praisesong on the passage of a brilliant star, from a dreamer below

Praisesong on the Passage of a Brilliant Star, from a Dreamer BelowAuthor(s): Sheree Renée ThomasSource: Callaloo, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 249-253Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805597 .

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PRAISESONG ON THE PASSAGE OF A BRILLIANT STAR, FROM A DREAMER BELOW

by Sheree Renee Thomas

Octavia,

Old Soul, Elder, Pioneer whose Lifework guides generations

She is mother to so many words that have yet to be born, midwife to a body of speculative fiction by blackfolk from around the world that will be birthed because her Lifework has shown us the way.

I am writing today and grieving, not because Ms. Butler was someone I was especially close to or a personal friend I could call or write with ease, but because I was one of the countless writers and readers who considered themselves truly blessed to have crossed

paths with her, to have been in her presence, no matter how brief, to hear her talk of her

work, the journey she traveled over five decades to claim her space in this world and in the science fiction genre and community, and to receive some of the advice and wisdom she acquired along the way, as an emerging writer, then as an acclaimed author, and later as a generous and respected educator.

Octavia,

Elder whose stories and novels of shapeshifters and gene traders, lone travelers col-

lapsing time to face ancestral memory, black women building worlds beyond walled cities,

beyond even our stars, our dreams, and contemplating "those aliens who are of course

ourselves," in this life, she was what my folk call an Old Soul. Her work reflected a vision that was Spirit sent. When I learned that she had passed on, in a phone call from a friend who thought the news had already reached me, I sat in silence, stunned. How could this

brilliant, vibrant mind be gone so soon?

Later, I went to my top shelf and gathered all her books around me. I reached for Fledg- ling, the last novel she would leave us, and held it in my hand. There would be no Parable

ofthe Trickster, the title she had once considered for the third volume in her Parable series or any number of unknown works that lived in her mind, awaiting the skill of her pen.

Her work in our world is now done, and she has joined the Ancestors, but she remains

Pioneer, this former student of Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany, who wrote herself

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into a genre that once rendered us invisible, portrayed us as mere caricatures, shadows of who we are and what we might be.

Where I am from, a river city perched on the bluff of the Mississippi, the language you are born with, the one which you are comforted in, reprimanded, raised, praised, and chastised in, is called your navel tongue. And as a daughter of the South, I was born with twin tongues. One held the language I spoke in public, the other the language elders

taught me from the porch in our home in North Memphis, a crowded, tumble down area in the backbone of the city known as much for its blackfolk and black music, its barbecue and blues, as it is for its distinctive black speech.

Born in the fall of 1972 when pecans from an ancient, twisted tree still filled my grand? father's front lawn, I grew up the firstborn of a too young mother and father, high school sweethearts who had lived only three city blocks from each other. This is a story that was

passed around to me in the same loving tongue, but from different points of view?of how my mother had marched down Alma Street during a Klondike block party in her

crisp majorette's suit, and my father, nappyheaded and skinny as a slick bean pole had seen her smile and loved her at once. Some said I was born too soon, my parents' dreams not yet fully formed. Others sucked their teeth and said a child is always born right on time. Either way, it was clear that I was here, and I grew up with the sound of my family's loving in my ear.

Around me, the elders leaned across porches, poked their heads outside frail screen doors with wire mesh tiny enough to withstand even the onslaught of Memphis mosqui- toes. Between the neighborhood gossip and chit-chat, church news and political banter,

jokes and liberal 'lessons' about the how and why of blackfolk's history in our hometown, I learned that to be understood clearly, one spoke in one tongue among neighbors, family, and friends, and another among everyone else.

From grandmother to grandfather, aunt and uncle, I learned very quickly which tongue was valued in the world outside our front door, and yet over the years I could not reject the voice that had instructed and nurtured me from birth. Today when I think about how

deeply I was touched by the twin tongues of blackfolk who remembered a time when even our city's libraries were off-limits to them, who remembered a time when black Firestone Tire workers like my grandfather, dependent upon their wages and a pension they had invested decades in, secretly gave donations to the Sanitation Workers' strike in over- turned hats passed along the back aisles of Baptist churches, for fear that their foremen's threats and intimidations may prove real... I realize that storytelling, the oral tradition that instructed and engaged me was such a rich and complex part of my childhood that it is little question how or why I began my journey toward writing speculative fiction.

