Since the LA fires started, me and I’m sure many other readers of Octavia Butler’s Parable series felt a sense of déjà vu. The neighborhood of Altadena has a rich black history that began after the civil rights movement. Before civil rights, this neighborhood was full of white ranchers and business owners. When Black/Afrikan and brown families began to move in, many white families moved out during the period, a phenomenon commonly known as “white flight”. White families did not welcome diversity in their neighborhood and their departure left opportunities for the diverse Altadena community we see today to bloom and grow. Octavia Butler grew up in Altadena. Her mother worked as a maid in wealthier white homes south of Pasadena proper. Butler received her associate’s degree from Pasadena City College and studied writing, anthropology, geology, and much more at UCLA. This was the same route of schooling my grandmother took when she came to California for college to become a nurse which led my family to settle in Altadena. Butler attended John Muir High School the same as my mother and her brothers and ironically my college roommate, an Altadena native, and his mother and generations of black families like ours. This beautiful neighborhood in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains has always been home to my family. One thing that I always particularly loved about Altadena was seeing a thriving Black/Afrikan community in LA with an abundance of green space, something most black communities in LA aren’t so fortunate to have. Altadena was always a beautiful neighborhood with its overhangs of oak trees, beautiful, lush mountains, an abundance of hiking trails and waterfalls. Altadena was the only place I wanted to dream of settling in when I grew up.
“We had fire today” reads a February 1st, 2025 diary entry in Butler’s Parable of the Sower. In the story, Lauren, a girl from the LA area living in 2024, is forced to live inside a community gated by large walls to protect herself from desperately poor starving people and a band of criminals high on a drug called pyro causing them to have arson addictions. Looking back at this story now is haunting as we enter only a few days into 2025 and the Eaton Fires have leveled the majority of the Altadena homes. The childhood home of Butler, where her grave, minimally burned in the fires.
Earthseed is the community that Lauren dreamed of, the sanctuary not only physically safe from the harshness of the outside world and the fires but a spiritual space for people. Altadena was my Earthseed, as my grandpa was escaping gang violence in Watts and my grandmother an abusive orphanage in Boston, they both came to settle in Altadena for refuge, similar to the many Altadena residents that found their way escaping the Jim Crow South. This neighborhood was a sanctuary for us and it lives on. These fires have come as a result of long-standing climate injustice and extractive practices of capitalist consumption that do not engage with the Earth in regenerative ways. However, I believe the soul of the community members of Altadena will not so easily be turned to ash.
Etched in the gravestone of Butler reads the famous quote from Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.” In the pulse of Altadena, Los Angeles, and beyond, the world now breathes the change she foresaw—a change that echoes through the shifting climate, the very manifestation of Butler’s prophecy. Written in 1993, her vision stands, astonishing in its clarity. Renowned for grounding the realms of Afrikan/Black science fiction and Afrofuturism, after the tremors of early 2025, one cannot help but ask: Is this fiction—or the future? She is the living word, embodying NOMMO, and with each story, she wields the griot’s power—the power of the word, the power to shape reality.