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KINDRED
Other Volumes in the Black Women Writers Series
Series Editor: Deborah E. McDowell
Marita Bonner/Frye Street and Environs
Octavia E. Butler/Kindred
Alice Childress/Lzfce One of the Family
Frances E. W. Harper//o/a Leroy
Gayl lones/Corregidora; Eva’s Man
Ann Petry/The Narrows; The Street
Carlene Hatcher Polite/77ze Flagellants
KINDRED
Octavia E. Butler
With an Introduction by Robert Crossley
Beacon Press Boston
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1979 by Octavia E. Butler
Introduction © 1988 by Beacon Press
First published as a Beacon paperback in 1988
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butler, Octavia E.
Kindred.
(Black women writers series)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3552.U827K5 1988 813′.54 87-47879
ISBN 0-8070-8305-4
To Victoria Rose,
friend and goad
Contents
INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT CROSSLEY ix
PROLOGUE 9
THE RIVER 12
THE FIRE 18
THE FALL 52
THE FIGHT 108
THE STORM 189
THE ROPE 240
EPILOGUE 262
Introduction
Robert Crossley
What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861
I
The American slave narrative is a literary form whose historical bound¬
aries are firmly marked. While first-person narratives about oppression
and exclusion will persist as long as racism persists, slave narratives
ceased to be written when the last American citizen who had lived under
institutionalized slavery died. The only way in which a new slave-memoir
could be written is if someone were able to travel into the past, become
a slave, and return to tell the story. Because the laws of physics, such
as we know them, preclude traveling backwards in time, such a book
would have to be a hybrid of autobiographical narrative and scientific
fantasy. That is exactly the sort of book Octavia Butler imagined when
she wrote Kindred, first published in 1979. Like all good works of fiction,
it lies like the truth.
Kindred begins and ends in mystery. On June 9, 1976, her twenty-
sixth birthday, Edana, a black woman moving with her white husband
Kevin Franklin to a new house in a Los Angeles suburb, is overcome by
nausea while unpacking cartons. Abruptly she finds herself kneeling on
a riverbank; hearing a child’s screams, she runs into the river to save
him, applies artificial respiration, and as the boy begins breathing again
she looks up into a rifle barrel. Again she sickens and is once more in
her new house, but now she is soaked and covered in mud. This is the
first of several such episodes of varying duration which make up the bulk
of the novel. Sometimes Dana (the shortened form of her name she
X INTRODUCTION
prefers) is transported alone, sometimes with Kevin; but the dizzy spells
that immediately precede her movements occur without warning and she
can induce her return to Los Angeles only at the hazard of her life. To
her horror Dana discovers during a second and longer episode of dis¬
orientation that she is moving not simply through space but through time
as well—to antebellum Maryland, to the plantation of a slaveowner who
is her own distant (though not nearly distant enough) ancestor. These
trips, 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 on the Maryland plantation, observing and suffering
the backbreaking field work, persistent verbal abuse, whippings, and
other daily cruelties of enslavement. Eventually Dana realizes that Rufus
Weylin, the child she first rescues from drowning, periodically “calls”
her from the twentieth century whenever his life is in danger. As he
grows older he becomes more repugnant and brutal, but she must try to
keep him alive until he and a slave woman named Alice Greenwood
conceive a child, to be named Hagar, who will initiate Dana’s own family
line. Only at Weylin’s death does Dana return permanently to 1976.
But she returns mutilated. The narrative comes full circle to the book’s
strange and disturbing opening paragraph: “I lost an arm on my last trip
home. My left arm.” Although the novel illuminates the paradoxes of
Dana’s homecoming—the degree to which her comfortable house in 1976
and the Weylin plantation are both inescapably “home” to her—Butler
is silent on the mechanics of time travel. We know that Dana’s arm is
amputated in the jaws of the past, that time is revealed to be damaging
as well as healing, that historical understanding of human crimes is never
easy and always achieved at the price of suffering, that Dana’s murderous
relative, like Hamlet’s, is “more than kin and less than kind.” The loss
of her arm becomes in fact, as Ruth Salvaggio has suggested, “a kind
of birthmark,” the emblem of Dana’s “disfigured heritage.”1 The sym¬
bolic meanings Kindred yields are powerful and readily articulable. The
literal truth is harder to state. 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 psychohistorical force,
not a feat of engineering, motivates Butler’s plot. How Dana travels in
time and how she loses her arm are problems of physics irrelevant to
Butler’s aims. In that respect Kindred reads less like Wellsian science
INTRODUCTION xi
fiction than like 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.
Perhaps Butler deliberately sacrificed the neat closure that a scientific—
or even pseudo-scientific—explanation of telekinesis and chronoportation
would have given her novel. Leaving the novel’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 comforted by a tale
that “makes sense.” Certainly, Butler did not need to show off a tech¬
nological marvel of the sort Wells provided to mark his traveler’s path
through time; the only time machine in Kindred is present by implication:
it is the vehicle that looms behind every American slave narrative, the
grim death-ship of 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, involuntary 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 institu¬
tional slavery’s auction block.
