record of 2034 has been lost. She did write during 2034. 1
have no doubt of that. She couldn't have gone for a year without writing. I've found occasional references to notes made then. No doubt by then, she was writing on whatever scraps of paper she could find.
She obviously liked to keep her writing when she could, but I suspect that somehow it helped her just to do it, whether she was able to keep it or not. The act of writing it-self was a kind of therapy.
The most important loss is this: There was at least one major escape attempt. The people of Acorn took no part in it, but of course they suffered for it later along with the rest of Camp Christian. Its leader was the same David Turner that my mother had met and liked in 2033. I know this because I've spoken to people who were there, who survived the ef-fort, and who remember the suffering.
My best informant was a plainspoken woman named Cody Smith, who in December of 2034 had been arrested for vagrancy in Garberville and transported to Camp Christian.
She was one of the survivors of the rebellion, although as a result of it, she suffered nerve damage and eventual blind-ness. She was beaten and kicked as well as electronically lashed. Here's her story as she told it to me:
"Day Turner's people were convinced that they could overwhelm the guards by piling onto them three or more to one. They believed they could kill the guards before their collars disabled them. Lauren Olamina said no. She said the guards were never all together, were never all outside at the same time. She said one guard missed was one guard who could kill all of us with just one finger. Day liked her. I don't know why. She was big like a man and not pretty, but he liked her. He just didn't believe she was right. He thought she was scared. But he forgave her because she was a woman.
That drove her crazy. The more she tried to talk him out of it, the more determined he was to do it. Then he asked her if she was going to give him away, and she got really quiet and so mad he actually took a step back from her. She could do that.
She didn't get loud when she got mad, she got real quiet. She scared people.
"She asked him who the hell did he think she was, and he said he was starting to not be sure. There was some bad feeling after that. She stopped talking to him and began talking to her own people. It was hard to talk, dangerous to talk. It was against the rules. People had to whisper and mutter and talk without moving their lips and not look at the people they were talking to. They got lashed if they were caught. Messages got passed from one person to an-other.
Sometimes they got changed or messed up and you couldn't tell what people were trying to tell you. Some-times someone told the guards. New people brought in from the road would do that—tell what they had no busi-ness telling. They got a little extra food for it or a warm shirt or something. But if we caught them at it, they never did it again. We saw to that.
There were always a few, though. They did it for a reward or because they were scared or because they had started to believe all those ser-mons and Bible classes and prayer meetings and the other stuff they made us sit through or stand through when we were almost too tired to live. I think a few of the women did it so the guards would treat them better in bed. Some guards liked to hurt you. So for us, talking was dangerous even if no guard saw you do it.
"Anyway, it didn't seem that anyone gave Day Turner away. Lauren Olamina just told her people that when it hap-pened, they should lie face-down on the ground with their hands behind their necks. Some of them didn't want to.
They thought Day was right. But she kept at them, pushing them, asking them about lashings they had seen—one guard lashing eight or nine people at the same time with just one finger.... She got herself lashed over and over, try-ing to talk to them—to the men in her group especially. I think Day worked on them at night when men and women were locked up separate. You know the kind of shit men say to one another when they want to stop other men from lis-tening to a woman. From what I heard, Travis Douglas was the one who kept Olamina's men in line. He wasn't all that big, but he had a force to him. People trusted him, listened to him, liked him.
And for some reason, Travis trusted Olam-ina. He didn't like what she was telling them to do, but he . . . like he believed in her, you know.
"When the break came, most of Olamina's people did what she had told them to do. That saved them from being shot or from being beaten as badly as the ones like me who didn't get on the ground fast enough. Day's people started grabbing guards, and the Acorn people dropped like stones. When the pain hit, they were already getting down on the ground, all but a guy named King—Jeff King—big, good-looking blond guy—and three women. Two were named Scolari—sisters or something—and Channa Ryan. I knew Channa Ryan. She just couldn't stand it anymore. She was pregnant, but not showing much yet. She figured if she died taking one of the guards and a guard's baby with her, it would be a good deal.
There was this one particular guy— ugly son of a bitch who washed himself maybe once a week. But he used to make her go to his cabin two or three times a week. He had his fun with her. She wanted to get him. She didn't, though.
"Day's people killed one guard. Just one, and it was a woman who got him—that evil bitch Crystal Blair. She died for it, but she got him. I don't know why she hated the guards so much. They didn't rape her, didn't pay that much attention to her. 1 guess it was just that they took her free-dom. She was a big pain in the ass while she was alive, but people kind of respected her after she was dead. She ripped that guard's throat out with her teeth!
