I think any who reaches the age of 21 in North America will already have witnessed at least one moment of Black excellence that was truly breathtaking. But different people are affected by different things.
For some it might be the tap dance scene in Stormy Weather, when the Nicholas Brothers jumped up from their table and delivered three of the most perfect minutes of dance ever captured on film. For some it might be the tactical brilliance, physical power and flawless aim of Michael Jordan on a basketball court. Or maybe it was Aretha Franklin on stage at the age of 73, her voice soaring to bring a whole theater of full of people to their feet—including the leader of the free world.
The point is, there’s always a first time that transcendent Blackness really blows you away. For me that moment came in June of 1984, when the mailman delivered the latest issue of my subscription to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Alongside the editorial from Asimov, an essay from Algis Budrys and short stories from other authors, there was a novelette from a name I’d never seen before—Octavia E. Butler.
Born in Pasadena in 1947, Butler was raised in a strict Baptist household by her widowed mother and maternal grandmother. As a child she sat in the car while her mother cleaned the houses of White people; when she did follow her parent in through the back door of those houses, she was disgusted with the way the owners treated “the help”. At school, she struggled with dyslexia and crippling shyness, both of which made her a target for bullies. Her reticence and her struggles often made people mistake her for “slow”.
But behind those barricades, the mind unfolding was brilliant, incisive, and perceptive. And it was a mind that Butler’s mother tried to nurture in whatever way she could. She dug through the trash of her employers to rescue reading material for her daughter, feeding the flame of a child’s intellect with discarded books and magazines. Eventually when the young Octavia ran out of stories to read, she began making up stories to tell herself. She plunged into her imagination, first scribbling in a big pink notebook, then tapping away at the keys of a typewriter that her mother provided.
But there was no easy path to success for a young Black woman who wanted to write science fiction in the 1960’s. Butler attended a community college in Pasadena and made her first $15 as a writer by winning a short story contest there. But she couldn’t understand why her stories kept being rejected by magazines, and she couldn’t get useful feedback from her college writing instructors. The one agent who agreed to read a manuscript she’d written was nothing but a scammer, a con artist who demanded that her mother pony up a month’s rent in exchange for the favor.
Butler worked a series of menial and meaningless jobs for years, doing whatever she could to keep a roof over her head and food on the table. She would get up at two or three every morning to write, because writing was the only thing she cared about; everything else was just marking time.
Her first real breakthrough came when she enrolled at California State University at Los Angeles. The Writer’s Guild of America had sponsored a program to mentor minority writers, and it was there that Butler finally met someone who could actually recognize her gift and do something practical to foster it. Silver Age legend Harlan Ellison was impressed with her writing, and encouraged her to attend the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, a six-week bootcamp designed to accelerate the learning process for speculative fiction writers. He believed in her potential so much that he pitched in $100 toward the costs of her attendance.
Butler made her first two professional sales to Ellison and to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of the workshop, around the time that I was born in 1970-1971. But that brief shining moment of hope would be followed by yet more frustration: after Clarion, Butler went another five years without selling a word.
During that time she worked on her first trilogy of novels, the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978). Immediately afterward, she researched and wrote the stand-alone novel that would eventually become her most popular and famous work, a time travel novel called Kindred (1979).
I was too young for Butler’s novels when they were first published, and would only come to read them when I was a married mother of two and better able to understand them. But as chance would have it, my first glimpse of her genius, the novelette called “Bloodchild”, was actually a breakthrough moment of her career. 1983-1984 was the beginning of her rise to genuine fame and fortune.
Thanks to editor Shawna McCarthy, Butler had already broken into one of the hottest magazines in SFF and won her first Hugo Award for a short story called “Speech Sounds”, which appeared in the same magazine in 1983. “Bloodchild”, published the summer of the following year, would go on to sweep all the professional awards in the genre: it won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Locus Awards for best novelette, as well as the SF Chronicle Award in the same category.
As for me? By the time I read the opening lines of “Bloodchild”, I had been a fan of science fiction and horror for seven years. I was an avid reader of Asimov and Stephen King and any other popular writer of SF or horror that I could swipe from my mother’s purse, buy from the Sci-Fi Book Club, or take out from the school library. I loved speculative fiction, and I lived for it.
Nonetheless, within the first few pages of this new novelette, I knew that “Bloodchild” was something I had never seen before. Not only was I riveted by the tale, I was shaken by it: I was in the presence of singular greatness, and I knew it.
Reconciling my response to the story with the responses of other readers is a strange exercise. I have heard many readers describe “Bloodchild” as a “pregnant man” story, for example, but that has never made any sense to me. I never viewed the viewpoint protagonist of the story as a man, in any sense of the world—I always saw him as a child. Like many children living under the thumb of a powerful oppressor, he is simply being forced to make adult decisions at an age where he should never have to. His own safety, and the continued well-being of his family, depends on his willingness to submit his body to the dominant species of an alien world. He’s not a colonist; he’s an immigrant, and immigrants have to pay the rent. For that matter, what’s about to happen to him isn’t pregnancy; pregnancy is bearing a child of your own species. This boy is about to become the host of parasitic insect, which is a different thing altogether.
Butler later said that she wrote the novelette to exorcise (or at least express) her own fear of parasitic invasion, particularly by the botfly. When I first read the story, I was definitely struck by the horror of the protagonist’s situation. Chosen from birth to serve as the designated host for the eggs of another sapient species, his story is about the struggle to accept the compromises necessary to survive.
I was also blown away by the depiction of emotional and physical intimacy between the alien and the human family that has agreed to serve its needs. Butler was not satisfied to depict this creature as a monster or even as an intentionally evil being; instead, the alien comes across as an anxious would-be mother hovering around a potential surrogate, someone she must trust to carry her children to term.
It blew me away that T'Gatoi wasn’t just a bug—she was a person, capable of making promises and even of meaning well. The fact that her young would devour their host unless they are removed immediately upon hatching is just an unfortunate wrinkle in a relationship that is otherwise mutually beneficial…and seems to be consenting, at least to some degree.
This was a world of moral, political and emotional complexity that I had never seen before. It was a story that could embody multiple paradoxes at once. Butler bore witness to cold political and biological realities, but still entwined them with the warmth of personal attachment. In her work, beauty and horror were braided together into a rope that was stronger than either strand could have been separately. Even the title was a reminder that birth and death are both accompanied by pain and gore—a reality that I would experience first-hand later in life, as both of my own daughters were delivered by Cesarean section.
I might argue that it was a story that only a Black woman could have written, given those themes of parasitic intimacy. But I think that even saying that it is a Black woman’s viewpoint would be selling the author short; “Bloodchild” was a story that only Octavia Butler could have written. And that turned out to be true of everything she wrote.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate most of the work Butler published before her untimely death in 2006. Her essays and interviews are wise, hard-nosed and inspiring. Kindred is one of the great stand-alone novels of the century, regardless of genre. The Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, followed by The Parable of the Talents in 1998: over thirty years later the Parables duology reads as chillingly accurate futurism, having captured 21st century California right down to the rise of theocratic fascism, the gated communities and the uncontrollable wildfires.
Nonetheless, no matter how much time passes, I still come back to “Bloodchild” from time to time. It’s a story I can re-read just for the nostalgic joy of it, like putting an old vinyl record on the turn-table to listen to the album that blew your mind when you were 14.
Age 54 now.
Mind: still blown.
Resources
Wikipedia: Bloodchild and Other Stories (1st edition 1995, second edition 2005)