I’d visited home and jumped from my car’s window and swum through the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina, and then lived in shock in the desolation of the aftermath. I’d marched through Manhattan to protest Bush’s preemptive war with Iraq, foolishly thinking our collective uprising would have some kine of impact, bitterly disappointed when I discovered it did not. I’d watched smoke billow from the Twin Towers on 9/11 and then spent hours walking from midtown to Brooklyn, peppered in ash.
I’d voted in my first presidential election and watched in confused horror as Bush was appointed by Supreme Court ruling.
Tragedy had loosed me from my moorings, my understanding of what the world was and how it worked, and it sent me spinning: a drunk river killed my brother Joshua in October 2000, and his killer was never held accountable for his death. I had more money, not much, but more than I’d had in college and high school, so I’d take the train to The Strand, where the stacks stretched on and on. I must have read Octavia Butler’s work for the first time in the early 2000s, when I was living in New York City as a young twenty-something, working as a publishing assistant. I found sustenance in literary writers and in science fiction and fantasy writers, too, needing the escapism of that kind of storytelling, which I had been drawn to since I was a small child and first read Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley-but the only science fiction and fantasy I could find in my school library were by Frank Herbert, J.
I spent those years wandering through my school library stacks, finding books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Richard Wright, Gabriel García Márquez, and Margaret Atwood. I lived in my grandmother’s four-bedroom house with fourteen other relatives and watched my extended family bear the brunt of poverty and racism through my childhood and adolescence. I had grown up in a poor/working-class family in rural Mississippi, where I spent years eating government cheese, red beans, and rice, and drinking powdered milk. I never encountered her in my coursework, as my required reading looked nothing like the books I found in my personal reading: I read The Last of the Mohicans, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye and little there resonated with the world I knew. I can’t remember when I first read Octavia Butler’s work.
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