"Day's people hurt a couple of other guards, but it cost them 15 of their own. Fifteen dead just to start with. Some others were lashed to death or almost to death later. Some were kicked and stomped as well as lashed. I was because I was too close to Crystal Blair when she killed that one guard.
Day got killed too, but not until later. Later, they hanged him.
By then, he was so busted up, I doubt he knew what was going on. The rest of us got hurt, but not so bad. The ones who could walk had to go out the next day to work. If we had headaches or teeth kicked in or bad gashes or bruises from being kicked with boots, it didn't matter. The guards said if they couldn't beat the devil out of us, they'd work him out of us. The ones who couldn't walk dis-appeared. I don't know what happened to them—maybe killed, maybe taken away for medical treatment. We never saw them again. Everyone else worked for sixteen hours straight. They lashed you if you stopped to pee. You had to just do it on yourself and keep working. They did that for three days straight. Work sixteen hours—dig a hole. Fill it up. Chop trees. Make firewood. Dig another hole. Fill it up. Paint the cabins. Chop weeds. Dig a hole. Fill it up. Drag rocks from the hills. Break them to gravel. Dig a hole. Fill it up.
"A couple of people went crazy. One woman just fell down on the ground and started screaming and crying. She wouldn't stop. The other one, a big man with scars all over his face, he started running and screaming—going nowhere, running in circles. They disappeared too. Three days. We didn't get enough to eat. You never got enough to eat unless you got kitchen duty. Every night they preached hellfire and damnation at us and made us memorize Bible verses for at least an hour before they'd let us sleep. Then it was like we hadn't slept at all and they were getting us up to do it all again. It was hell. Plain hell. No devil could have made a better one."
Cody Smith. She was an old woman when I met
her—il-literate, poor, and scarred. If her version of the break and its aftermath is true, it's no wonder my mother never wrote much about it after her captivity. I've never found anyone who heard her talk much about it.
But at least she got most of her own people through the rebellion. She lost only three, and two others—the Mora sisters—had given away their status as sharers. I wonder that all the sharers hadn't given themselves away. On the other hand, when everyone is screaming, I suppose sharers' screams don't draw special attention. 1 don't know how the Moras gave themselves away, but Cody Smith and other in-formants have told me they did. It may have been the rea-son that after the rebellion, they were raped more often than the other women were. They never gave any other sharer away.
That was my mother's 2034. I wouldn't have wished it on her. I wouldn't have wished it on anyone.
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Vagrancy laws were much expanded, and vagrant adults with children could lose custody of the children, unless they were able to establish homes for them within a specified period of time. In some counties, job-placement help was available from churches and local businesses, and the jobs had to provide at least room and board for the family, even if there were no salary. Vagrant women often became un-salaried household help or poorly paid surrogate mothers.
In other counties, there was no help at all for vagrants. They had to make a proper home for their children or their chil-dren would be rescued from their inadequate, unfit hands.
Not surprisingly, children were "rescued" this way much more often from vagrants who were considered heathens than from those who were seen as acceptable Christians. And
"heathens" who were poor, but not true vagrants, not homeless, might find themselves reclassified as vagrants so that their children could be placed in good Christian Amer-ica homes. The idea, of course, was to make good Christian Americans of them in spite of the wickedness, or at best, the errors of their parents.
It's hard to believe that kind of thing happened here, in the United States in the twenty-first century, but it did. It
shouldn't
have happened, in spite of all the chaos that had gone before. Things were healing. People like my mother were starting small businesses, living simply, becoming more prosperous. Crime was down in spite of the sad things that happened to the Noyer family and to Uncle Marc. Even my mother said that things were improving. Yet Andrew Steele Jarret was able to scare, divide, and bully people, first into electing him President, then into letting him fix the country for them. He didn't get to do everything he wanted to do. He was capable of much greater fascism. So were his most avid followers.
For people like my mother, Jarret's fanatical followers were the greater danger. During Jarret's first year in office, the worst of his followers ran amok. Filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened, ordi-nary citizens who only wanted order and stability, the fa-natics set up the camps. Meanwhile, Jarret himself was busy with the ridiculous, obscene Al-Can war. If Jarret's thugs weren't locking poor people into collars, Jarret himself was seducing them into the military and feeding them into what turned out to be a useless, stupid exercise in destruction. The already-weakened country all but collapsed. Too many Americans, whether or not they belonged to CA, had family and friends in both Canada and Alaska. People deserted or left the country to avoid the draft—there was one, at last—and the saying was, during the war, that healthy young men were America's biggest export.