February 21, 2024 • 23 mins
In this visionary and introspective episode of The Passage, the Ferryman, voiced by Dan Fogler (Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, The Walking Dead), welcomes a soul whose pen crafted worlds and whose imagination reshaped the boundaries of science fiction. Octavia Butler voiced by Juliette Jeffers, a luminary of speculative storytelling and the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, embarks on her final journey, her passage as unique and profound as her literary legacy.
As they traverse the ethereal realms of the afterlife, Octavia reflects on her life's journey—from her humble beginnings in Pasadena, California, where she was raised by her widowed mother, to her rise as a beacon of innovation and diversity in the world of science fiction. Despite her shyness and the racial and societal barriers that stood against her, Butler found solace and strength in the pages of fantasy novels and the infinite possibilities of her own writing.
In this episode, the Ferryman guides Octavia through a passage that mirrors her own narrative style, a landscape where the surreal meets the profound. They encounter the incarnations of her dark and strange creations, each an echo of Butler's fearless exploration of the human condition, of identity, and of the tangled threads of choice and destiny.
As she navigates this dreamscape of her own making, Butler's journey is not just a passage but a celebration of her resilience, her unparalleled vision, and her indelible impact on the genre of science fiction. Her story is a testament to the power of perseverance and the transcendent nature of storytelling.
In this episode of The Passage, listeners are invited to voyage into the rich tapestry of Octavia Butler's mind, where each twist and turn reveals the depth and complexity of her imagination. Written by Nicki Salcedo.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
I regret to tell you that very many American lives
in love.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
What herd to shut from the car. He's dead. Whether
he rebird to president or four hours, people must get up.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
And I.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Am here in the in between, to collect their spirits
and carry them to what comes next. This road is
not on any map. It spans the thresholds between their
most forbidden desires and their gris fear. All I ask
(01:20):
for in payment is a tale and accounting of their
lives and the great temporary that is the land of
the living.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
These are their stories. This is the passage.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
February twenty fourth, two thousand and six. The psychological landscape
of an American city in the dawn of a new millennium.
The covetous and the criminalized, the sceptered and the marginalized,
creators and their critics. This is a place where truth
(02:37):
has splintered into as many self reflections as there are onlookers,
millions of egos angling for positions on their own stages,
desperate to be seen by themselves, a million voices screaming
to hear themselves, all wanting to fit into their own experience.
(03:00):
Trapolis where loneliness and madness come to dance. And soon
there will be as many realities as there are souls,
each projecting themselves on their own screens. Already it is beginning,
(03:20):
the countless din of infinite echoes, all converging in an
ugliness so intricate and baroque that it takes a true
seer to divine the beauty in it. We meet one
up sere today, a conjurer of the future, if you will,
(03:41):
who spent her life struggling upward to see and be
seen herself a knife that cuts through the gristle of
the chaos of America to pull out its bloody, beating heart.
And once she has to describe it to us so
(04:02):
beautifully and viscerally that we cannot believe we've never seen it. Yeah,
there she is at the corner, there, waiting on this bus,
though she's not quite sure where it will take her.
Speaker 5 (04:27):
Octavia, Come, Octavia, come.
Speaker 6 (04:48):
Oh am, are your only passenger today?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Please take a seat.
Speaker 7 (04:54):
I seem to have forgotten money, No matter, can.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I pay you with your words. Please?
Speaker 7 (05:06):
What do I call you?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
The ferryman?
Speaker 7 (05:13):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (05:14):
I am a fairy man too, I suppose I mean,
I listen, I carry.
Speaker 7 (05:22):
I don't judge, do you.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
It is not my way to judge, But my passengers
often seek validation.
Speaker 6 (05:36):
Why not? We all want some affirmation. But critics can
be cruel. They will not hesitate to give a writer
a bad review, even in death, God like in their
power to destroy the things they can't understand.
Speaker 7 (05:54):
You want the truth. I was my worst critic.
Speaker 6 (06:01):
No, no, no, I wouldn't worry about your judgment anymore
than any others. I've been judged my whole life.
Speaker 7 (06:15):
When I was a child, I was only told what I.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
Couldn't do, what I shouldn't do. Black girls don't write.
Black girls certainly don't write science fiction.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
No.
