A Woman of Talents: A Memorial for Octavia Butler
by N. Jeanne Burns

When Octavia E. Butler’s twelfth novel, Fledgling, came out in 1995, I was excited. It had been seven years since her last book was published, Parable of the Talents (so named from the Biblical parable of the talents), and all her fans were eager to see what was next. Yet when I heard that Fledgling was about vampires, I dismissed it because I’m not fond of fantasy writing.
Until I heard that she had died on February 24, 2006.

She had chosen her path long before they met. His mistake was in seeing her as a young girl. She was already a missile, armed and targeted.
--from Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Born in Pasadena, California in 1947, Butler dreamed of a life outside the limits of racism, classism and sexism. Her mother, also named Octavia, was an African-American woman who had been pulled out of school in the third grade to work in the cane fields of Louisiana. Her mother never went back to school. As an adult, she worked as a maid in a white household.

Butler grew up in the palatial home where her grandmother also worked as the cook and her two uncles worked as handymen and gardeners. Her family was allowed to come and go from that home only through the back door.

She escaped her perceived oppression by telling herself stories, which she eventually began writing down when she was ten. “Their lives seemed so terrible to me at times—so devoid of joy or reward. I needed my fantasies to shield me from their world,” she said in an Essence interview in 1979.

There is no escape. What a cruel and terrible thing escape would be if escape were possible.
--a from Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

In spite of her dyslexia, Butler graduated from high school and went on to get an Associate Degree from Pasadena City College in 1968. She spent the next eight years working at low-wage menial labor, including sorting potato chips, to support herself while she wrote and submitted her short stories and novels. Butler’s first novel, Patternmaster, was published in 1976.

Her stories are often about the disaffected. Most of her protagonists are women of color. The boundaries of gender and sexuality are challenged. Sometimes, her stories are prophetic. Her characters are always agents in their own lives. Butler wrote often about the near-future, one ravaged by human ignorance and willful disregard for humanity or the planet.

In spite of the fact that the literary establishment often snubs science fiction, Butler has been recognized for her work by academia. Dorothy Allison and Jewelle Gomez, among others, have written academic papers on Butler’s work. Her book Kindred is frequently assigned in African American literature classes. Both the Nebula and Hugo awards, science fiction’s premiere awards, have honored Butler’s work. In 1995, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Butler a $295,000 “Genius” award. About the award, she said, “I didn’t take an IQ test or anything. I’m no genius.”
That money enabled her to buy her first home. There she cared for her ailing mother who died in 1999.

And gangsters were likely to run around in matching tunics all sporting white crosses on their chests. This was something new. Or something old.
--from Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler

Butler was reclusive so little is known about her personal life. Many in the queer community believed her to be at least bisexual if not lesbian. She never denied it, nor did she proclaim it. With short-cropped hair, a sonorous voice, big bones and just over six feet tall, she fit the stereotype at least.

If Butler’s novels are any indication, at least her imagination was unconventional. In her Xenogenesis trilogy, the characters reproduced in three-somes: one female, one male, and one genderless being. In Kindred, her African-American female protagonist partnered with a white man. In Fledgling, the female protagonist had both male and female sexual partners but mated only with male vampires.

God kept silent but was so palpably, disturbingly present that even in the silence Martha felt rebuked. "Where is this?" she asked, not really wanting to know, not wanting to be dead when she was only forty-three. "Where am I?"
"Here with me," God said.
--from “The Book Of Martha” by Octavia Butler

How Octavia E. Butler died is a mystery. Some newspapers report that she died after a fall in front of her home. Others report that she’d had a stroke. She was found on her stoop next to a spilled bag of groceries.

I just finished reading Fledgling and grieve Octavia Butler again. I crave her unique voice. In spite of the fact that she had been writing and publishing since 1976, science fiction is  dominated by white straight men. Shortly after Butler died, the New York Times’ new science fiction reviewer David Itzkoff wrote an article listing his top ten favorite science fiction books of all time. All of the books were by white, straight men.
In the Biblical parable, a landowner gives five ‘talents’, or money, to one man, two to a second man, and one to another. When he returns, he is pleased with the men who doubled the talents they’d been given, and was displeased with the man who just buried his talent. I’m just glad Octavia E. Butler didn’t bury her ‘talents’ but instead turned two into ten. I look forward to rereading all of her books and short stories.

Octavia E. Butler Bibliography

Kindred (1979)
Fledgling (2005)
Patternist Series:
            Wild Seed (1980)
            Mind of My Mind (1977)
            Patternmaster (1976)
            Clay’s Ark (1984)
            Survivor (1978)
Xenogenesis Trilogy:
            Dawn (1987)
            Adulthood Rites (1988)
            Imago (1989)
Parable Series:
            Parable of the Sower (1993)
            Parable of the Talents (1998)
Short Story Collections:
            Bloodchild and other stories (1995, 2006 with add. stories)
            Speech Sounds (1983)
Published on the Internet:

Amnesty

Book of Martha