Empathy in John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s “Parable of the Sower”

Saturday July 20, 2024, is the start of Lauren Oya Olamina’s diary in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Important to reread Butler’s novel and John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s graphic adaptation.

During the camp season at Laurel Falls, Lillian Smith would write letters home to the parents of campers. In the mid-summer 1946 Laurel Leaf, she wrote to parents about the adventures of Buss Eye, the plays that the girls wrote, and other camp activities. Near the end of the letter, she writes about the conversations that the campers had after hearing about the lynching of George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcolm in Monroe, GA.

The campers asked what they can do, and she writes,

I think the most heartbreaking and frustrating thing for all of us who feel decent inside ourselves is to know what to do. If we don’t find some way for our children to express their kindly feelings I fear that they may find it easier psychologically not to have decent feelings but to grow instead a hard shell of indifference and blindness to protect themselves from questions that are hard to answer.

As I read John Ira Jennings and Damian Duffy’s adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I kept coming back to Smith’s comments, here and…