Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

by Susana M. Morris

Octavia lamented that her decision to publish Survivor when she did was primarily a financial one. She begrudgingly accepted the editor’s notes and got her advance, wagering that it was better to take the money and work on what would become Kindred than to take the time she ultimately felt was necessary to whip Survivor into shape.

Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, and Survivor are all meditations on hierarchy, especially as it manifests in the form of settler colonialism.

Historian Gerald Horne notes, “In North America the colonialism implanted bloodily involved racialization, which meant the denial of the right to have rights, making millions—Africans particularly—denizens of a society but not of it, that is, permanent aliens, a status that has not entirely dissipated to this very day, indicating its profundity.”

“I might have been making some comment on Black America. Once the thought came to me, I realized that I probably was commenting on Black America. Then I had to ask myself how I felt about that—that I was perhaps making a comment on learning the wrong thing from one’s teachers.”

“I have published three small novels. No one can get away with sneering at me or pitying me when I call myself a writer. It’s good.”

Imagine if Octavia at this point in her career had not been bogged down by all of these material concerns, if she had had a room of her own with a lock and a key and a stream of income that allowed her to not engage in backbreaking labor. Imagine.

Kindred grew out of something I heard when I was in college, during the mid-1960s. I was a member of a black student union, along with this guy who had been interested in black history before it became fashionable. He was considered quite knowledgeable, but his attitude about slavery was very much like the attitude I had when I was thirteen—that is, he felt that the older generation should have rebelled. He once commented, “I wish I could kill off all these old people who have been holding us back for so long, but I can’t because I would have to start with my own parents.”

But she did not place the blame on her Black ancestors or her living elders. She didn’t think, I am not my ancestors, you can catch these hands. Octavia thought, I am not my ancestors—they were immeasurably strong. How could I have possibly survived what they had to endure?

Octavia Margaret was born on a sugar plantation in northern Louisiana, in the same place where her own ancestors had been enslaved years before.

I spent a lot of my childhood being ashamed of what she [her mother] did, and I think one of the reasons I wrote Kindred was to resolve my feelings, because, after all, I ate because of what she did . . . Kindred was kind of a reaction to some of the things going on during the sixties when people were feeling ashamed of, or more strongly, angry with their parents for not having improved things faster, and I wanted to take a person from today and send that person back to slavery.

I am the daughter of a maid and a bootblack, the descendant of slaves. I climb upon the bones of those who survived hell.”

“I carried that look for a number of years before I understood it, and before I understood what my friend had failed to understand. I didn’t have to leave school when I was ten, I never missed a meal, always had a roof over my head, because my mother was willing to do demeaning work and accept humiliation.”

Only years later would adult Octavia fully realize that she had lashed out at her mother, a woman who endured low pay and insults to put food on the table, rather than at the true source of her resentment. The white lady had made her feel small, and she was upset with her mother for letting that happen. So yes, Octavia understood her friend’s anger because she had already done the work of reconciling her own. The question was how to get her generation, especially middle-class Blacks like her classmate, and the ones that followed to have their own epiphanies.9 The answer to that question would eventually become Kindred.

Although she was often suspicious of the masculinist tenor of the Black Power movement, she resonated with its messages about self-determination and pride. Octavia also connected to feminism, and throughout her career she openly identified as a feminist.

Kindred not only reveals slavery’s quotidian horrors for Octavia’s fellow Black baby boomers coming of age during the civil rights and Black Power movements, but also the Faustian bargain that slavery’s descendants are often forced to make in the face of white supremacy.

Likewise, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong, Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time, and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (all published that year) highlighted the significance of women in the genre.

“So far my research has been very slight, my imagination immense. That may never change in one way. Imagination will probably always play a larger role than research. Else I’d write nonfiction, or at the best I would type fiction which I’m loath even to read. But Dune and Shogun and The Godfather prove what good research—thorough research can bring forth.”

“I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn’t really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.”

She had chosen Maryland as the setting for Kindred because she was inspired by the stories of two of its most famous formerly enslaved residents: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

Her experience at Mount Vernon was transformative. She wrote to a friend, “No amount of books, pictures or Historical Society dioramas can quite bring the bad old days to life like in a way stepping back into them.”

Her further research into slavery only cemented her conviction that systemic oppression based on hierarchal thinking was intricately woven into the fabric of not only American society but human civilization.

“It was depressing reading not only because bad things happened to slaves, but because it could become so pedestrian when you read enough of it, so ordinary.”31 The quotidian horrors of slavery found in slave narratives and first-person accounts would provide much inspiration for Kindred.

She worked on the project she was alternately calling To Keep Thee in All Thy Ways and Guardian—the title Kindred would come later—nearly every day and devoted portions of each week to going down rabbit holes of research.

In her diary, she mulls over the brief fling she had with a man she met at the library, an encounter she found clumsy and transactional.

“I write of people. Thus, I require outside contact . . . I must be open, approachable. And gently, carefully, I must approach. I NEED PEOPLE.”

“The stories got me: stories of conflict, betrayal, torture, murder, exile, and incest,” she recalled. “I read them avidly. This was, of course, not exactly what my mother had in mind when she encouraged me to read the Bible. Nevertheless, I found these fascinating, and when I began writing, I explored these themes in my own stories.”