Speaker 6 (06:26):
Black girls don't win Hugo and Nebula awards. Black girls
certainly don't win MacArthur Fellowships.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Hum.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
I didn't listen, though I blocked out the could nots
and should not. I chose to hear another voice instead,
Be who you are and not who someone else thinks
you ought to be. A voice said to me, voice
(06:59):
inside me. The same voice said rite I didn't have
time for dreaming. I didn't have time for inspiration. I
just wrote until it became habit. I faried hopes, I
faried fears, California dreaming the American dream. What happens to
(07:23):
a dream deferred? I couldn't tell you. I wrote, that's
the truth of it and the dream of it.
Speaker 7 (07:33):
Some of us don't dream. We just do.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
We write, and their story is still inside me.
Speaker 7 (07:44):
Where are you taking me?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, Octavia?
Speaker 6 (07:49):
That depends No, no, no, no, I want to go back.
I still have work to do. I didn't have a choice,
Just like this getting on your bus. There were no
choices but to pick up my pen, clean toilets are right,
be's some awful man, secretary or right? Be dead inside
(08:11):
or right? I didn't have a choice. Writing is private
until it isn't. Creating a story is a personal thing
between you and eternity. No one has to know the
worlds you create, the pain you exercise. It's an escape
until one day someone gives you fifteen dollars for a
(08:32):
few of your words, and you forget the privacy of
it all. Writing can set you free. It was my
way to freedom and of future. I couldn't see any
other way to get there, And again I had no choice.
Speaker 7 (08:49):
The future chose me.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Here it continues to choose you.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
You mean to say, I can't go back, only forward?
Do I have to do it alone? I might have
been too alone in life.
Speaker 7 (09:07):
I don't want to be alone.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Now?
Speaker 7 (09:17):
Wait? Who is this?
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Do I know them?
Speaker 7 (09:36):
Hello? Did she not see me?
Speaker 2 (09:42):
She cannot?
Speaker 7 (09:47):
Who is she?
Speaker 6 (09:50):
I know her? A white woman carrying a young boy.
That the dress she wears covers her from ankle to chin,
but the hem of her skirt is caked in mud.
The boy is soaking, wet and not shivering. I know her,
(10:12):
I know the boy. They are out of time, but
I know them like I know my own reflection in
this window.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Ah, there are more.
Speaker 7 (10:39):
And this young couple.
Speaker 6 (10:42):
They sit next to the mother and child, as though
they cannot help it.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
They are tied to each other. I know them too.
The woman looks like me.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
If I could have made myself over, younger, marriageable, fierce
yet to come? I wonder if these spirits are kindred
to me my ancestors perhaps, or my lineage.
Speaker 7 (11:08):
Or both? Are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I don't invite these spirits? You do, aliens, monsters, You've
kept so many spirits with you. Why, I don't know.
Speaker 7 (11:26):
I thought I knew, but now I'm not so sure.
Speaker 8 (11:32):
Ah.
Speaker 6 (11:33):
A pregnant man, a womanish creature. He's letting her sit first.
Now he settles in carefully next to her. His belly
protrudes slightly. It moves like the ocean. Something, something is
alive inside of him.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
Now I remember these people.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Oh, somehow my characters never felt like something I gave
birth to. I form them out of clay, like God,
like Zeus. A man in a police uniform, a woman
speaking Spanish, A man carrying a rifle, the barrel radiating heat.
(12:20):
His whip is scaped over with blood strapped to his hip.
I see the female alien with blood on her claws.
An old man reads from a sacred text, but the
teen beside him writes her own. The monster inside the
pregnant belly stirs. The lady in the back, the one
(12:42):
that most resembles me. One of her arms is missing, gone,
and her husband cautiously holds the hand she still has.
She is indifferent to the absence of her limb and
the offer of his love. Sers not of this realm,
(13:03):
shadows from another world.
Speaker 7 (13:06):
Aliens.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
Alien is the word we use to describe that which
we cannot understand, which we cannot comprehend, something from beyond us,
something unknown, that which we fear the most. Ferrymen, How
many ways can you define alien? Is it by badge
(13:37):
or country? Is it skin or planet? Am I a
monster because my voice is too deep and my body
too strong? Are women monsters for death? Or men monsters
for making babies they don't want? I've seen it all,
(13:57):
I wrote to make sense of it. Could ever tell
me why bad things happened? Why evil people rise into
power for generations? Why the silence endure?
Speaker 7 (14:06):
So I wrote?
