At the Huntington, located in San Marino, visitors enjoy strolls, art exhibits, and the diet-busting Rose Garden Tea Room (“Another dollop of Devonshire cream? Yes, please!”). Botanists can spend years getting to know the plants burgeoning in the Huntington’s botanical gardens.
And scholars from the world over visit to conduct research at the Huntington’s Library.
Among the twelve million books, maps, illustrations, photos, and manuscripts the Library holds are the papers of the renowned African American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), who was born and raised in Pasadena and is known for such novels as Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).
The Huntington’s Octavia E. Butler Collection includes correspondence, journals, and book drafts by Butler the established author whose first novel, Patternmaster, appeared in 1976 and who in 1995 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a “Genius Grant.”
But the archive also holds a vast array of diaries, notes, and stories Butler produced while growing up in Pasadena. She wrote her first stories very early on and promised her preteen self she would someday author best-selling books. Butler kept that promise.
What was growing up possessed by genius like for Butler? How are traces of Butler’s now-famous novels already evident in her childhood musings? To explore these and related questions, literary scholar Chi-ming Yang dove into the Butler archive, focusing on Butler’s writings from age five to age eighteen. The result is Yang’s Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse.
Yang is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published scholarly articles on blackness, abolition, and the Atlantic slave trade and a book on how the British understanding of China and taste for Chinese culture shaped notions and practices of virtue in eighteenth-century England. But do not worry. Though H is for Horse exhibits impressive scholarship, the book’s engaging prose is quite readable for a general audience.
To honor Butler’s penchant for dictionaries and enthusiasm for library research and for cataloging her findings, Yang has organized her book A-to-Z fashion as an alphabet book with twenty-six chapters, starting with “A is for Alias” and ending with “Z is for Zorro.” Each chapter examines a concept, cultural artifact, or place that emerges in the archive as a clue to understanding a childhood possessed by a genius for writing.
The ancient Romans believed at birth a tutelary spirit, a particular genius, attached to each person to guide and inspire her or him through life. Going Roman, we could say Olympic track athlete Bob Beamon was born with a genius for the long jump, Mozart with a genius for music. As Yang shows, Butler was born with a genius for writing stories. H is for Horse tracks how this genius resolutely guided the young Butler toward authorship.
Distinct from straightforwardly verifiable facts about an author’s life, for example that Butler attended Pasadena’s John Muir High School, the relation between Butler and her genius was a dynamic of imagination far within the author’s young self. To track this relation thus becomes for Yang a matter of drawing inferences from patterns of imagery, emotion, and thought found in the archive, making H is for Horse, Yang writes, a “speculative childhood biography” of a “child genius.”
Consider how Yang explores the young Butler’s love for horses. Roaming northwest Pasadena and Altadena, Butler would have seen horses being ridden along the streets. At age ten, Butler purchased her first book for herself, Anna Pistorius’s What Horse Is It? At age six, she had secured her first library card and soon devoured every horse story and novel she could find.
For a young girl to love horses is not unusual. Yang pursues the question: what singular imaginative vision did Butler’s genius conjure and sustain through that love?
The child took to drawing horses by tracing the illustrations in What Horse Is It? But she omitted from these drawings the riders, saddles, and bridles in the illustrations. The horses of Butler’s childhood imaginings were free beings. Their freedom, Yang argues, relates to Butler’s next great love after horses: space travel.
The second book the young Butler bought herself was a compendium of star maps and information about the planets. Butler became voracious for pulp science fiction magazines and B-list science fiction movies, for example, 1954’s Devil Girl from Mars.
The archive gathers Butler’s childhood stories about horses and about space travel and alien beings. As Yang relates, the protagonist of the preteen horse stories, Silver Star, “was a magical white horse named after the [star-shaped] birthmark on her horse mother’s shoulder.” This equine character was to metamorphose into the teenage space-travel stories’ Silver Star, “a Martian in a girl’s body.”
For Yang, “In a sense, horses were [Butler’s] first aliens.” How so?
In an interview as an adult, Butler recalls how, as a child, she imagined becoming “a magical horse on an island of horses.” Sometime around her eleventh year, Butler drew a topographical map of Star Island, where horses rule and run free.
Yet, Yang demonstrates, rather than as a utopia, a perfect place, Butler imagined Star Island as an actual place where the horses grapple with the climate. The map specifies the northern region the horses move to during the summer to escape heat and the southern region they move to in the winter to escape cold.
Yang suggests the island’s grasslands recall the section of Altadena known as The Meadows and that the island’s desert region recalls the ranch near Victorville of Butler’s maternal grandmother. As a child, visiting this desert ranch far from city lights, Butler first gazed on the Milky Way.
The magical horses’ island, Yang notes, is star shaped, a six-pointed star, like some deep-ocean starfish. With seasons and a variable climate, Star Island “conjures earth, sea, and sky” and implies what climate scientists call the Earth System. Yet this is an Earth inhabited by horses who, with their intelligence, telekinetic powers, and heat-ray eyes, run circles around would-be horse breakers, the men from The Land of People.
In 1871, bending grammar, the teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud declared, “Car je es un autre” (“For I is an other”). In relation to Star Island, consider exclaiming, “For the Earth is an other planet.” Alien to The Land of People, the young Butler’s horses gallop on an other planet, yet that planet is Earth reimagined decentered from humans. And as Earth has never been human centered, Star Island is an early exercise in reimagining Earth and life there more truly and more strange, that is, closer to their uncanny realities.
As Silver Star the horse and horse stories gave way to Silver Star the Martian and interplanetary stories, Butler’s campaign to become a major writer clarified. The biographical picture that emerges in H is for Horse is that of a quiet yet fierce day-to-day struggle commencing in childhood.
Besides a person, H is for Horse is about a place. Reading the book, Pasadenans will note a number of familiar locales.
There’s Pasadena City College (PCC), where Butler took her first creative writing course (“Short Story Writing”), won her first literary prize, and had a story, “Loss,” published in the 1968 issue of Pipes of Pan, PCC’s student literary magazine that now goes by the name Inscape.
There’s NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where in the 1960s James Lovelock introduced the precursor concept to Earth system science, his Gaia hypothesis: life maintains the conditions allowing for life, with symbiosis all the way down, as Lovelock’s collaborator, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, emphasized. Yang underscores Butler’s intense interest in symbiosis, which became an important theme in her later work.
There’s the Brookside Pool, now the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, opened to all people regardless of race in 1947, the year of Butler’s birth. Yang documents spoken and unspoken forms of segregation in the Pasadena of Butler’s youth.
And there’s the Pasadena Public Library, the branch known as the Central Library. Yang quotes Butler as calling that library her “‘second home’ and the place where she had ‘half lived’ since the age of six.”
Butler made her way from the Central Library’s Children’s Room to the MacArthur Fellowship without compromising her genius. Her imaginative vision held fast over the decades of its development. Yang describes how, as an adult, Butler would peruse her childhood writings to draw from them story ideas and inspiration.
A lively book overflowing with insights, H is for Horse is a must-read for Octavia Butler fans and a fine introduction for readers new to Butler and her work.
By the way, a great place to buy or to order H is for Horse and Butler’s novels is the Pasadena bookstore named in Butler’s honor, Octavia’s Bookshelf.
Deets
Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse, by Chi-ming Yang. Oxford University Press, 312 pages, $29.99. Available from local booksellers or through the publisher.
- Octavia’s Bookshelf, 1353 North Hill Avenue, Pasadena, CA, 91104
