Monday, February 27, 2006

Author Tananarive Due remembers Octavia Butler

Speculative and horror fiction author Tananarive Due and her husband, author Steven Barnes, (also a speculative fiction writer) were good friends of Octavia Butler (at one time all three resided in Seattle). In an eloquent essay she sent out to the members of her AOL group, Ms. Due remembers her friend. She has given me permission to reprint her essay here and I do so gladly:

Even for writers, words can fail us. It has taken me twenty-four hours to find the words.

In speculative black fiction, we are a very small family. Our matriarch has died.

Sunday morning, when a magazine reporter sent me word that Octavia Butler had died, I didn’t want to believe it. I saw nothing in the news nor on the Web. I called Octavia’s home number and listened with a pounding heart as her phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. I delighted – for just a bare instant – when the ringing stopped and I heard her voice.

On her answering machine. Already distant, clearly a recording. But Octavia’s voice.

I stammered a message. What to say? Are you alive or dead? “I’ve...heard something...and I was hoping to speak to Octavia...” I stopped, nearly sobbing. In that instant, I understood the futility of the act. We cannot call the dead on the telephone.

I thought of the other times I had called her – never enough, it turns out – when I tried to make our conversations brief, never able to fight the certainty that I was pulling her away from a stream of brilliant thoughts. Once, she apologized for the loud music playing in the background. It turned out that Octavia, like me, enjoyed listening to music while she wrote. How many times did I hesitate to dial her number simply because I didn’t want to disturb her?

I was introduced to the works of Octavia E. Butler when a friend of mine, a writer and columnist named Robert Vamosi, insisted I must read her. I read Kindred, her time-travel story of a contemporary black woman who is periodically flung back into the Antebellum slavery period, and I was floored. I often say that between Alex Haley’s Roots, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Butler’s Kindred, we can come no closer to experiencing slavery, and its legacy, in America.

I advise people to read Kindred first, because it serves as such a wondrous bridge to speculative fiction. After that, some readers will insist it should be Wild Seed and the Patternist series. But I often suggest Parable of the Sower. In it, Butler creates her own religion – a religion that embraces change.

All that You touch You Change. (You touched us, Octavia)

All that you Change Changes you. (You had to know how much we loved you)

The only lasting truth Is Change. (It was inevitable that we would lose you)

God is Change.