Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  At the same time, Butler has been eager to avoid using her fiction as a soapbox. “Fiction writers can’t be too pedagogical or too polemical,” she told one interviewer.13 The route she pursues to her readers’ heads is through their guts and nerves, and that requires good storytelling, not just a good set of issues. Science fiction and fantasy are a richly metaphorical literature. Just as Mary Shelley in Frankenstein invented a monstrous child born from a male scientist’s imagination as a metaphor for the exclu- sion of women from acts of creation, and just as Wells’s Time Machine used hairy subterranean Morlocks and effete aboveground Eloi as metaphors for the upstairs-downstairs class divisions of Victorian Eng- land, so Butler has specialized in metaphors that dramatize the tyranny of one species or race or gender over another. In Kindred the most powerful metaphor is time travel itself. Traveling to the past is a dramatic means to make the past live, to get the reader to live imaginatively in the recreated past, to grasp it as a felt reality rather than merely a learned abstraction. The chapter titles Butler has given to each of the major episodes of Kin- dred further invite the reader to respond metaphorically: “The River,” “The Fire,” “The Fall,” “The Fight,” “The Storm,” and “The Rope.” As one commentator has observed, these chapter headings suggest something elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative.14 Kin- dred, after all, is not a documentary about racism, although the vividness of its invented details gives it a convincing “you are there” documentary power. But, finally, her work succeeds in engaging, terrifying, and mov-

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  ing readers because it is not fiction composed by agenda.

  White writers, Butler has pointed out, have tended to include black characters in science fiction only to illustrate a problem or as signposts to advertise the author’s distaste for racism; black people in much science fiction are represented as “other.”15 All Butler’s fiction stands in quiet resistance to the notion that a black character in a science-fiction novel is there for a reason. In a Butler novel the black protagonist is there, like the mountain, because she is there. Although she does not hesitate to harness the power of fiction as fable to create striking analogies to the oppressive realities of our own present world, Butler also peoples her imagined worlds with black characters as a matter of course. While her frequent use of women as protagonists has brought attention to the black feminist aes- thetic she practices, it is just as important to notice that there is always a critical mass of characters of color in her novels. One of the exciting fea- tures of Kindred is its attentiveness both to the exceptional situation of an isolated modern black woman in a household under slavery and to her complex social and psychological relationships within the community of slaves she joins. Despite the severe stresses under which they live, the slaves constitute a rich human society: Dana’s proud and vulnerable ancestor, Alice Greenwood; the mute housemaid, Carrie; Sarah, the cook who nurses old grievances while kneading bread dough; young Nigel, whom Dana teaches to read from a stolen primer; Sam James, the field hand who begs Dana to teach his brother and sister; Alice’s husband, Isaac, mutilated and sold to Mississippi after a failed escape attempt; even Liza, the sewing woman, who betrays Dana to the master and is punished by the other slaves for her complicity with the white owners. Although the black community is persistently fractured by the sudden removal of its members through either the calculated strategy or the mere whim of their white controllers, that community always patches itself back together, drawing from its common suffering and anger a common strength. It is the white characters in the novel who seem odd, isolated, pathetic, alien.

  The most problematic white man in Kindred is not the Maryland slave owner but the liberated, modern Californian married to Dana. Kevin Franklin is a good man. He loves Dana, loathes the chattel system that governs every feature of antebellum life in Maryland, and works with the Underground Railroad while he is trapped in the past. Yet he is by gender and race implicated in the supremacist culture. Throughout the novel But- ler ingeniously suggests parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin: their facial expressions, their language, even after a time their

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  accents merge in Dana’s mind so that she mistakes one for the other. “I gave her that husband to complicate her life,” Butler has commented, mis- chievously.16 One of the novel’s subtlest touches is in the chapter in which Dana is obliged to become Rufus Weylin’s secretary and handle his cor- respondence and bills; in 1976 Kevin had, unsuccessfully but still reveal- ingly, tried to get his wife to type his manuscripts and write his letters for him. When Kevin and Dana are in nineteenth-century Maryland at the same time, the only way they can spend a night together is to make a pub- lic pretense of being master and slave, playing along with the prevailing belief that a black woman was the sexual property of a white man. But, as Dana realizes, the more often one plays such a role, the nearer the pre- tending comes to reality: “I felt almost as though I really was doing some- thing shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed” (p. 97). And, she fears, Kevin begins to fit into the white, male, Southern routine too easily. Shut- tling between the two white men in her life, she is aware not only of the blood link between herself and Rufus but of the double link of gender and race that unites Rufus and Kevin. The convergence of these two white men in Dana’s life not only dramatizes the ease with which even a “progressive” white man falls into the cultural pattern of dominance, but it suggests as well an uncanny synonymy of the words “husband” and “master.”17

