“My aunt was too late with it, though,” Butler said. She could have stability and a nice pension, and if she really wanted to, she could write on the side. That same aunt would tell Butler, “Negroes can’t be writers,” and advise her to get a sensible job as a teacher or civil servant. Despite her family’s warnings, she did exactly what she wanted to do. Her mother’s youngest sister, who was the first in the family to go to college, became a nurse. Later, she would call it her “positive obsession” and would put it all on the line. When she learned she could make a living doing this, she never let the thought go. “I needed my fantasies to shield me from the world.”
Butler thought she could come up with a better story than that, so she began to write her own: temporary escape hatches from a life of “boredom, calluses, humiliation, and not enough money,” as she saw it.
#OCTAVIA BUTLER MIND OF MY MIND MOVIE#
When she was 12 years old, she watched Devil Girl From Mars, a black-and-white British science-fiction movie about a female alien commander named Nyah who has mind-control powers, a vaporizing ray gun, and a tight leather outfit with a cape that touches the floor. She was a comic-book nerd: first DC and then Marvel. Le Guin, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Zenna Henderson, whose book Pilgrimage she would buy for her friends to read. She especially liked Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula K. She found a refuge at the Pasadena Public Library, where she leaped into science fiction.
She went home and wrote stories of wild horses that could shape-shift and that “made fools of the men who came to catch them.” Children’s capacity for cruelty stayed with her. When she saw an old pony at a carnival with festering sores swarmed by flies, she realized the sores had come from the other kids kicking the animal to make it go faster. She loved horses like those in The Black Stallion. “But when I wrote, I wasn’t.” By the time she was 10, she was writing her own worlds. “I usually had very few friends, and I was lonely,” Butler said. She did dream a lot, and she began to write her dreams down in a large pink notebook she carried around with her. In her elementary-school progress reports, one teacher wrote that “she dreams a lot and has poor concentration.” That was true. It was the only time in her life she really considered suicide. “Instead, I grew six feet tall.” The boys resented her growth spurt, and sometimes she would get mistaken for a friend’s mother or chased out of the women’s bathroom. The first time she remembered someone calling her “ugly” was in the first grade - bullying that continued through her adolescence. Her youth was filled with drudgery and torment. She broke down in tears when she had to speak in front of the class. In her family, Butler went by Junie, short for Junior, and in the world, she went by Estelle or Estella to avoid confusion for people looking for her mother. She was quiet and deeply religious, and she read Butler bedtime stories until she was 6, at which point she said, “Here’s the book. Octavia Margaret’s dream was to have her own place where she could tend her garden. Later, her mother would rent a spot for the two of them in Pasadena and work as a day laborer for wealthy white women. Her father, Laurice James Butler, worked as a shoeshiner and died when she was 3 years old. When Butler was very young, her family used to “stay on the place,” meaning they lived on the property of the family they worked for. Octavia Margaret worked from an early age she attended school in California but was pulled out after a few years to help earn money. As far as Butler could tell, her grandmother’s life wasn’t far removed from slavery - the only difference was she had worked hard enough and saved enough money to move everyone out west during the Great Migration, to Pasadena, California, in the early 1920s. There was no school for Black children, but Estella taught Octavia Margaret enough to read and write. She raised seven children on a plantation in Louisiana, chopping sugarcane, boiling laundry in hot cauldrons, and cooking and cleaning, not only for her family but for the white family that owned the land. Her grandmother was an astonishing woman.
Octavia Estelle Butler was named after two of the most important people in her life: her mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, and her grandmother, Estella.
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