Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2252]

So today we remembered the friends and the family members we’ve lost. We spoke our individual memories and quoted Bible passages, Earthseed verses, and bits of songs and poems that were favorites of the living or the dead. … Then we buried our dead and we planted oak trees. … Afterward, we sat together and talked and ate a meal and decided to call this place Acorn. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2252

Note

Turn: the chapter’s pivot from argument to ritual, told in three flat anaphoric sentences chained by ‘Then’ and ‘Afterward.’ The liturgy of the first sentence — Bible, Earthseed, songs, poems, ‘favorites of the living or the dead’ — collapses into five words of action, ‘we buried our dead and we planted oak trees,’ where the burial and the naming of the settlement in the next paragraph are the same gesture. The naming arrives last and casually, ‘decided to call this place Acorn,’ which retroactively makes the sowing parable that follows the chapter’s true title.