And then it did just that.
Oh, yes. It did.
I could return the compliment. I could have reached for the power to do that. But I would rather fix the problem. What happened to me shouldn't happen to anyone, yet such things have happened to thousands of people, perhaps millions. I've read history. Things weren't always this way. They don't have to go on being this way. What we have broken we can mend.
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My Uncle Marc was the handsomest man I've ever seen. I think I fell more than half in love with him before I even met him. There were also times when I was afraid for him. I don't know what to make of our family. My grandfather was, from what I've heard, a good and dedicated Baptist minister. He looked after his family and his community and insisted that both be armed and able to defend themselves in an armed and dangerous world, but beyond that, he had no ambitions. It never seemed to occur to him that he could or should fix the world. Yet he was the father of two would-be world-fixers. How did that happen?
Well, my mother was a sharer, a little adult at 15, and a survivor of the destruction of her whole neighborhood at 18. Perhaps that was why she, like Uncle Marc, needed to take charge, to bring her own brand of order to the chaos that she saw swallow so many of the people she loved. She saw chaos as natural and inevitable and as clay to be shaped and directed. As she says in one of her verses:
Chaos
Is God's most dangerous face—
Amorphous, roiling, hungry.
Shape Chaos—
Shape God.
Act
Alter the speed
Or the direction of Change.
Vary the scope of Change.
Recombine the seeds of Change.
Transmute the impact of Change.
Seize Change,
Use it.
Adapt and grow.
And so she tried to adapt and to grow. Perhaps she feared being like her own mother, who looked for help in a "smart" drug and wound up damaging her child and killing herself. Chaos. Whatever my mother's reasoning, she decided that she knew what was wrong with her world, and she knew what would fix it: Earthseed. Earthseed with all its definitions, admonitions, requirements, purpose. Earthseed with its Destiny.
My Uncle Marc, on the other hand, hated the chaos. It wasn't one of the faces of his god. It was unnatural. It was demonic. He hated what it had done to him, and he needed to prove that he was not what it had forced him to become. No Christian minister could ever hate sin as much as Marc hated chaos. His gods were order, stability, safety, control. He was a man with a wound that would not heal until he could be certain that what had happened to him could not happen again to anyone, ever.
My father called my mother a zealot. I think that name applies even more to Uncle Marc. And yet, I think Uncle Marc was more of a realist. Uncle Marc wanted to make the Earth a better place. Uncle Marc knew that the stars could take care of themselves.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina
saturday, december 18, 2032
Dan hasn't come back. I had no reason to expect him to give up and come home so quickly, but I did hope. Jorge, Diamond Scott, and Gray Mora are going to trade at the Coy street market today. I've told them to leave word with the few people we know in Coy, and on the way back, to tell the Sullivan family. Their quickest way home takes them past the Sullivan place.
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Marcus slept through the night, causing no trouble to himself or to us. Bankole happened to be in the kitchen when he awoke, and that was good. Bankole took him out to one of our composting toilets. I didn't see him until later when he had washed and dressed. Then he came hesitant and tentative, to my kitchen table.
"Hungry?" I asked. "Sit down."
He stared at me for several seconds, then said, "When I woke up, I thought all this was just a dream."
I put a piece of fruit-laden acorn bread in front of him. We had both been raised on the stuff because our old neighborhood happened to have several very fruitful California live oak trees within the walls. My father didn't believe in waste, so he found out how to use acorns as food. Native Americans did it. We could do it. He and my mother worked at learning to use not only acorns but cactuses, palm fruit, and other plants that might otherwise be seen as useless. For Marcus and me, all this was food from home.
Marcus took the acorn bread, lit into it, and chewed slowly. First he looked delighted, then tears began to stream down his face. I gave him a napkin and a glass of what had once been a favorite morning drink of his—a mug of hot, sweet apple juice with a lemon squeezed into it. The apples we pressed in southern California were of a different variety, but I don't think he noticed. He ate, wiped his eyes, looked around. He stared at Bankole as Bankole came in, then focused on the rest of his breakfast, all but huddling over it the way a hawk does when it's claiming and protecting its kill. There was no more talk for a while.