Speaker 6 (14:08):
I shaped the horror into something beautiful. I wrote from
the shadows. But shadows are real phenomenon, physical and obstruction
of light. I wrote from the shadows to make you
see them. I wrote in defiance to show people they
(14:29):
don't have to bend to the judgments of others. They
can live their own way.
Speaker 7 (14:39):
Look at that.
Speaker 6 (14:42):
The ocean at night. I love a drive up the Pacific.
Host writers are the most treacherous of criminals. I hurt,
I maim, I torture and kill. I set women on
(15:05):
hard journeys and tear open the stomachs of pregnant men.
I travel through time and space with no regard for
the laws of science. This is the blessed audacity of fiction.
I am stronger than Zeus on Olympus. Zeus fears me.
(15:27):
You driver, you fear me.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Ha ha.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
It is a new feeling for you. I can see
that I haven't lived one life. I lived a thousand. Hell,
maybe you've taken me on this journey before, maybe a
thousand times. I am a criminal of eternity. People applauded
and paid me money to hurt and maim and kill.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Well.
Speaker 6 (15:53):
I wish the applause and money had been easy. That
was a much tougher.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Journey one we're on now. But I have died before.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
I died when they rejected my skin and my words.
I died when they rejected the tenor of my voice
or the strength of my stature. After every story, I died.
What becomes of you if you've died before, if you've
(16:32):
died again and again?
Speaker 7 (16:41):
I need I need a hair high.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I can't breathe in air.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
Smells strange, hair like a dream. The landscape outside lush evergreen?
Speaker 7 (17:11):
What road is this? Driver?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
You're changing it as we go? This too is your story.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
Hum A dissipation of the haze into crystal blue clouds
are welcome. I like moments of shade as much as
I like sunshine. Shadows too, of course, the shadows are
a blessing these passengers on the bus. My character is
(17:46):
my children, the parables of my life. I used to
fear that they were wedged into tight sleeping places and
shackled to me in long chains.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
But they aren't.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
I said I had no choice, but now I'm not
sure that's quite true. I had many choices, but I
was so decisive, so determined, I felt my path destined.
Speaker 7 (18:14):
And when I could not.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
Write, I took for granted all that I had already written. Still,
every story I created created me. I wrote to create myself.
Speaker 7 (18:38):
So what becomes of me now?
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Ferrymen, I want to be free. I do not believe
in heaven or hell. Heaven is for the naive and
hell is for the jaded. For sensible people, I'd expect
a sensible after life.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
There is no after or before.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Is there.
Speaker 7 (19:03):
Just next to next to next?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Then tell me what is next?
Speaker 7 (19:14):
This slow moving bus, where is it going?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
I used up eight lives, hence my name, to get
to this last voyage.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
Is this the dying American dream? Is this the last
underground railroad? With you?
Speaker 6 (19:39):
Crawling through my self pity until I can finally see
the stars? Maybe my manifest destiny was to tell the
truth until it slept. I always thought my life was unfinished,
in need of revision. Maybe it is okay like this,
When I say I have so much more to say,
(20:01):
I forget. There may be other voices out there ready
to write those words, because I am able to do
both reach into the past and see into the future
to find the truth.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
It did write the truth, didn't you?
Speaker 6 (20:23):
I wrote my truth. Sometimes it felt like vengeance, but
the truth isn't vengeance. It's just the truth. I wrote
these stories for me, and others were drawn to them.
I'm grateful for that. And now these characters have chosen
(20:43):
to be with me. Yeah, what do you say, Ferryman?
Do they keep traveling with us? Or do I go
the rest of the way alone?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Well? Yeah, I don't make the decision.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
Okay, then.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
It seems uh, this is your stuff.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Look out the window, the beauty and terror of it all.
It is there, with or without me. I can't accept
that my words are eternal children, be well.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Thank you for the ride, Thank you for your words.
(22:08):
Where there was no path toward the future, she forged one.
Where the path was dark, She cast the light. A
photographer of the American psyche, Why then shouldn't she forge
her own afterlife? Don't tell anybody. I do wonder what
(22:32):
dreams she will spin into reality beyond the veil Ah.
It's not for me to know. All I can do
is listen and see her on her passage.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
The Passage stars Dan Fogeler as the Ferryman. Episode features
Juliet Jeffers.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
As Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Written by Nicki Salcedo with additional writing by Dan Bush
and Nicholas Dakoski. Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick,
and Alexander Williams. First assistant director, script's supervisor and production
coordinator Sarah Klein. Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by
Alexander Rodriguez, Casting by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon.
