“Where’d my mama go?” he demanded on his first day home.
“Away,” Rufus had said. “She went away.”
“When is she coming back?”
“I don’t know.”
The boy came to me. “Aunt Dana, where’d my mama go?”
“Honey … she died.”
“Died?”
“Yes. Like old Aunt Mary.” Who at last had drifted the final distance to her reward. She had lived over eighty years—had come over from Africa, people said. Nigel had made a box and Mary had been laid to rest near where Alice lay now.
“But Mama wasn’t old.”
“No, she was sick, Joe.”
“Daddy said she went away.”
“Well … to heaven.”
“No!”
He had cried and I had tried to comfort him. I remembered the pain of my own mother’s death—grief, loneliness, uncertainty in my aunt and uncle’s house …
I had held the boy and told him he still had his daddy—please God. And that Sarah and Carrie and Nigel loved him. They wouldn’t let anything happen to him—as though they had the power to protect him, or even themselves.
I let Joe go to his mother’s cabin to be alone for a while. He wanted to. Then I told Rufus what I had done. And Rufus hadn’t known whether to hit me or thank me. He had glared at me, the skin of his face drawn tight, intense. Then, finally, he had relaxed and nodded and gone out to find his son.
Now, he sat with me—being sorry and lonely and wanting me to take the place of the dead.
“You never hated me, did you?” he asked.
“Never for long. I don’t know why. You worked hard to earn my hatred, Rufe.”
“She hated me. From the first time I forced her.”
“I don’t blame her.”
“Until just before she ran. She had stopped hating me. I wonder how long it will take you.”
“What?”
“To stop hating.”
Oh God. Almost against my will, I closed my fingers around the handle of the knife still concealed in my bag. He took my other hand, held it between his own in a grip that I knew would only be gentle until I tried to pull away.
“Rufe,” I said, “your children …”
“They’re free.”
“But they’re young. They need you to protect their freedom.”
“Then it’s up to you, isn’t it?”
I twisted my hand, tried to get it away from him in sudden anger. At once, his hold went from caressing to imprisoning. My right hand had become wet and slippery on the knife.
“It’s up to you,” he repeated.
“No, Goddamnit, it isn’t! Keeping you alive has been up to me for too long! Why didn’t you shoot yourself when you started to? I wouldn’t have stopped you!”
“I know.”
The softness of his voice made me look up at him.
“So what else do I have to lose?” he asked. He pushed me back on the pallet, and for a few moments, we lay there, still. What was he waiting for? What was I waiting for?
He lay with his head on my shoulder, his left arm around me, his right hand still holding my hand, and slowly, I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite of all my talk. But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I had saved so many times. So hard to kill …
He was not hurting me, would not hurt me if I remained as I was. He was not his father, old and ugly, brutal and disgusting. He smelled of soap, as though he had bathed recently—for me? The red hair was neatly combed and a little damp. I would never be to him what Tess had been to his father—a thing passed around like the whiskey jug at a husking. He wouldn’t do that to me or sell me or …
No.
I could feel the knife in my hand, still slippery with perspiration. A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus—erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.
I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me. I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side.
He screamed. I had never heard anyone scream that way—an animal sound. He screamed again, a lower ugly gurgle.
He lost his hold on my hand for a moment, but caught my arm before I could get away. Then he brought up the fist of his free hand to punch me once, and again as the patroller had done so long ago.
I pulled the knife free of him somehow, raised it, and brought it down again into his back.
This time he only grunted. He collapsed across me, somehow still alive, still holding my arm.
I lay beneath him, half conscious from the blows, and sick. My stomach seemed to twist, and I vomited on both of us.
“Dana?”
A voice. A man’s voice.
I managed to turn my head and see Nigel standing in the doorway.
“Dana, what …? Oh no. God, no!”
“Nigel …” moaned Rufus, and he gave a long shuddering sigh. His body went limp and leaden across me. I pushed him away somehow—everything but his hand still on my arm. Then I convulsed with terrible, wrenching sickness.
Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving.
Something … paint, plaster, wood—a wall. The wall of my living room. I was back at home—in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall. I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus’s fingers had grasped.
I pulled my arm toward me, pulled hard.
And suddenly, there was an avalanche of pain, red impossible agony! And I screamed and screamed.
Epilogue
We flew to Maryland as soon as my arm was well enough. There, we rented a car—Kevin was driving again, finally—and wandered around Baltimore and over to Easton. There was a bridge now, not the steamship Rufus had used. And at last I got a good look at the town I had lived so near and seen so little of. We found the courthouse and an old church, a few other buildings time had not worn away. And we found Burger King and Holiday Inn and Texaco and schools with black kids and white kids together and older people who looked at Kevin and me, then looked again.