  The date of Dana’s final return to Los Angeles is July 4, 1976, the bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. In bringing the novel full circle from the protagonist’s birthday to the nation’s birthday, Butler deftly connects individual consciousness with social history and invites readers to meditate on the relationships between personal and political identities. What has been trivialized or sentimentalized—or erased—in the public celebrations of the past reemerges unvarnished in Dana’s homecoming on the fourth of July. Dana comes back to southern California with a truer understanding of African-American history than the sanitized versions offered by the popular media. Predictably, she scorns the image of the plantation derived from Gone with the Wind, but she also learns the inadequacy of even the best books as preparation for the firsthand experience of slavery. In her first trips to the past, Dana’s literacy, her education, and her historical knowledge sometimes lull her into a false sense of security. In one pas- sage, she records her pleasure in the friendly atmosphere of the cookhouse where the slaves gather to eat and talk, usually free from white overseers.

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  There she observes “a girl and boy, sitting on the floor eating with their fingers. I was glad to see them there because I’d read about kids their age being rounded up and fed from troughs like pigs. Not everywhere, appar- ently, not here” (p. 72). Although she does not name her literary source, Dana is recalling an episode from chapter 5 of Frederick Douglass’s 1845

  Narrative (a work Butler read carefully during her research for Kindred )

  that describes feeding time at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation:

  Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons.18

  Mistakenly, because the food and the treatment of children are better than Douglass’s Narrative seemed to promise, Dana behaves as if the cook- house is a sanctuary. That error in judgment leads to her first vicious flog- ging, when she is discovered teaching slave children to read. After her second whipping by Rufus Weylin’s father following her attempted flight from the plantation, she reflects angrily as another sl
ave woman salves her wounds, “Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape” (p. 177). Books had not taught her why so many slaves accepted their condition, nor had books defined the kind of bravery pos- sible in the humiliating situation of being owned.

  Films, Dana finds, are even less reliable guides to the past. Hollywood production values and the comfort of a theater seat insulate viewers from material purported to be historically accurate. Dana recalls witnessing the beating of a slave hunted out one night by white patrollers and how she crouched in the underbrush a few yards away from the man’s young daughter. The slave’s crime was being found in bed with his own free- born wife without having written permission from his owner:

  I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop!

  “Please, Master,” the man begged. “For Godsake, Master, please …” I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit.

  I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too- red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them plead- ing and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. ( p. 36)

  At such moments of first-person intensity, Kindred reveals its own liter-

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  ary kinship with the memoirs of ex-slaves published in the nineteenth cen- tury, for Butler’s greatest achievement in the novel is collapsing the gen- res of the fantastic travelogue and the slave narrative. She incorporates into Kindred both narrative strategies of the classic memoirs of former slaves and occasional deliberate verbal and situational echoes of those texts. In doing so she establishes a degree of authenticity and seriousness rarely attained by contemporary writers mining the conventions of the Wellsian time-travel story.

  Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel V. Carby’s feminist revision of the traditions of American black women’s writing, contrasts the image of the slave woman as victim in men’s slave memoirs with a very different image that emerges in such autobiographies as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Lucy Delany’s From the Darkness Cometh Light, and Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. In those narratives, Carby argues, women define themselves as agents rather than as mere victims, and they record the brutality of their treatment by their owners in order to emphasize their resistance to victimization and their claim to freedom. Dana, Butler’s fictive autobiographer, extends that ideology and aesthetic of the slave woman’s memoir into the late- twentieth century. Much of Kindred is a record of endurance, but there are also numerous acts of heroism and humanity, culminating in the act of manslaughter in self-defense that finally liberates Dana, at terrible cost, from her tyrannical ancestor.19

  Chained to her ancestral past by the genealogical link that requires her to keep the oppressive slave master alive until her own family is initiated, Dana works out the ethic of compromise that Harriet Jacobs tolerated to safeguard her children and herself. Despite her feelings of repugnance and shame, Jacobs compromised the sexual standards imposed on nineteenth- century women in order to maintain her central core of integrity and free- dom of will; she reluctantly practiced a situational ethics dictated by the extreme circumstances that constrained the ethical choices of black women under slavery. As several commentators on Jacobs’s memoir have argued, the crucial sentence around which our understanding of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl must be fashioned is her retrospective revision of the ethical norms that govern a woman’s choices and behaviors under systematic oppression: “Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”20 Butler’s Dana must move painfully toward a simi- lar ethical relativism as she discovers that the moral choices of a late-