She recalled: “One of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narratives—I think I had gotten to one by a man who was explaining how he had been sold to a doctor who used him for medical experiments—was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near as it was. I was going to have to do a somewhat cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it.”43 That the “somewhat cleaned-up version” of slavery that Octavia pens in Kindred remains terrifying is a testament to both the enduring horrors of slavery and Octavia’s uncanny ability to convey the core truths of slavery’s violence for a modern audience.

Kindred is fundamentally speculative in that it creates an impossible scenario to invite readers to consider their own assumptions, beliefs, and behavior about slavery and its legacy. That is, what would you do if you were transported back to the antebellum era? Octavia’s response is stark and pragmatic. She believed that most contemporary Black people, like their ancestors, would endure for the sake of their own survival and of those they loved. They would commit smaller yet still dangerous acts of rebellion, such as shirking work and destroying tools, as well as larger ones, like committing infanticide and suicide, but few would burn down plantations or murder slave owners outright. They would develop curious, complicated relationships with the people who owned them, and they would hold fast to the community of enslaved people, kith and kin, who comprised their support system. And although they would be worn down by slavery, what Dana calls in the novel “a long slow process of dulling,” they would never lose sight of their humanity or the fact that what they were experiencing was terrible and wrong.

This is NOT the story of a woman’s struggle to be free. This is a story of a black woman who must preserve the life of her white slavemaster ancestor without betraying her own people or herself.”

In Kindred, Octavia depicts slavery’s ultimate irony, that the institution did more to dehumanize Rufus and other whites than the enslaved property that they sought to oppress.

She also toyed with the idea of making Kevin a Black man, perhaps a fair-skinned one who could pass for white, which would incite psychological torment for him as he traveled in time.

Similarly, Michele Wallace in her strident 1979 polemic Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman called out the toxic masculinity in so-called radical spaces of the 1970s. Like her Black feminist peers, Octavia rejected the notion that a “return” to patriarchy is the solution to the intergenerational conflict.

“I was much more interested in taking a black woman of now and sending her back to then, and having her cope. I wanted to do a novel about feelings as much as about history. Because I recognize that a lot of young people did not really understand on the level of feelings—they could quote facts for you—but they didn’t really understand what it might have been like to live then.”

“It’s one thing to read about it and cringe that something horrible is happening,” she noted. “I sent somebody into it who is a person of now, of today, and that means I kind of take the reader along and expose them in a way that the average historic novel doesn’t intend to, can’t.”

What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking—whoever “everyone” happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?

Although Octavia was indeed a member of the growing group of Black feminist women writers, the fact that she almost exclusively wrote science fiction did set her apart. Besides Samuel R. Delany, Octavia was the only other known Black science fiction writer in circulation when she emerged on the scene. She and Delany were soon joined by Steven Barnes, and they were a trio for a while.

She told budding writers to “forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

There are versions of Kindred that she imagined as part of the Patternist universe in her archive, but Octavia ultimately decided to make it a stand-alone novel.

“it will become un-American to criticize the destructive activities of big business. The media will minimize such criticism, cowed by governmental assertions that they stand in the way of getting America moving again, putting us back on top.”

Octavia thought of Reagan as a genial monster.

In “Free Libraries: Are They Becoming Extinct?” Octavia mused that “public libraries are the open universities of America . . . They offer worlds of possibilities to people who might otherwise be confined by their ignorance and poverty to continued ignorance and worsened poverty.”

I wrote Wild Seed as a reward for having written Kindred. Kindred was depressing. I had to go to places that I didn’t enjoy going, in my own mind, and in history. Also, my characters in Kindred couldn’t really win. I couldn’t change history and make them win. The closest they could come to winning was to survive. They lived. They didn’t live whole, but they lived. When I finished Kindred, I needed to do something that was fun. Wild Seed was fun. Which is odd because it was also one of the most difficult novels I’ve ever written. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

Besides the theme of chattel slavery, in both Kindred and Wild Seed Octavia “decided to approach history as though it were another planet.”

“If I could do anything, anything at all . . . I would want to live forever and breed folks,” she admitted. Her friends stared at her in confusion. Immortality was one thing, but breeding people? Girl. “Breed people?” “Yeah, I’d create a race of superhumans!”

Octavia saw America’s political sensibilities as faddish, with people becoming bored and being easily swayed by novelty.

Throughout her life she bristled against the accusation of lesbianism, believing that this misidentification both stymied her romantic prospects with men and undermined some of her potential friendships with women.

From her teens and well into her thirties she intermittently struggled with thoughts of suicide.

“I am a dancing bear, a novelty, a black woman who writes successfully. I must be able to prevail whether blacks in general are in or out of fashion. That means I must always speak well and have something interesting to say. I must become a good storyteller—reach people on a level beyond color.”

The “Carl Brandon hoax” is probably the most glaring example of the early lack of diversity. In the 1950s, white science fiction writers Terry Carr and Peter Graham created the figure of Carl Joshua Brandon, a supposedly Black science fiction writer.52 For more than two years, before the ruse was exposed, “Carl” published stories and corresponded with fellow authors who congratulated themselves on being progressive enough to include a Black man in their literary circles.

It should be no surprise that when Butler was approached in 1980 to coedit an anthology of stories about the future of race, to be called Black Futures, she jumped at the chance.