Free Unexpected Stories by Octavia E. Butler Page A

learn to talk. And partly to shock her into thinking along new and not always pleasant lines. That last is ugly. Not something I like to do to kids. The adults I do it to usually can’t be reached any other way. Most of the time they’re not salvageable anyway. All the kids like Valerie have is ten years or so of failure conditioning. Not quite enough to be fatal.
    Valerie said, “I liked the parts where Harriet helped those slaves to get away.”
    “She could have been killed every time she helped them.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Why do you think she kept doing it?”
    Again the bored shrug. “I don’t know. Wanted them to get free, I guess.”
    Off-the-top-of-her-head stuff. She had liked the book all right, at least while she was reading it. It was a juvenile biography of Harriet Tubman, well written, fast moving, and exciting. There were a lot of reasons for Valerie to get more than a couple of evenings of entertainment out of it. Reasons beyond the ones usually given for making a black kid read that kind of book. Right now, though, her mind had wandered outside, where the rest of the court kids were screaming and chasing each other up and down the driveway.
    I hit her with a scene from the book. Herself in Harriet’s place. Seven or eight people following her north. Night. North star. White people nearby. Danger. Close call. Fear. Oneof her followers wanting to turn back, and another, and another. Fear like a barrier you could reach out and touch. Gun in her hand, telling them they would go on with her or be shot
    Push.
    Reading it and living it are two different things. Valerie got the whole scene in a few seconds like a really vivid dream. Not the kind of dream someone her age ought to be having, but she was going to have to grow up pretty fast.
    She shook herself and muttered something like, “Long-haired motherfucker!” It was one of the kinder names that people in our court called each other from time to time . But at that moment Valerie was applying it to the rest of Harriet’s would-be deserters.
    She looked at me, frowning. “They always got halfway up north and then somebody would get scared and want to go back. How come they were so scared to just go ahead and be free?”
    Breakthrough. The kids outside were forgotten for the moment. She had asked a question she wanted the answer to.
    I worked with Valerie until her brother—an older one, not Larry—banged on the door and yelled, “Valerie, Mama say come do these dishes.”
    She left, taking another book with her, a step closer to being ready. I became aware of somebody else as Valerie left.
    A woman coming down the driveway to my house. She spoke to Valerie in the kind of first-grade language that the ten-year-old had come to know and dislike years ago.
    “My, that’s a big book you have there. Are you going to read all that?”
    Valerie muttered something that might have been either “yes” or “no,” leaped the distance between her porch and mine and disappeared into her house. She had left my door open, and the woman walked in like she owned the place. Organization woman. White, of course. White people came to the court to turn off the utilities, evict tenants, sell overpriced junk and take care of other equally savory kinds of business. This would be one of those other kinds. For once, I was glad of Valerie’s youth and ignorance. She didn’t know anything the organization could lift out of her thoughts and use against me.
    I said, “Eve, if you don’t know how to talk to kids why don’t you just pass by without saying anything?”
    “I was only trying to be pleasant to her because she’s one of yours.” She sat down uninvited and smoothed first her dress, then her hair. Her hair was long and when she was nervous she liked to fool with it. Now she was starting to twist a piece of it around her fingers.
    “Did she think you were pleasant?”
    Eve changed the subject. “We’ve missed you. Wewant you to come to a meeting today … if