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  twentieth-century black feminist cannot be exercised with impunity in the world of the slave state. At earlier stages in her experience in Maryland, as Dana tells Kevin, she is able to cling precariously to the ethical imper- atives of her own time, though even then her perspective and choices must necessarily be fundamentally different from his:

  You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer…. I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then … I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. ( p. 101)

  The longer she remains in the nineteenth century, the thinner the pro- tective cushioning becomes, until Dana finds herself five years later (in Maryland time) divided against herself, torn between absolute standards and pragmatic choices. The Dana of 1976 California finds it unthinkable that she would assist in the sexual exploitation of another black woman by a white man, but the Dana of 1824 Maryland finds herself in a moral trap. Rufus Weylin asks her to persuade Alice Greenwood, her own great- great-grandmother, to go to bed with him. Although she knows that her family tree is traceable to a child that Rufus fathers and Alice bears, Dana initially finds Rufus’s proposal repulsive, and she angrily rejects it. But when Rufus tells Dana that he will beat Alice—perhaps even beat her to death—if she refuses his advances and if Dana does not try to change Alice’s mind, she is caught in Harriet Jacobs’s dilemma: “He had all the low cunning of his class. No, I couldn’t refuse to help the girl—help her avoid at least some pain. But she wouldn’t think much of me for helping her this way. I didn’t think much of myself ” (p. 164). The choice demanded by the situation will satisfy neither Dana’s own internal stan- dards nor the larger feminist principle of sisterhood; she suffers the same shame that Jacobs felt, but she also adopts the compromise.

  In the end, what may be most powerful and valuable for readers of Kin- dred is the simple reminder that all that history occurred not so very long ago. In foreshortening the distance between then and now, Butler focuses our attention on the continuity between past and present; the fantasy of traveling backwards in time becomes a lesson in historical realities. We may also be reminded that historical progress is never a sure thing. In one of her brief respites in 1976 between bouts of enslavement in the nine- teenth century, Dana reads the memoirs of Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps: “Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in

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  only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hun- dred” (pp. 116-7). The systematic horrors of American slavery could have provided a model for that later programmed oppression and genocide.

  Like Dana and Kevin, the reader of Kindred may discover a closer kin- ship with the characters and events of the antebellum South than we often care to admit. And just as Dana feels compelled in the novel’s epilogue to travel to contemporary Maryland and “touch solid evidence that those people existed” (p. 264), readers of this fantastic invention may also find their felt understanding of history enriched and deepened. In Kindred Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.

  —May 2003

  1. Kenan, 498.

  2. Salvaggio in Barr, et al., 33.

  Notes

  3. Rushdy’s “Families of Orphans” comments astutely on the concept of home in Kindred; the chapter on Kindred in his later book, Remembering Generations, makes an extensive analysis of family as a social construct. For the most compre- hensive discussions of Kindred and history see Govan’s
“Homage to Tradition,” Levecq’s “Power and Repetition,” and Kubitschek’s chapter in Claiming the Heritage.

  4. Beal, 14; Kenan, 495; Potts, 336–37. Not all her critics have been willing to accept Butler’s disclaimer, and some have seen genetics and sociobiology, not physics, as the sciences underlying Kindred. See the essays by Elyce Rae Helford and Nancy Jesser.

  5. Mixon, 12.

  6. See Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession” in Bloodchild and Other Stories,

  125–35.

  7. Beal, 15; Rowell, 51.

  8. McCaffery, 65.

  9. Octavia Butler in a note to Beacon Press, 12 February 1988.

  10. George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), which imagines the evolution of a new culture in the aftermath of a biological catastrophe in North America, fea- tures a black matriarch who mothers the new society and warns against repeating the colonialist patterns of dominance and enslavement in the old culture. In More Than Human (1953), Theodore Sturgeon’s three linked novellas about social out- casts with psychic powers, twin black girls with telekinetic powers help form the

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  alternative human community the novelist calls homo gestalt. In both books, how- ever, the black characters are largely stereotypical and play secondary roles to white men.

  11. Bradbury, 96.

  12. Quoted by Govan, “Connections, Links, and Extended Networks,” 87, n. l2.

  13. McCaffery, 69.

  14. Kubitschek, 27.

  15. Harrison, 32–33. See also Butler’s short essay “The Monophobic Re- sponse.”