(23:24):
Editing and sound designed by Dan Bush, dialogue editing and
sound mixing by Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound.
Our supervising producer is Josh Than, created by Dan Bush
and Nicholas Dakoski. Produced by Dan Bush, The Passage is
a production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
Yeah, I am the fairy man.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
I regret to tell you that very many American lives
in love.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
What herd to shut from the car. He's dead. Whether
he rebird to president or four hours, people must get up.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
And I.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Am here in the in between, to collect their spirits
and carry them to what comes next. This road is
not on any map. It spans the thresholds between their
most forbidden desires and their gris fear. All I ask
(01:20):
for in payment is a tale and accounting of their
lives and the great temporary that is the land of
the living.
Speaker 4 (01:29):
These are their stories. This is the passage.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
February twenty fourth, two thousand and six. The psychological landscape
of an American city in the dawn of a new millennium.
The covetous and the criminalized, the sceptered and the marginalized,
creators and their critics. This is a place where truth
(02:37):
has splintered into as many self reflections as there are onlookers,
millions of egos angling for positions on their own stages,
desperate to be seen by themselves, a million voices screaming
to hear themselves, all wanting to fit into their own experience.
(03:00):
Trapolis where loneliness and madness come to dance. And soon
there will be as many realities as there are souls,
each projecting themselves on their own screens. Already it is beginning,
(03:20):
the countless din of infinite echoes, all converging in an
ugliness so intricate and baroque that it takes a true
seer to divine the beauty in it. We meet one
up sere today, a conjurer of the future, if you will,
(03:41):
who spent her life struggling upward to see and be
seen herself a knife that cuts through the gristle of
the chaos of America to pull out its bloody, beating heart.
And once she has to describe it to us so
(04:02):
beautifully and viscerally that we cannot believe we've never seen it. Yeah,
there she is at the corner, there, waiting on this bus,
though she's not quite sure where it will take her.
Speaker 5 (04:27):
Octavia, Come, Octavia, come.
Speaker 6 (04:48):
Oh am, are your only passenger today?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Please take a seat.
Speaker 7 (04:54):
I seem to have forgotten money, No matter, can.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
I pay you with your words. Please?
Speaker 7 (05:06):
What do I call you?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
The ferryman?
Speaker 7 (05:13):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (05:14):
I am a fairy man too, I suppose I mean,
I listen, I carry.
Speaker 7 (05:22):
I don't judge, do you.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
It is not my way to judge, But my passengers
often seek validation.
Speaker 6 (05:36):
Why not? We all want some affirmation. But critics can
be cruel. They will not hesitate to give a writer
a bad review, even in death, God like in their
power to destroy the things they can't understand.
Speaker 7 (05:54):
You want the truth. I was my worst critic.
Speaker 6 (06:01):
No, no, no, I wouldn't worry about your judgment anymore
than any others. I've been judged my whole life.
Speaker 7 (06:15):
When I was a child, I was only told what I.
Speaker 6 (06:18):
Couldn't do, what I shouldn't do. Black girls don't write.
Black girls certainly don't write science fiction.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
No.
Speaker 6 (06:26):
Black girls don't win Hugo and Nebula awards. Black girls
certainly don't win MacArthur Fellowships.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Hum.
Speaker 6 (06:38):
I didn't listen, though I blocked out the could nots
and should not. I chose to hear another voice instead,
Be who you are and not who someone else thinks
you ought to be. A voice said to me, voice
(06:59):
inside me. The same voice said rite I didn't have
time for dreaming. I didn't have time for inspiration. I
just wrote until it became habit. I faried hopes, I
faried fears, California dreaming the American dream. What happens to
(07:23):
a dream deferred? I couldn't tell you. I wrote, that's
the truth of it and the dream of it.
Speaker 7 (07:33):
Some of us don't dream. We just do.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
We write, and their story is still inside me.
Speaker 7 (07:44):
Where are you taking me?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
Well, Octavia?
Speaker 6 (07:49):
That depends No, no, no, no, I want to go back.
