Kindred (38 page)

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.

In many ways
Kindred
, set in a historical past scrupulously researched by the author, departs from Butler’s characteristic kind of fiction. With the exception of
Wild Seed
(1980), all her other novels, from
Patternmaster
(1975) through
Parable of the Talents
(1998), have been situated in the future, often a damaged future, and have focused on power relationships between “normal” human beings and human mutants or extrasolar aliens. But if
Kindred
has some surface differences from the rest of Butler’s fiction, at its deepest levels it is a central text in her exploration of the webs of power and affection in human relationships, of the ethical imperative and the emotional price of empathy, of the difficult struggle to move beyond alienation to connection. In all her fiction she has produced parables that speak to issues of cultural difference, whether sexual, racial, political, economic, or psychological, and to issues of mastery and self-mastery.
Kindred
shares imagery with Butler’s futuristic novels, in particular with
Parable of the Talents
, whose electronically controlled collars and neurological “lashings” are but science-fictional extrapolations of the plantation owners’ coffles and whippings. In both novels the degradations of slavery are a constant, as is the determination of the victims whose lives are under total control to resist and escape. But
Kindred
is technically a much sparer story, without the multiple narrative perspectives of the later book, and without any of the conceptual or technological apparatus usually associated with science fiction. Apart from its single fantastic premise of instantaneous movement through time and space,
Kindred
is consistently matter-of-fact in presentation and depends on the author’s reading of authentic slave narratives, her assimilation of data from research at libraries and historical societies, the maps she used to plot her characters’ movements, and her visits to the Talbot County, Maryland, sites of the novel. Butler herself has repeatedly insisted that
Kindred
should be read as a “grim fantasy,” not as science fiction, since there is “absolutely no science in it.” She has also remarked that such generic labels are often more useful as marketing categories than as reading protocols.
⁴
Like Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
or Anna Kavan’s
Ice
, Butler’s novel is an experiment that resists easy classification, and like other neo-slave narratives it blurs the usual boundaries of genre.

II

When she enrolled in a summer workshop for novice science-fiction writers in 1970 at the age of twenty-three, Octavia Estelle Butler took a decisive step toward satisfying an ambition she had cherished since she was ten. An only child whose father died when she was a baby, Butler was aware very early of women struggling to survive. Her maternal grandmother told stories of unrelenting labor in the canefields of Louisiana while raising seven children. Her mother, Octavia M. Butler, had been working since the age of ten and spent all her adult life earning a living as a housemaid. As the author told Veronica Mixon in an interview just before
Kindred
appeared, the experiences of the women in her family influenced her youthful reading and her earliest efforts at writing: “Their lives seemed so terrible to me at times—so devoid of joy or reward. I needed my fantasies to shield me from their world.”
⁵
The powerful imaginative impulse that produced
Kindred
had its first test runs in the escapist fantasies of a child who needed to find or invent alternative realties. By temperament and by virtue of her strict Baptist upbringing, Butler was reclusive; imaginary worlds solaced her against the pinched rewards of the actual world, and books took the place of friends. From the age of six the public library became her second home and writing became her “positive obsession.”
⁶

Kindred
, however, is anything but an escapist fantasy. If as a girl Butler needed to put some distance between herself and the soul-shrinking realities of her mother’s life, she nevertheless always had her eyes open. What she saw as a child she later confronted and reshaped as a novelist. When her mother couldn’t find or afford a babysitter, young Octavia was often taken along to work. Even then she observed the long arm of slavery: the degree to which her mother operated in white society as an invisible woman and, alarmingly, the degree to which she accepted and internalized her status. “I used to see her going in back doors, being talked about while she was standing right there and basically being treated like a non-person, something beneath notice…. And I could see her later as I grew up. I could see her absorbing more of what she was hearing from the whites than I think even she would have wanted to absorb.” At the time she blamed her mother’s employers less than her mother for allowing herself to be demeaned.
⁷

