Octavia Margaret’s dream was to have her own place where she could tend her garden. Later, her mother would rent a spot for the two of them in Pasadena and work as a day laborer for wealthy white women. Her father, Laurice James Butler, worked as a shoeshiner and died when she was 3 years old. When Butler was very young, her family used to “stay on the place,” meaning they lived on the property of the family they worked for. Octavia Margaret worked from an early age she attended school in California but was pulled out after a few years to help earn money. As far as Butler could tell, her grandmother’s life wasn’t far removed from slavery - the only difference was she had worked hard enough and saved enough money to move everyone out west during the Great Migration, to Pasadena, California, in the early 1920s. There was no school for Black children, but Estella taught Octavia Margaret enough to read and write. She raised seven children on a plantation in Louisiana, chopping sugarcane, boiling laundry in hot cauldrons, and cooking and cleaning, not only for her family but for the white family that owned the land.
Her grandmother was an astonishing woman. Octavia Estelle Butler was named after two of the most important people in her life: her mother, Octavia Margaret Guy, and her grandmother, Estella.
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