I still have work to do. I didn't have a choice,
Just like this getting on your bus. There were no
choices but to pick up my pen, clean toilets are right,
be's some awful man, secretary or right? Be dead inside
(08:11):
or right? I didn't have a choice. Writing is private
until it isn't. Creating a story is a personal thing
between you and eternity. No one has to know the
worlds you create, the pain you exercise. It's an escape
until one day someone gives you fifteen dollars for a
(08:32):
few of your words, and you forget the privacy of
it all. Writing can set you free. It was my
way to freedom and of future. I couldn't see any
other way to get there, And again I had no choice.
Speaker 7 (08:49):
The future chose me.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Here it continues to choose you.
Speaker 6 (08:55):
You mean to say, I can't go back, only forward?
Do I have to do it alone? I might have
been too alone in life.
Speaker 7 (09:07):
I don't want to be alone.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Now?
Speaker 7 (09:17):
Wait? Who is this?
Speaker 8 (09:23):
Do I know them?
Speaker 7 (09:36):
Hello? Did she not see me?
Speaker 2 (09:42):
She cannot?
Speaker 7 (09:47):
Who is she?
Speaker 6 (09:50):
I know her? A white woman carrying a young boy.
That the dress she wears covers her from ankle to chin,
but the hem of her skirt is caked in mud.
The boy is soaking, wet and not shivering. I know her,
(10:12):
I know the boy. They are out of time, but
I know them like I know my own reflection in
this window.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Ah, there are more.
Speaker 7 (10:39):
And this young couple.
Speaker 6 (10:42):
They sit next to the mother and child, as though
they cannot help it.
Speaker 7 (10:47):
They are tied to each other. I know them too.
The woman looks like me.
Speaker 6 (10:53):
If I could have made myself over, younger, marriageable, fierce
yet to come? I wonder if these spirits are kindred
to me my ancestors perhaps, or my lineage.
Speaker 7 (11:08):
Or both? Are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (11:13):
I don't invite these spirits? You do, aliens, monsters, You've
kept so many spirits with you. Why, I don't know.
Speaker 7 (11:26):
I thought I knew, but now I'm not so sure.
Speaker 8 (11:32):
Ah.
Speaker 6 (11:33):
A pregnant man, a womanish creature. He's letting her sit first.
Now he settles in carefully next to her. His belly
protrudes slightly. It moves like the ocean. Something, something is
alive inside of him.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
Now I remember these people.
Speaker 6 (12:00):
Oh, somehow my characters never felt like something I gave
birth to. I form them out of clay, like God,
like Zeus. A man in a police uniform, a woman
speaking Spanish, A man carrying a rifle, the barrel radiating heat.
(12:20):
His whip is scaped over with blood strapped to his hip.
I see the female alien with blood on her claws.
An old man reads from a sacred text, but the
teen beside him writes her own. The monster inside the
pregnant belly stirs. The lady in the back, the one
(12:42):
that most resembles me. One of her arms is missing, gone,
and her husband cautiously holds the hand she still has.
She is indifferent to the absence of her limb and
the offer of his love. Sers not of this realm,
(13:03):
shadows from another world.
Speaker 7 (13:06):
Aliens.
Speaker 6 (13:17):
Alien is the word we use to describe that which
we cannot understand, which we cannot comprehend, something from beyond us,
something unknown, that which we fear the most. Ferrymen, How
many ways can you define alien? Is it by badge
(13:37):
or country? Is it skin or planet? Am I a
monster because my voice is too deep and my body
too strong? Are women monsters for death? Or men monsters
for making babies they don't want? I've seen it all,
(13:57):
I wrote to make sense of it. Could ever tell
me why bad things happened? Why evil people rise into
power for generations? Why the silence endure?
Speaker 7 (14:06):
So I wrote?
Speaker 6 (14:08):
I shaped the horror into something beautiful. I wrote from
the shadows. But shadows are real phenomenon, physical and obstruction
of light. I wrote from the shadows to make you
see them. I wrote in defiance to show people they
(14:29):
don't have to bend to the judgments of others. They
can live their own way.
Speaker 7 (14:39):
Look at that.
Speaker 6 (14:42):
The ocean at night. I love a drive up the Pacific.
Host writers are the most treacherous of criminals. I hurt,
I maim, I torture and kill. I set women on
(15:05):
hard journeys and tear open the stomachs of pregnant men.
I travel through time and space with no regard for
the laws of science. This is the blessed audacity of fiction.
I am stronger than Zeus on Olympus. Zeus fears me.
(15:27):
You driver, you fear me.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Ha ha.
