How we cite our quotes: The main text of the story is cited (Chapter.Paragraph). The date headers are not counted as paragraphs. The verses in the chapters with a single passage from the narrator's religious texts are cited (Chapter.Verse.Line#). In chapters with multiple passages, the verses are cited (Chapter.Verse#.Line#). The four section pages with the years and passages are cited (Year.Verse).
Quote #1
Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That's an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery. That might work in Christopher Donner's America. Labor laws, state and federal, are not what they once were. (11.21)
Hmm, being in debt...that kind of sounds familiar for many of us, right? Like, if you fail to pay back student loans and then fail to appear in court about them, you can be arrested. Is it fair to equate a mountain of debt to slavery? Lauren seems to think so, although she calls it debt slavery and not just regular slavery.
Quote #2
Harry woke up, drank a little water, and listened while Zahra told how Richard Moss had bought her from her homeless mother when she was only fifteen—younger than I had thought—and brought her to live in the first house she had ever known. He gave her enough to eat and didn't beat her, and even when her co-wives were hateful to her, it was a thousand times better than living outside with her mother and starving. Now she was outside again. In six years, she had gone from nothing to nothing. (15.12)
Here's another type of slavery: marriage. Zahra was trapped with Richard Moss, but she viewed that situation as better than her past of living on the streets. It's not until Robledo is destroyed that Zahra has to start anew. So now that Richard Moss is dead, she's free, right? Well, maybe freedom isn't so simple. Zahra doesn't have many possessions or any money, so can she sustain herself? She's on the streets yet again. But this time, she has Lauren and Harry—so perhaps an Earthseed community for societal support will be her means of freedom.
Quote #3
I looked at Harry. "You might be able to get into Olivar if you can walk there from here. The Garfields would take you in."
He thought about that for a while. "I don't want to," he said. "I don't think there's any more future in Olivar than there was in our neighborhood. But at least in our neighborhood, we had the guns." [...]
"[T]hey were our guns, not hired gunmen. No one would turn them against us. In Olivar, from what Joanne said, no one's allowed to have a gun except the security force. And who the hell are they?" (15.14-17)
This dialogue between Harry and Lauren occurs shortly after the destruction of Robledo. Harry's analyzing the downsides of migrating to Olivar and ruling out doing so himself. He doesn't use the word slavery, but that's pretty much how he imagines it would be if he lived in Olivar, since people there can't own guns unless they're part of the company security force.
Quote #4
"Richard let his older kids go out, but he wouldn't let me. Before he bought me, though, I was a good shot."
Her alien past again. It distracted me for a moment. I had been waiting to ask her how much a person costs these days. And she had been sold by her mother to a man who couldn't have been much more than a stranger. He could have been a maniac, a monster. And my father used to worry about future slavery or debt slavery. Had he known? He couldn't have. (16.53-54)
Lauren thinks over how her father worried about debt slavery or slavery in the future while not recognizing the plight of women such as Zahra, whose marriages are effectively slavery situations. Today's feminists might describe this as a problem of patriarchy, or rule by men. That's not any newfangled theory; it goes back to the 17th century and earlier.
Quote #5
"She taught me to read and write," Travis said. "Then she taught me to teach myself. The man she worked for had a library—a whole big room full of books."
"He let you read them?" I asked.
"He didn't let me near them." Travis gave me a humorless smile. "I read them anyway. My mother would sneak them to me."
Of course. Slaves did that two hundred years ago. They sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts. (18.37-40)
This exchange between Travis and Lauren is based not just on the history of slaves educating themselves in the pre-Civil War United States, but also on Octavia Butler herself reading books her mother snuck her, as Butler described in an autobiographical essay titled Positive Obsession. Pretty inspiring, huh?
Quote #6
I looked at Natividad who sat a short distance away, on spread out sleepsacks, playing with her baby and talking to Zahra. She had been lucky. Did she know? How many other people were less lucky—unable to escape the master's attentions or gain the mistress's sympathies. How far did masters and mistresses go these days toward putting less than submissive servants in their places? (18.46)
Here Lauren reflects on Natividad's past life. Natividad was a servant, but it was a lot more like slavery given how the master was eyeing her for sex. Luckily, Natividad escaped, along with Travis. Consider how working conditions can be so bad that a place of employment effectively turns into a slavery situation. Does Lauren's migrating Earthseed group do away with those problems altogether, or does they replicate those problems to some extent? For instance, does Lauren boss everyone else around too much, or do the members of her group have fair say into what decisions are made?
Quote #7
Then the farm was sold to a big agribusiness conglomerate, and the workers fell into new hands. Wages were paid, but in company scrip, not in cash. [...] Wages—surprise!—were never quite enough to pay the bills. According to new laws that might or might not exist, people were not permitted to leave an employer to whom they owed money. They were obligated to work off the debt either as quasi-indentured people or as convicts. That is, if they refused to work, they could be arrested, jailed, and in the end, handed over to their employers. (23.87)
Wait, hold up—what's company scrip? That's payment by a company in currency that is only good at stores owned by that company. It's totally not fair, because then you can't shop around elsewhere for deals or, like, get out of the company town and live elsewhere. To find out more about company towns, check out this article.
Quote #8
Stitched into the tongue of each of the dead woman's boots were five, folded one hundred-dollar bills—a thousand dollars in all. We had to tell [Emery] how little that was. If she were careful, and shopped only at the cheapest stores, and ate no meat, wheat, or dairy products, it might feed her for two weeks. It might feed both her and Tori for a week and a half. Still, it seemed riches to Emery.
[...]
Emery squandered too much money on pears and walnuts for everyone. She delighted in passing these around, in being able to give us something for a change. She's all right. We'll have to teach her about shopping and the value of money, but she's worth something, Emery is. (24.190-191)
After working away as a debt slave for a big agribusiness conglomerate, Emery doesn't have much understanding of the value of money. She isn't good at budgeting it, in other words. That's a skill people have to learn, and one they may not be good at due to their life experiences.
On the other hand, another way to view Emery's spending choices is that she's placing her trust in her new traveling companions and giving them gifts in order to build up "social capital."
Quote #9
Jail for Bankole could have meant being sold into a period of hard, unpaid labor—slavery. Perhaps if he had been younger, the deputies might have taken his money and arrested him anyway on some trumped-up charge. I had begged him not to go, not to trust any police or government official. It seemed to me such people were no better than gangs with their robbing and slaving. (25.5)
This is Lauren, a fictional character, talking in a near-future sci-fi novel, but it's not all that far from the truth today. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for criminals. Today, many prisoners in the United States labor away for less than $0.25 an hour. If Lauren's world is similar, it's no wonder she doesn't want Bankole to unnecessarily risk getting arrested.
Quote #10
"You might be able to get a job as a driver," she said. "They like white men to be drivers. If you can read and write, and if you'd do the work, you might get hired." [...]
"You mean driving those big armored trucks, don't you?"
Emery looked confused. "Trucks? No, I mean driving people. Making them work. Pushing them to work faster. Making them do . . . whatever the owners says."
Harry's expression had dissolved from hopeful to horrified to outraged. "Jesus God, do you think I'd do that! How could you think I'd do anything like that?"
Emery shrugged. It startled me that she could be so indifferent about such a thing, but she seemed to be. "Some people think it's a good job," she said. (25.52-56)
Slaves of whatever sort might view the types of labor involved in slave practices, such as "driving" humans to make them work harder, differently from the way people without experience of that system might view them. Emery is accustomed to slave labor; Harry isn't.