Resting in Power: Octavia Butler and her Kindred Spirits

“I’m a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”  -Octavia Butler

I remember my life in chunks of books. First the illustrated Bible, worn after spending days in dark clinic waiting rooms flipping through the pages. Then there was the dogeared copy of Mufaro’s  Beautiful Daughters, highly illustrated, again, and lovely.  Middle school was a marathon of Sweet Valley High novels and Babysitters’ Club books and eventually there was Toni Morrison in high school (which I had to reread during college to fully understand what I was consuming).

The first books I bought in college were not for any courses. They were books I had dreamed of buying brand new:  C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.  Together, those books define a good chunk of my worldview today.  Throughout undergrad, I bought the rest of Octavia Butler’s books as I could afford them, and scoured the internet for interviews and meta conversations about her life and her work.

On February 27, 2006 I came running out of my campus apartment to a meeting with my supervisor in the housing office.  I was breathless, near tears and he was willing to listen, even if he didn’t understand.  You see, I had just read that Octavia E. Butler died from an injury in her home three days earlier.

Alone.

She died alone, but, from what I knew about her life, Octavia Butler chose to live as a recluse.  I don’t have enough personal information of her as to why or how much of a hermit she was, but she was comfortable in her identity. She certainly didn’t need this eager reader’s prying.

Octavia Butler’s work changed a part of my life that was stuck in between loving stories and loving science.  As I was developing a crude sociology of the department of engineering on my campus, Octavia Butler’s nuanced female characters were vampires, time travellers, space shifters and more.  And even though they were stuck underneath the umbrella of science fiction, their stories and circumstances were more real than most.

While people were developing religions out of her fictions (and missing the point, I thought), I was coming into an identity of what @MDotwrites would call a black girl from the future, like Lauren in Parable of the Sower and her daughter in Parable of the Talents.  Quirky as hell, but all right.

Today, whenever I visit a bookstore, I always look out for her titles on the shelves.  If there are none, I’ll go to the front desk and order at least Kindred, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Maybe the entire Xenogenesis series if there’s time.  I can’t tell you why I do this; but it’s important to me that her words are still around for someone to stumble on.

I have my own ideas about where Octavia Butler is right now. But I wish she were here so she can hear me and other hungry brown girls and women say, “Thank you.”