For how could one not grow up with a pen in one's hand when your grandfather told

you tales of how he had struggled to learn to read and write when cotton thorns had pricked his young fingertips, how some folk he knew could not even sign their name, even after

many hard years of labor, how he became the first of his brothers to leave the fields of Somerville and come to Memphis in the back of a rusty truck headed for Beale Street?

These true tales, life stories, oral histories as well as family lore and mythmaking sparked my imagination and filled me with questions that pushed me to seek out the

dusty shelves of my neighborhood library when I was still curious or dissatisfied with my family's answers. Stories of haints who sat on your chest as you slept at night and stole

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your breath, of High John de Conqueror that was more than a root and how Uncle Juicy got his name, of how the city burned and the bricks flew from the hands of outraged men, women, and teenagers on the night they killed our King. On that night, folk shut wooden doors usually flung open because of the heat. On that night the sky above Klondike was full of smoke and flame, and the street where my father had first loved my mother was full of the sound of shots, curses, and sirens.

I began writing so early, in the margins of sales flyers and church newsletters, and on the backs of my grandfather's utility bills and Piggly Wiggly grocery bags, that even to this day I still feel blessed to be able to write on regular paper, even college rule seems like the finest linen, a luxury. But as I read to myself and wrote on the paper my grandfather gathered for me, I learned that some stories were not to be trusted and that others could

get one killed, and it was because of this fear, that so many stories had gone untold, our voices silenced.

My grandfather had a good friend who lived in our neighborhood and would visit him

often, to talk about current events and catch up. Sometimes I would hear them speak in hushed tones above my head as I played on the front porch steps or climbed the stooped back pecan tree, and some of the stories they would tell each other were grim. I remember

only small snatches of one regarding a man the neighbor had known in his youth who had been murdered in a way I wouldn't know until later was called a lynching. Frightened but ever curious, I think it was then when I became interested in learning more about the role of African Americans in American history and the stories we had to tell. The discussions of my grandfather and his friend had planted a strong seed in me that wouldn't germinate until I had graduated to writing in my own spiral notebooks.

Eager to chronicle some of our stories, I had begun to pen my own tales comprised of the people and the places, the voices that I knew so well. I once rewrote three chapters of Wuthering Heights in what I later came to understand as "black vernacular," setting it in antebellum Memphis and imagining Heathcliff as a young "light skinned" black slave with Chickasaw heritage while Catherine was his white playmate. Emily Bronte's story reminded me of the grim tales I'd heard my grandfather and his good friend recount, and it taught me that so many ideas and themes I had thought were unique to my community were actually 'universal.' But even as I wrote my little novel, I knew I didn't want the

spirits of my hero and heroine to end up wandering among the heather and the mists on the moor, swallowed up by folk legend and gossip, so I imagined them as haints that would haunt their tormentors until black folk were free, haints right out of my grandfather's scary stories that made it hard to sleep. Of course, I didn't finish this epic haint tale, but years later, I wonder if this could have been my first attempt at a speculative fiction story.

Although one neighbor had once told me when I when was growing up to "watch out for them white folk that's older than yo' mama," because "they come from a time make you wish you whatn't never born," it was a wonderful librarian, a white elder, who offered reading suggestions after my father had escorted me to the Hollywood Branch

library when I'd exhausted my parents' extensive, eclectic collection. I had read Black Arts Movement texts, from Baraka when he was LeRoi Jones to Haki Madhubuti when he was Don L. Lee, to the gothic literature, science fiction and fantasy we loved best, Poe, Bester, and Ray Bradbury, Asimov and Tolkien, even some of their old, outdated

textbooks, Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins. This librarian went out of her way to share

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her personal favorites and recommendations with me and I was grateful for even having access to the adult section. Here I was able to explore a world I'd only begun to love, and no one could have told me then that those meager shelves of science fiction and fantasy would only be a beginning.

A few years later, I found myself demanding more from the work I was reading. I had

always loved science fiction, but when I was knee deep in adolescence, navigating my way through hormones and puberty, trying to find a space for myself, I was disenchanted, no

longer satisfied with the genre that had given me much pleasure. Suddenly, the field that had been so limitless and inviting, was closed to me.

