THEY'LL MAKE A GOD of her.

I think that would please her, if she could know about it. In spite of alt her protests and denials, she's always needed devoted, obedient followers - disciples - who would listen to her and believe everything she told them. And she needed large events to manipulate. All gods seem to need these things.

Her legal name was Lauren Oya Olamina Bankole. To those who loved her or hated her, she was simply "Olamina."

She was my biological mother.

She is dead.

I have wanted to love her and to believe that what happened between her and me wasn't her fault. I've wanted that. But instead, I've hated her, feared her, needed her. I've never trusted her, though, never understood how she could be the way she was&emdash;so focused, and yet so misguided, there for all the world, but never there for me. I still don't understand. And now that she's dead, I'm not even sure I ever will. But I must try because I need to understand myself, and she is part of me. I wish that she weren't, but she is. In order for me to understand who I am, I must begin to understand who she was. That is my reason for writing and assembling this book.

It has always been my way to sort through my feelings by writing. She and I had that in common. And along with the need to write, she also developed a need to draw. If she had been born in a saner time, she might have become a writer as I have or an artist.

I've gathered a few of her drawings, although she gave most of these away during her lifetime. And I have copies of all that was saved of her writings. Even some of her early, paper notebooks have been copied to disk or crystal and saved. She had a habit, during her youth, of hiding caches of food, money and weaponry in out-of-the-way places or with trusted people, and being able to go straight back to these years later. These saved her life several times, and also they saved her words, her journals and notes and my father's writings. She managed to badger him into writing a little. He wrote well, although he didn't like doing it. I'm glad she badgered him. I'm glad to have known him at least through his writing. I wonder why I'm not glad to have known her through hers.

"God is Change," my mother believed. That was what she said in the first of her verses in Earthseed: The First Book of the Living.

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

The words are harmless, I suppose, and metaphorically true. At least she began with some species of truth. And now she's touched me one last time with her memories, her life, and her damned Earthseed.

************************************************************************

THE ORIGINAL 13 SETTLERS of Acorn, and thus the original 13 members of Earthseed, were my mother, of course, and Harry BaIter and Zahra Moss, who were also refugees from my mother's home neighborhood in Robledo. There was Travis, Natividad, and Dominic Douglas, a young family who became my mother's first highway converts. She met them as both groups walked through Santa Barbara, California. She liked their looks, recognized their dangerous vulnerability - Dominic was only a few months old at the time - and convinced them to walk with Harry, Zahra, and her in their long trek north where they all hoped to find better lives.

Next came Allison Gilchrist and her sister Jillian - Allie and Jill. But Jill was killed later along the highway. At around the same time, my mother spotted my father and he spotted her. Neither of them was shy and both seemed willing to act on what they felt. My father joined the growing group. Justin Rohr became Justin Gilchrist when the group found him crying alongside the body of his dead mother. He was about three at the time, and he and Allie wound up coming together in another small family. Last came the two families of ex-slaves that joined together to become one growing family of sharers. These were Grayson Mora and his daughter Doe and Emery Solis and her daughter Tori.

That was it: four children, four men, and five women.

They should have died. That they survived at all in the unforgiving world of the Pox might qualify as a miracle - although, of course, Earthseed does not encourage belief in miracles.

No doubt the group's isolated location - well away from towns and paved roads - helped keep it safe from much of the violence of the time. The land it settled on belonged to my father. There was on that land when the group arrived one dependable well, a half-ruined garden, a number of fruit and nut trees, and groves of oaks, pines, and redwoods. Once the members of the group had pooled their money and bought handcarts, seed, small livestock, hand tools, and other necessities, they were almost independent. They vanished into their hills and increased their numbers by birth, by adoption of orphans, and by conversion of needy adults. They scavenged what they could from abandoned farms and settlements, they traded at street markets and traded with their neighbors. One of the most valuable things they traded with one another was knowledge.

Every member of Earthseed learned to read and to write, and most knew at least two languages - usually Spanish and English, since those were the two most useful. Anyone who joined the group, child or adult, had to begin at once to learn these basics and to acquire a trade. Anyone who had a trade was always in the process of teaching it to someone else. My mother insisted on this, and it does seem sensible. Public schools had become rare in those days when ten-year-old children could be put to work. Education was no longer free, but it was still mandatory according to the law. The problem was, no one was enforcing such laws, just as no one was protecting child laborers.

My father had the most valuable skills in the group. By the time he married my mother, he had been practicing medicine for almost 30 years. He was a multiple rarity for their location: weLl educated, professional, and Black. Black people in particular were rare in the mountains. People wondered about him. Why was he there? He could have been making a better living in some small, established town. The area was littered with tiny towns that would be glad to have any doctor. Was he competent? Was he honest? Was he clean? Could he be trusted looking after wives and daughters? How could they be sure he was really a doctor at all? My father apparently wrote nothing at all about this, but my mother wrote about everything.

She says at one point: "Bankole heard the same whispers and rumors I did at the various street markets and in occasional meetings with neighbors, and he shrugged. He had us to keep healthy and our work-related injuries to treat. Other people had their first aid kits, their satellite phone nets, and, if they were lucky, their cars or trucks. These vehicles tended to be old and undependable, but some people had them. Whether or not they called Bankole was their business.

"Then, thanks to someone else's misfortune, things improved. Jean Holly's appendix flared up and all but ruptured, and the Holly family, our eastern neighbors, decided that they had better take a chance on Bankole.

"Once Bankole had saved the woman's life, he had a talk with the family. He told them exactly what he thought of them for waiting so long to call him, for almost letting a woman with five young children die. He spoke with that intense quiet courtesy of his that makes people squirm. The Hollys took it. He became their doctor.

"And the Hollys mentioned him to their friends the Sullivans, and the Sullivans mentioned him to their daughter who had married into the Gama family, and the Gamas told the Dovetrees because old Mrs. Dovetree - the matriarch - had been a Gama. That was when we began to get to know our nearest neighbors, the Dovetrees."

Speaking of knowing people, I wish more than ever that I could have known my father. He seems to have been an impressive man. And, perhaps, it would have been good for me to know this version of my mother, struggling, focused, but very young, very human. I might have liked these people.