The Underground Railroad in Parable of the Sower

Throughout Parable of the Sower, Butler alludes to the Underground Railroad and to colonial American slavery, fitting the situations of character from different minority races into this example of a racial struggle. The story Travis and Natividad Douglas, a black man and a Hispanic woman, could be set, as Lauren herself notices, in a different time period: the slave boy son of a cook steals books from his master to learn how to read before falling in love and saving the house maid. Emery Solis’ and her daughter Tori’s story has similar aspects of a plantation-style living that feel impossibly antiquated for a world supposedly less than two decades in the future. In the workplace and in the cultural mindset, races have in many ways returned to where they were in the 18^th century. Whites are trusted – both Bankole and Emery inform Harry, the one white member of the group, of his easier job prospects, and can run or own the lives of others, workers in factories and homes who may as well be considered slaves for their meager salaries and indebting careers. Colored people are often mistrusted, often sold or used as slaves (the Moras, the Solis’s, the Douglas’s, and the Moss wives), and are seen as suspicious in mixed couples.

In fact, some of the characters don’t even seem surprised at, or have accepted, the nature of the work put on these workers: Lauren questions how far masters went in beating insubordinate servants but thinks little of the nature of modern day servants; Emery calmly recommends the high-paying job of “driving” such workers at a factory to Harry and seems to think the line of work is an acceptable or inevitable part of the world. Within a few decades from when the book was published (1993), the world is accustomed to racially fueled hatred, enslavement, and profiling.

Lauren’s troupe of likely Earthseed converts is often referenced as slaves fleeing by way of the Underground Railroad to a better future up North. Their travels, and those of the many poor around them, greatly resemble the Railroad and further hone in on the slave-like aspect of their lives before joining this family: “Now it’s a highway, a river of the poor. A river flooding north.” (223) Like the Abolitionist leaders of that time period (such as Frederick Douglas, whom Bankole is even compared to), the leaders of Lauren’s group are trying to figure a way for these outcasts, ex-slaves, to live remotely with their independence and their own community.

The notion behind all this is that our seemingly progressive nation will quickly revert to racial enslavement and abuse when society collapses. The world portrayed shows none of the racial sensitivity or equality we take for granted today; years of struggle for equality have disintegrated with the rest of our social structure. In absence of wealth or class, people reverted to racism as a means of division, as race only remained to categorize the countless homeless and poor. Reading this dystopian view of our future makes us question the steadfastness of our attempts to move past race, and also to question whether we have moved past them at all.