In hip-hop, Public Enemy was talking about "fight the power" and there was a renewed interest in the Nation of Islam and other traditions as folk across the country continued to struggle with the social and cultural politics of identity, trying to figure out how to be Black in a society that didn't value blackness unless you were entertaining. I realized that in much of my reading in the genre at that time, people that looked like me or talked like me did not exist. There was no space in the future for folk like my grandfather or any? one in our neighborhood. And when we were included, it was usually in a subordinate, sidekick situation, where somehow the good of all mankind depended on our death, the self sacrifice of the "Magical Negroes" writer Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu discussed in her 2004 essay, "Stephen King's Super-Duper Magical Negroes." Where were the blackfolk, I wondered as I scanned my science fiction shelves, who remembered Tuskegee? Who knew what "maafa" meant or could tell you a story about when the people could fly?

Frustrated, I stopped reading the genre for a while and began looking at Black litera? ture. As I struggled to understand what it might mean to be a black woman in our world

today, I needed to read works by writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, J. California

Cooper, or Gayle Jones, writers whose lives and stories were not being taught in my high schools. Their brave words helped me write myself. They articulated perspectives and histories that would inform me as a young person and as an emerging writer. And as I started writing more of my own stories, some of them were speculative in form, but I didn't think of them in this way. It wasn't until I was an undergraduate studying history that I recovered the tools for seeing our world that had once inspired me as a child.

I first discovered Octavia's work in college, when a professor, a Victorian scholar, as?

signed her novel, Kindred, in a course exploring representations of slavery in literature. As you can imagine, the legacy of slavery looms large in the Delta, particularly in my hometown of Memphis, where re-examining this era in American history is practically a local pastime. We read her works alongside those of Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose,

Margaret Walker 'sjubilee, and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, and up until Kindred, we'd all been fairly quiet, distant. In our first class discussions we chose our words carefully and treated history as a flat, abstract voiceless thing, tiptoeing around verbal minefields in a place where everyone claimed they'd marched with King and the ghosts of the Civil

Rights era still hovered in the air around us, whispering about losses and sacrifices few our age had the courage or the will to revisit.

But Octavia's novel broke our facade of indifference and those protective barriers of silence were broken. The story of Dana's journey through time and history electrified our class and raised the level of discourse, inspiring passionate discussion and debate. Fll never forget it. A dear friend then gave me one of my favorite works by Octavia, Wild

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Seed, making me a Butler fan for life. I never imagined then that I would later have an op- portunity to review her work, Parable ofthe Taients for The Washington Post Book World, or that I would be blessed to meet her and experience her wisdom and humor as an instruc- tor at Clarion West in 1999 or publish her in my first anthology, in which she generously allowed me to reprint some of her work.

Octavia's impact on my life is personal, deep, and I have heard the same from so many other readers who felt that their lives had literally changed after experiencing her work.

The last time I saw Ms. Butler was a very joyous moment, when she received the Langston Hughes Medal at CCNY Surrounded by so many of her fans and lifelong friends I met at Clarion when we all applied because Octavia was one of the stellar writers teaching that

year, the evening was magical, with music and an insightful interview by Wesley Brown. I remember still feeling shy around her, because she is, after all, one of my favorite authors in the world, and she reminded me of elders in my own family, warm, funny, keenly observant, and gracious as ever.

There is so much I could say about this wonderful woman whose presence was as distinctive as her writing, but I would just invite you all to revisit her work and pass it on to a new friend, pass it on to a growing, young reader. Octavia will certainly be missed, but she has left an amazing body of work for us to explore and revisit. Her novels and stories are visionary, sensual, startling, erotic, and at times, horrific, but always skillfully written, sophisticated, and full of surprising insights and wisdom?the mark of a truly gifted storyteller. I take comfort in knowing that her writing will continue to inspire, that new generations will be touched by her Lifework, that her words have already touched so many. She has expanded our notions of what literature is, what science fiction can be,

adding her voice, her vision to our ongoing discussions and critique of race, class, gender, community. Octavia had so much to tell us about ourselves, our world, what it means to be human, how we might move forward as we build on it, afraid perhaps, imperfect, but brave. So much to tell us and I imagine, much more still.

Journey well, Octavia. Journey well.

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praisesong on the passage of a brilliant star, from a dreamer below

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