We went into the countryside, into what was still woods and farmland, and found a few of the old houses. A couple of them could have been the Weylin house. They were well-kept and handsomer, but basically, they were the same red-brick Georgian Colonials.
But Rufus’s house was gone. As nearly as we could tell, its site was now covered by a broad field of corn. The house was dust, like Rufus.
I was the one who insisted on trying to find his grave, questioning the farmer about it because Rufus, like his father, like old Mary and Alice, had probably been buried on the plantation.
But the farmer knew nothing—or at least, said nothing. The only clue we found—more than a clue, really—was an old newspaper article—a notice that Mr. Rufus Weylin had been killed when his house caught fire and was partially destroyed. And in later papers, notice of the sale of the slaves from Mr. Rufus Weylin’s estate. These slaves were listed by their first names with their approximate ages and their skills given. All three of Nigel’s sons were listed, but Nigel and Carrie were not. Sarah was listed, but Joe and Hagar were not. Everyone else was listed. Everyone.
I thought about that, put together as many pieces as I could. The fire, for instance. Nigel had probably set it to cover what I had done—and he had covered. Rufus was assumed to have burned to death. I could find nothin
g in the incomplete newspaper records to suggest that he had been murdered, or even that the fire had been arson. Nigel must have done a good job. He must also have managed to get Margaret Weylin out of the house alive. There was no mention of her dying. And Margaret had relatives in Baltimore. Also, Hagar’s home had been in Baltimore.
Kevin and I went back to Baltimore to skim newspapers, legal records, anything we could find that might tie Margaret and Hagar together or mention them at all. Margaret might have taken both children. Perhaps with Alice dead she had accepted them. They were her grandchildren, after all, the son and daughter of her only child. She might have cared for them. She might also have held them as slaves. But even if she had, Hagar, at least, lived long enough for the Fourteenth Amendment to free her.
“He could have left a will,” Kevin told me outside one of our haunts, the Maryland Historical Society. “He could have freed those people at least when he had no more use for them.”
“But there was his mother to consider,” I said. “And he was only twenty-five. He probably thought he had plenty of time to make a will.”
“Stop defending him,” muttered Kevin.
I hesitated, then shook my head. “I wasn’t. I guess in a way, I was defending myself. You see, I know why he wouldn’t make that kind of will. I asked him, and he told me.”
“Why?”
“Because of me. He was afraid I’d kill him afterwards.”
“You wouldn’t even have had to know about it!”
“Yes, but I guess he wasn’t taking any chances.”
“Was he right … to be afraid?”
“I don’t know.”
“I doubt it, considering what you took from him. I don’t think you were really capable of killing him until he attacked you.”
And barely then, I thought. Kevin would never know what those last moments had been like. I had outlined them for him, and he’d asked few questions. For that I was grateful. Now I said simply, “Self-defense.”
“Yes,” he said.
“But the cost … Nigel’s children, Sarah, all the others …”
“It’s over,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to change any of it now.”
“I know.” I drew a deep breath. “I wonder whether the children were allowed to stay together—maybe stay with Sarah.”
“You’ve looked,” he said. “And you’ve found no records. You’ll probably never know.”
I touched the scar Tom Weylin’s boot had left on my face, touched my empty left sleeve. “I know,” I repeated. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.”
“You probably needed to come for the same reason I did.” He shrugged. “To try to understand. To touch solid evidence that those people existed. To reassure yourself that you’re sane.”
I looked back at the brick building of the Historical Society, itself a converted early mansion. “If we told anyone else about this, anyone at all, they wouldn’t think we were so sane.”
“We are,” he said. “And now that the boy is dead, we have some chance of staying that way.”
Reader’s Guide
Critical Essay
ROBERT CROSSLEY
University of Massachusetts at Boston
“What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!”
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
I
First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died. But the literary form has persisted, just as the legacy of slavery has persisted, into the present. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of what has been christened the “neo-slave narrative,” a fictional mutation of the autobiographies of nineteenth-century Americans who lived as slaves. Among the many historical novels, often with first-person narrators, that have recreated the era of slavery, some of the best known are Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). Octavia Butler’s hybrid of memoir and fantasy is a distinctive contribution to the genre of neo-slave narrative. Although Kindred is not itself a work of science fiction, Butler has brought to the creation of this narrative the sensibilities of an author who works largely outside the tradition of realism. When Kindred first appeared in 1979, no one had thought of using the fictional conventions of time travel to transport a modern African American to an antebellum plantation. Time-traveling narratives are always replete with paradoxical questions: If you travel back a century and a half and kill your own great-great-grandfather, can you yourself ever be born? Is it as possible for the future to influence the past as it is for the past to shape the future? But then every good work of fiction is paradoxical: It lies like the truth.