Speaker 6 (15:32):
It is a new feeling for you. I can see
that I haven't lived one life. I lived a thousand. Hell,
maybe you've taken me on this journey before, maybe a
thousand times. I am a criminal of eternity. People applauded
and paid me money to hurt and maim and kill.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Well.
Speaker 6 (15:53):
I wish the applause and money had been easy. That
was a much tougher.
Speaker 7 (15:58):
Journey one we're on now. But I have died before.
Speaker 6 (16:06):
I died when they rejected my skin and my words.
I died when they rejected the tenor of my voice
or the strength of my stature. After every story, I died.
What becomes of you if you've died before, if you've
(16:32):
died again and again?
Speaker 7 (16:41):
I need I need a hair high.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
I can't breathe in air.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
Smells strange, hair like a dream. The landscape outside lush evergreen?
Speaker 7 (17:11):
What road is this? Driver?
Speaker 2 (17:15):
You're changing it as we go? This too is your story.
Speaker 6 (17:21):
Hum A dissipation of the haze into crystal blue clouds
are welcome. I like moments of shade as much as
I like sunshine. Shadows too, of course, the shadows are
a blessing these passengers on the bus. My character is
(17:46):
my children, the parables of my life. I used to
fear that they were wedged into tight sleeping places and
shackled to me in long chains.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
But they aren't.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
I said I had no choice, but now I'm not
sure that's quite true. I had many choices, but I
was so decisive, so determined, I felt my path destined.
Speaker 7 (18:14):
And when I could not.
Speaker 6 (18:15):
Write, I took for granted all that I had already written. Still,
every story I created created me. I wrote to create myself.
Speaker 7 (18:38):
So what becomes of me now?
Speaker 6 (18:39):
Ferrymen, I want to be free. I do not believe
in heaven or hell. Heaven is for the naive and
hell is for the jaded. For sensible people, I'd expect
a sensible after life.
Speaker 7 (18:58):
There is no after or before.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
Is there.
Speaker 7 (19:03):
Just next to next to next?
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Then tell me what is next?
Speaker 7 (19:14):
This slow moving bus, where is it going?
Speaker 6 (19:23):
I used up eight lives, hence my name, to get
to this last voyage.
Speaker 7 (19:30):
Is this the dying American dream? Is this the last
underground railroad? With you?
Speaker 6 (19:39):
Crawling through my self pity until I can finally see
the stars? Maybe my manifest destiny was to tell the
truth until it slept. I always thought my life was unfinished,
in need of revision. Maybe it is okay like this,
When I say I have so much more to say,
(20:01):
I forget. There may be other voices out there ready
to write those words, because I am able to do
both reach into the past and see into the future
to find the truth.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
It did write the truth, didn't you?
Speaker 6 (20:23):
I wrote my truth. Sometimes it felt like vengeance, but
the truth isn't vengeance. It's just the truth. I wrote
these stories for me, and others were drawn to them.
I'm grateful for that. And now these characters have chosen
(20:43):
to be with me. Yeah, what do you say, Ferryman?
Do they keep traveling with us? Or do I go
the rest of the way alone?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Well? Yeah, I don't make the decision.
Speaker 7 (21:00):
Okay, then.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
It seems uh, this is your stuff.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Look out the window, the beauty and terror of it all.
It is there, with or without me. I can't accept
that my words are eternal children, be well.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Thank you for the ride, Thank you for your words.
(22:08):
Where there was no path toward the future, she forged one.
Where the path was dark, She cast the light. A
photographer of the American psyche, Why then shouldn't she forge
her own afterlife? Don't tell anybody. I do wonder what
(22:32):
dreams she will spin into reality beyond the veil Ah.
It's not for me to know. All I can do
is listen and see her on her passage.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
The Passage stars Dan Fogeler as the Ferryman. Episode features
Juliet Jeffers.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
As Octavia Butler.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
Written by Nicki Salcedo with additional writing by Dan Bush
and Nicholas Dakoski. Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick,
and Alexander Williams. First assistant director, script's supervisor and production
coordinator Sarah Klein. Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by
Alexander Rodriguez, Casting by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon.
(23:24):
Editing and sound designed by Dan Bush, dialogue editing and
sound mixing by Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound.
Our supervising producer is Josh Than, created by Dan Bush
and Nicholas Dakoski. Produced by Dan Bush, The Passage is
a production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
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