Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [426]

There was nothing more. A few minutes later, I heard Dad leave. I waited until I heard Cory go to her room and shut the door. Then I got up, shut my door, moved my lamp so the light wouldn’t show under the door, then turned it on and opened my grandmother’s Bible. She had had a lot of Bibles and Dad had let me keep this one. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 426

Note

The listening child’s ritual of concealment — shutting a door, editing the lamp’s throw — rendered in plain, unhurried actions that mirror what she just overheard: the family is now a set of rooms, each with its own light discipline. The sentence carries no interiority, and that restraint is the point; the moral content emerges from geography and wattage. The inherited Bible arriving at the end quietly makes the next verse a bequest rather than an argument.