Kindred begins and ends in mystery. On June 9, 1976, her twenty-sixth birthday, Edana Franklin is overcome by nausea while moving with her white husband, Kevin, into a new house in the Los Angeles suburbs. Abruptly she finds herself kneeling on a riverbank, hears a child screaming, runs into the river to save him, performs artificial respiration, and as the boy begins breathing she looks up into a rifle barrel. Again she sickens and finds herself back once more in her new house, but soaking wet and covered in mud. She has not hallucinated; she has been transported, physically as well as psychically. This inexplicable, nightmarish transit from one place to another is the first of six such episodes of varying duration that make up the bulk of the novel. Sometimes Dana (the shortened form of her name she prefers) is transported alone, sometimes with Kevin; but the dizzy spells that immediately precede her movements occur without warning, and she is returned to Los Angeles only when she believes her life is threatened. The second time this happens, Dana discovers that she is moving not simply through space but into the past as well—to the Maryland plantation of a slave owner who is her own distant ancestor.
Dana’s involuntary trips to the past, like convulsive memories dislocating her in time, occupy only a few minutes or hours of her life in 1976, but her stay in the alternative time is stretched as she lives out an imposed remembrance of things past. Because of this dual time level a brief absence from Los Angeles may result in months spent in the nineteenth century, observing and suffering the backbreaking field work, enduring verbal abuse, whippings, and other daily brutalities of enslavement. Rufus Weylin, the child Dana rescues from drowning on her first trip to her ancestral home, periodically “calls” her from the present, whenever his life is in danger. As he grows older he becomes more repugnant and dangerous, but she must try to keep him alive until he and a slave woman named Alice Greenwood conceive a child, Hagar, who will initiate Dana’s own family line. Only upon Weylin’s death can Dana return permanently to 1976, but she comes back without her left arm. This is the shocking premise on which Kindred depends, and the author makes no effort to rationalize it. That is, Butler does not attempt to explain what she describes so graphically at the end of the sixth chapter: How could Dana’s arm, from the elbow down, be physically joined to the plaster of her living room wall? The author is silent on the process by which Dana’s arm is severed in the twilight zone between past and present. Kindred, one could say, is no more rational, no more comfortably explicable than the history of slavery itself. But that is a little too easy. The fiction has a ruthless logic to its design, and in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”1
Time damages as well as heals, and genuine historical understanding of human crimes is never easy and always achieved at the price of suffering. The loss of Dana’s arm becomes, as Ruth Salvaggio has suggested, “a kind of birthmark,” the emblem of
a “disfigured heritage.”2 The symbolic meanings Kindred yields are powerful and readily articulable even if the literal truth is harder to state. It is the paradoxes of kinship, of family, of history, of home that engage Butler’s imagination, not the paradoxes of time travel. In particular, the novel has much to say about the paradoxical nature of “home,” that magnet for American sentiment and homilies: “There’s no place like home”; “Home is where the heart is”; “You can’t go home again.” To all of those simplicities Kindred offers a challenge. By the time Dana’s time traveling finally stops and she is restored to her Los Angeles home in 1976, the meaning of a homecoming has become impossibly complicated. Her first act, once her arm has sufficiently healed, is to fly to present-day Maryland; both her California house and the Weylin plantation have become inescapably “home” to her.3
None of this reads like the classic time-travel stories of science fiction. In The Time Machine (1895) H. G. Wells had his traveler display the shiny vehicle on which he rode into the future to verify the strange truth of his journey; in Kindred the method of transport remains a fantastic given. An irresistible psycho-historical force, not a feat of engineering, motivates Butler’s plot. How Dana travels in time is a problem of physics irrelevant to Butler’s aims. Kindred has far less in common with Wellsian science fiction than it has with that classic fable of alienation, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, whose protagonist simply wakes up one morning as a giant beetle, a fantastic eruption into the normal world. Butler has sacrificed the neat closure that a scientific—or even pseudo-scientific—explanation of time travel would have given her novel. Leaving the book’s ending rough-edged and raw like Dana’s wound, Butler leaves the reader uneasy and disturbed by the intersection of story and history rather than reassured by a tale that solves all the mysteries. She did not need to show off a technological marvel of the sort Wells provided to mark his traveler’s path through time; instead, Kindred evokes the terrifying and nauseating voyage that looms behind every American slave narrative: the Middle Passage from Africa to the slave markets of the New World. In her experience of being kidnapped in time and space, Dana recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting voyage of her ancestors, just as her employment in 1976 through a temporary job agency—“We regulars called it a slave market,” Dana says with grouchy irony (p. 52)—operates as a benign, ghostly version of institutional slavery’s auction block.
Kindred Page 30