Race:
Fear of Return to Servitude/Slavery-
Rich families that can afford enough security to stay in the comfort of their own home have servants, which might be one of the only available options for employment in this society. Both Natividad and Travis were in servitude when they decided to escape the property with their child due to sexual harrassment against Natividad. This was compared to the way that slaves were forced to live for hundreds of years in the United States. “They sneaked around and educated themselves as best they could, sometimes suffering whipping, sale, or mutilation for their efforts” (Butler 1993, 201).
This is a manifestation of the genuine fear that many African Americans have while trying to reconnect with the land, which is something that black farmer Leah Penniman writes about in her essay “Black Gold” (2020). Although Butler does not explicity talk about agricultural slave labor and its parallels to this situation, she still explores the possibility that people of color in need of work may have to resort to servitude for rich white families in times of socioeconomic and political crisis.
There is also the fear of being a “debt slave” to a company town, a situation that Emery found herself in after her husband passed away. Employees are purposefully not paid enough at their job to afford rent or other living expenses, therefore the company can use this debt against them and force them to stay on company owned land indefinitely. Reverend Olamina warned Lauren about the predatory behavior of these towns despite their apparent security, since they see workers as disposable.
Gender:
Men in Robledo have the typical role of providing for the family. Reverend Olamina leads church services, but he also works at the local college and must travel back and forth to bring money home. Meanwhile, Cory and Lauren stay home to teach the neighborhood children, which is stereotypically a female task. However, regardless of gender, Reverend Olamina tries to train members of the community to use a gun. Both men and women carry firearms for safety.
Lauren decides to dress as a man when she leaves Robledo for a better chance of survival. She knows that a group of two women and one man looks much weaker to violent people than a group of two men and a woman.
Male escorts are necessary for women to leave the community because of all the dangers outside the walls. Women who are left defenseless are raped and killed. At first, the gendered roles in this book reflect some of the themes that Susan Schrepfer discusses in her book Nature’s Altars (2005), in which men had the privilege of exploring and conquering nature, while women were steered away from it. However, later on in the book as Lauren leads the group North with her grandparent’s old roadmaps, this narrative switches and Lauren, an African American teenage girl, becomes the primary explorer of “uncharted” land.
Back to the Land:
The homesteading element of this novel actually combats racial stereotypes seen in a lot of historical back-to-the-land literature. For example, the back to the land movement for African Americans was commonly called “back to farm,” which was a blatant relabeling of slavery. In the Jim Crow South, many white supremacists believed that African Americans were “adapted to agriculture.” (Padilla Carroll 2022, 52-53). Additionally, Padilla Carroll points out the white supremacist views that Myrtle Borsodi had surrounding homesteading, in which a “self-sufficient woman…” was defined as “educated, white, and middle to upper-middle class” (Padilla Carroll 2022, 81).
In Parable of the Sower, most of the members of the Robledo community are people of color, with only two white families. Every family had their own garden with fruits and vegetables, meaning that all households were self-sufficient. This was normalized in the community, and there were no associations with race and agriculture. Even when Lauren and the other travelers founded Acorn on Bankole’s land, the idea that they would have to subsistence farm and basically homestead was already widely accepted amongst the group. Their reasoning for doing so was strikingly similar to Ralph Borsodi’s ideas in Flight from the City (1933), that civilization was a corrupt place where humanity had stopped making progress, therefore in order to flourish, one must return to the land and make their own food and money.
“We must have arable land, a dependable water supply, and enough freedom from attack to let us establish ourselves and grow” (Butler 1993, 206)
Parallels to the “Noble Savage” Trope
In historical American environmental thought, the character of the noble savage is seen as primitive, authentic, pure, and at a lower stage of evolution than the white savior. Sometimes they were seen as wasteful users of the land, as the way they had managed their environment for centuries was completely different from the management practices of white Europeans (Gilio Whitaker, 2019).
In some ways, this stereotype can be superimposed onto the Paints and other violent street-poor characters in the novel. They are characterized as villians by the “well-off” members of the Robledo community, who have a clear sense of community and structure. They look down on the actions of those outside the walls, despite the fact that many are acting out of desparation. The purposeful setting of fires by Paints and the burning of homes, trees, and grass can be compared to the way that white Europeans described the practices of the Noble Savage. They saw them as ignorant and dangerous. However, the Messiah Complex meant that Europeans saw it as their duty to colonize the land and teach the Noble Savage the “right” way to manage land. The relationship between the Paints and the Robledo community is different, because they are strictly enemies. There is no purposeful exchange of information or practices between the two groups.