Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [520]

It’s not fair,” he said today for the twentieth or thirtieth time. “Lauren’s a girl and you let her go. You always let her do things. I could learn to help you guard and scare off robbers…” He had once made the mistake of offering to help “shoot robbers” instead of scaring them off, and Dad all but preached him a sermon. Dad almost never hits us, but he can be scary without lifting a finger. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 520

Note

Characterization through the correction of a single verb: ‘shoot robbers’ versus ‘scare them off’ is the whole of the father’s moral architecture, and the narration delivers the lesson as narrative aside rather than speech. ‘Dad almost never hits us, but he can be scary without lifting a finger’ is a disturbing sentence — the qualifier ‘almost’ does quiet work about the household’s baseline of violence.