Some of these childhood memories infiltrated the fiction she produced in her maturity; certainly they shaped her purpose in
Kindred
in imagining the privations of earlier generations of black Americans who were in danger of being forgotten by the black middle class as well as ignored by white Americans. While a student at Pasadena City College, Butler heard a bright male classmate carrying on about being held back by his parents and wanting to kill off the older generations of African Americans. He knew a lot about black history “but he didn’t feel it in his gut,” she thought. It brought back to her mind her own earlier anger over her mother’s cultivated deafness to the insults of her employers. At that moment, she later said, the idea for
Kindred
came to her.
⁸
Butler’s effort to recover something of the experiences of the nineteenth-century ancestors of those who, like herself and her college classmate, had come of age during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements was an homage both to those women in her family who still struggled for an identity and to those more distant relations whose identities had been lost. “So many relatives that I had never known, would never know” (p. 28), Dana muses sadly early on in
Kindred
as she thinks of the bare names inked in her family Bible.

Although Dana’s experiences when she is hurled into the midst of slave society are full of terror and pain, they also illuminate her past and fresh-en her understanding of those generations forced to be non-persons. One of the protagonist’s—and Butler’s—achievements in traveling to the past is to see individual slaves as people rather than as encrusted literary or sociological types. Perhaps most impressive is Sarah the cook, the stereotypical “mammy” of books and films, whose apparent acceptance of humiliation, Dana comes to understand, masks a deep anger over the master’s sale of nearly all her children: “She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter” (p. 145). Here we see literary fantasy in the service of the recovery of historical and psychological realities. As fictional memoir,
Kindred
is Butler’s contribution to the literature of memory every bit as much as it is an exercise in the fantastic imagination.

The artfulness of
Kindred
is the product of a single-minded and largely isolated literary apprenticeship. In her younger years Butler lived for her trips to the library, but her family paid little attention to what she read. Her teachers were unreceptive to the science-fiction stories she occasionally submitted in English classes. Her schoolmates also found her tastes in reading and writing strange and, increasingly, Butler kept her literary interests to herself. In adolescence she immersed herself in the science-fictional worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brackett, and Ray Bradbury, and the absence of black women writers from the genre did not deter her own ambitions: “Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”
⁹

In the 1940s and 1950s no black writers and almost no women were visibly publishing science fiction. Not surprisingly, few black readers — and, we can assume, very few black girls—found much to interest them in the science fiction of the period, geared as it was toward white adolescent boys. Some of it was provocatively racist, including Robert Heinlein’s
The Sixth Column
(1949), whose heroic protagonist in a future race war was unsubtly named Whitey. The highest honor available for a character of color in such novels was sacrificing his life for his white comrades, as do an Asian soldier named Franklin Roosevelt Matsui in
The Sixth Column
and the one black character in Leigh Brackett’s story “The Vanishing Venusians” (1944). Other books tried resolutely to be “colorblind,” imagining a future in which race no longer was a factor; novels like Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s End
(1953) embodied the white liberal fantasy of a single black character functioning amiably and unselfconsciously in a predominantly white society.

A diligent reader in the 1950s, searching for science-fiction novels with something more than a patronizing image of black assimilation on white terms, could have turned up only a few texts in which race was acknowledged and allowed to shape the novel’s thematic and ideological concerns.
¹⁰
Perhaps the most interesting example is a chapter in a book that Butler read in her youth, Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles
(1950). Titled “Way in the Middle of the Air,” it is the story of a mass emigration of black Southerners to Mars in the year 2003. The Southern economy and the cultural assumptions of white supremacy are devastated when the entire black populace unites to ensure that all members of the community can pay their debts and arrive at the rocket base in time for the great exodus. Barefoot white boys report in astonishment this unanticipated strategy for a black utopia: “Them that has helps them that hasn’t! And that way they
all
get free!” In a speech that ironically skewers the myth of progress in African-American history, one petulant white man complains:

I can’t figure why they left now. With things lookin’ up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here’s the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin’ anti-lynchin’ bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go.
¹¹

“Way in the Middle of the Air” may be the single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science fiction by a white author. But its very rarity demonstrates how alien the territory of American science fiction in its so-called golden age, after the second world war, was for black readers and for aspiring writers like Octavia Butler. She has often observed, in response to questions about her nearly unique status as an African-American woman writing science fiction, that you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.