Oy/Octavia: or Keeping My Promise to Ms. Butler

I did not have the pleasure of knowing Octavia E. Butler personally. It is best then for me to mention my involvement with a book chapter about her work and a story written by her. These pieces, created a little more than two decades apart, relate to each other in that the chapter played a role in the story’s publication. During the early 1980s, I was responsible for the first scholarly book chapter discussion of Butler’s fiction: Ruth Salvaggio’s piece which appeared in the Starmont House reader’s guide I edited. (I discuss Salvaggio’s contribution to Butler scholarship at length in the afterword to my anthology Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory.) My purpose here is to describe how Butler’s willingness to include her story “The Book of Martha” in Afro-Future Females concerns circumventing the impossibility of keeping the promise I made to her.

Butler granted me permission to publish “The Book of Martha” because she was kind enough to remember that I was one of the first scholars who took an interest in her work. She was quite explicit about the compensation she required. “I would just like to receive a copy of the book. Having a copy is very important to me,” she said.

“Of course. No problem. I will be more than happy to send you a copy.”

“You won’t forget?”

“No. I won’t forget. I promise.”

The book was published after Octavia E. Butler left us. I was never able to keep my promise.

I viewed my participation in the The National Black Writers Conference Bi-annual Symposium held at Medger Evers College in Brooklyn (“Celebrating the Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler,” March 28, 2009) as a means to acknowledge and honor the promise in the best way available to me. When I offered to read “The Book of Martha,” the event’s organizer was rightly concerned that I would bore the audience; she said that a professional actress should read the story. This perfectly reasonable suggestion might as well have been a projectile shot into my heart. The story was my gift from Butler. How could someone else read something which meant so much to me?

“I can engage the audience. I am not a boring academic,” I insisted to the organizer.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I promise.”

I exuded false confidence when I received permission to be the reader. Delivering academic papers constitutes my sole formal performance experience. I have had no dramatic training. I was merely taught how to assume a dour tone, to say “Derrida,” “Foucault,” and “Lacan,” and to sit down immediately thereafter. I was not sure that I could keep my promise to provide a scintillating dramatic rendition which would engage an audience of “real people” Butler appreciators.

When I closely encountered the packed house in the large conference venue auditorium, I wished that the moderator would never finish introducing me, that I would never have to traverse that lengthy stage. The introduction end had to be near, though; being prolific could only go so far. As I awaited hearing the dreaded conference version of “Heeeere’s Marleen,” the moderator mispronounced the first all important little word in the title of my novel Oy Pioneer!. “Oy,” after all, is not typical black community parlance.

I stepped on stage and immediately experienced a Susan Boyle moment. I looked awkward. I looked wrong. I logically looked like I was not and never could be akin to Butler and this audience. Reacting to the lack of confidence the audience radiated, I reached mid stage and turned to face them dead on. Summoning my best Ethel Merman imitation (even though she was a shiksa, Ethel did of course have the quintessential New York stage loud mouth), I belted out a correction vis-à-vis the moderator’s mistake. “It’s oy,” I insisted as loudly and vehemently as I could. The audience’s cold stare suddenly turned to smiling welcoming acceptance. They recognized that even though my authentic New York voice was...