I met Octavia E. Butler only once. A mutual friend insisted that I talk with her. The three of us were research fellows at the Getty in Santa Monica.
I dutifully went to Butler’s office late one afternoon in the fall of 1996. The door was slightly ajar, and I knocked. “Come in,” Butler said in her very deep voice. I stammered an introduction, mentioning the name of our friend. “Why are you here?” she asked, not anywhere near as unkindly as that sounds. She was curious. We chatted for maybe 20 minutes about our respective projects, our understandings of Los Angeles history. Despite being a short visit, it was memorable, because Butler was so obviously an estimable, memorable person.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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It is fitting that the person who made sure I met Butler was the historian Mike Davis. These two were in the midst of revolutionizing writing about Southern California in fiction and history, their efforts distinguished intellectual bookends on the “thinking about Los Angeles” shelf.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower, published a few years earlier, had already established itself as the most evocative, scary, and prophetic example of a new, critical approach to L.A. history. Butler’s vital novel is, at this very moment when L.A. is grappling with the devastation wrought by wildfires, speculative fiction that also reads like a CliffsNotes anticipation of an unspeakably sad present here in Southern California.
The novel means a great deal to me for many reasons. For one, the author cannot be avoided. How could she be? Made of multitudes, Butler demanded so much of herself. She constantly exhorted herself to write, to write more, to write better, to succeed. She compelled and propelled herself, and even two decades after her death, she compels others through her work and words. “I had novels to write, so I wrote them,” she told an interviewer in 2006. The collection of her papers at the Huntington is one of that venerable institution’s most requested archives year in and year out, sought by myriad scholars entranced by her writing and her legacy. All these many years later, I can hear her deep voice asking what brought me to her office door.
Beyond all this, Parable of the Sower resonates because of the historical chords it strikes, all its echoes of Los Angeles and California history. Set in the year 2024—the future when Butler was writing it—Parable is a postapocalyptic novel of violence and terror. Climate change, fire, and violent gangs have put people on the run across a ruined metropolitan cityscape. Black American exodus and out-migration, complete with charismatic leadership, is a theme, as is the establishment of Black townships in the West. Black women, especially the protagonist, 15-year-old Lauren Olamina, struggle for their lives against a palimpsest backdrop of an earlier, nonfiction narrative embodied by such real-life women as Biddy Mason, who remade Los Angeles after securing her freedom from enslavement in the 19th century. Company town capitalism, foundational to the political economy of the West for well over a century, is also an element. Fundamental to the novel is homegrown religion; while Lauren’s Earthseed is not Mormonism, the migratory story of its founding, as well as the search for safety and refuge amid deadly Western violence, rhymes with the Mormon saga.
But my experience with Parable of the Sower, the way its fiction whispers history to me, has changed. When the Eaton Fire destroyed much of Altadena, ripping the heart out of its historic Black community, the novel became more significant, bleaker and sadder. It is impossible for me to read it now with any suspension of what is real all around me. In the bewildering fury of runaway fire, Altadena burned up. The very cemetery in which Butler is buried burned; I have seen a photograph of her headstone framed by singed vegetation. The novel opens in a society ravaged by disaster in 2024; as history or even prophecy, Butler was off by mere days.
Parable of the Sower has its painted-face Pyros who get off on lighting fires and watching them burn and destroy. We have our own—people, at times, of course, but climate change, heat, drought, low humidity, and gale-force winds are fire starters too. Pyros are everywhere, and we’d best be as vigilant as Butler’s characters on the run. And might we, in our time of grief and ash, begin to draw some parable lessons from the empathy Lauren feels for everyone hurt and lost?
Butler knew her Bible. She knew the book of Matthew and its parable of the sower. She knew the passage that exhorts the faithful and the thoughtful to heed the signs: “He who has ears, let him hear.” But she also knew, every bit as much, that the same plea for cognizance is repeated several times in the book of Revelation, also known as the book of the Apocalypse.•
William Deverell is the codirector and founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and a professor of history at USC. He is also the founding director of the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. He is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century American West. His undergraduate degree in American studies is from Stanford, and his MA and PhD degrees in American history are from Princeton. He has published widely on the environmental, social, cultural, and political history of the West.
