Octavia E. Butler said, “These novels are not prophetic. These novels are cautionary tales… The problems that I write about are problems that we can do something about. That’s why I write about them.”
“I hope they’re not prophecy because I don’t want to live in that world.”
For FIFTY YEARS after slavery ended, Black newspapers ran a special kind of classified ad and they are the most heartbreaking documents in American print.
They were called "Lost Friends" and "Information Wanted" ads. Freed people, searching for family sold away decades earlier.
Mothers describing children by a scar on a knee, a song they hummed, the name of the trader who drove them off. Husbands naming a wife last seen at an auction in 1849. Grown men searching for a mother whose face they'd carried since age six.
One New Orleans paper's column was read aloud from the pulpits of some 800 churches — so the ads could reach people who could not read, in every congregation, every Sunday.
so much of the human experience is dictated by pure serendipity. Intricate cosmological details that are warping our fates before we even come into being.