In many ways Kindred departs from Octavia Butler’s characteristic
kind of fiction. Most of her work, from her first novel Patternmaster
,(1975) through Clay’s Ark (1984), has been situated in the future, often
a damaged future, and has focused on power relationships between “nor¬
mal” human beings- {Homo sapiens) and human mutants, gifted with
extraordinary mental power, who might generically be named Homo
superior. More recently, in her prize-winning story “Bloodchild” (1984)
and her novel Dawn (1987), Butler has shifted her attention to the intricate
web of power and affection in the relationships between human beings
and alien species. In all her science fiction she has produced fables that
speak directly or indirectly to issues of cultural difference, whether sex¬
ual, racial, political, economic, or psychological. Kindred shares with
Butler’s other works an ideological interest in exploring relationships
between the empowered and the powerless, but except for Wild Seed
(1980), Kindred is her only novel situated in the past. And even Wild
Seed—set in seventeenth-century Africa, colonial New England, and
antebellum Louisiana—is strongly mythical in flavor and is populated by
some of the same long-lived, psychically advanced characters who appear
in her futuristic novels. Kindred is technically a much sparer story; the
psychic power that draws the central character back in time to the era of
slavery remains in the novel’s background, and the autobiographical voice
XU INTRODUCTION
of the modem descendant of, witness to, victim of American slavery is
foregrounded. Moreover, apart from the single fantastic premise of in¬
stantaneous movement through time and space, Kindred is consistently
realistic in presentation and depends on the author’s reading of authentic
slave narratives and her visits to the Talbot County, Maryland, sites of
the novel. Butler herself, when interviewed by Black Scholar, denied
that Kindred is science fiction since there is “absolutely no science in
it.’’2
The term “science fiction” is, however, notoriously resistant to def¬
inition and is popularly used to designate a wide range of imaginative
literature inspired and patterned by the natural sciences (chemistry, phys¬
ics, geology, astronomy, biology), by such social sciences as anthro¬
pology, sociology, and psychology, and by pseudo-sciences like
parapsychology and Scientology.3 The proportion of science-fictional
texts based on scrupulously applied scientific principles rather than on
faulty science, pseudo-science, or wishful science is probably quite small.
If, for instance, all the narratives and films premised on “starships” and
the fantastic notion of faster-than-light travel were denied the title of
“science fiction,” the canon would shrink dramatically. By the most
conservative of definitions—those which emphasize the natural sciences,
rigorously applied to fictional invention—Kindred is not science fiction.
Butler’s own preferred designation of Kindred as “a grim fantasy” is a
more precise indicator of its literary form and its emotional tenor. The
exact generic label we assign Kindred may be, however, the least im¬
portant thing about it. Like Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Anna Kavan’s
Ice, Butler’s novel is an experiment that resists easy classification by
blurring the usual boundaries of genre. Inevitably, readers will wonder
what provoked the author to adapt the form of a fantastic travelogue to
a restoration of the genre of slave-memoir.
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 twelve. An only child whose father died when she was a baby, Butler
was aware very early of women struggling to survive. Her maternal
grandmother had stories to tell about long hours of work in the canefields
of Louisiana while raising seven children. Her mother, Octavia M. Butler,
INTRODUCTION xiii
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 inter¬
view 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.”4 The
powerful imaginative impulse that produced Kindred had its origin in the
escapist fantasies of a child who needed to find or invent alternative
realities. By temperament and by virtue of the strict Baptist upbringing
her mother enforced, Butler was reclusive; imaginary worlds solaced her
for the pinched rewards of the actual world, and books took the place of
friends.
Kindred, however, is not an escapist fantasy. If as a girl Butler needed
to distance herself from the grimness 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, as she told the
interviewer from Black Scholar. Even then she observed the long arm
of slavery: the degree to which her mother operated in white society as
an invisible woman and, worse, 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.”5
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. Butler’s effort to recover something of the expe¬
rience of the nineteenth-century ancestors of those who, like herself,
grew up in the heady days of the 1960s civil rights movement was a
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), the contemporary black woman from California 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 freshen
XIV INTRODUCTION
her understanding of those generations forced to be nonpersons. 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 ste¬
reotypical “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 fright¬
ened 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’s relatives
paid little attention to what she read, as long as it wasn’t obscene. Her
teachers were baffled by and unreceptive to the science fiction stories she
occasionally submitted in English classes. Her schoolmates simply
thought her tastes in reading and writing strange, and increasingly Butler
kept her literary interests to herself. In her adolescence she immersed
herself in the science-fictional worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brack¬
ett, 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.”6
In the 1940s and 1950s no black writers and almost no women were
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 tribute paid to a character of
color in such novels was for the author to have him sacrifice his life for
his white comrades, as an Asian soldier named Franklin Roosevelt Matsui
does in The Sixth Column, as does 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
INTRODUCTION xv
was a factor; such novels often embodied the white liberal fantasy of a
single black character functioning amiably in a predominantly white so¬
ciety. Jan Rodricks, the last survivor on earth in Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s End (1953), is a representative instance of the black character
whose blackness supposedly doesn’t matter; but the novel’s one overt
comment on race is a flippant allusion to a future reversal of South African
apartheid in which whites are the victims of black discrimination—the
stereotypical white conservative fantasy.
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 black
characters’ blackness was acknowledged and allowed to shape the novel’s
thematic and ideological concerns.7 Perhaps the most interesting example
is a chapter in a book that Butler read in her youth, Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles (1950). Titled “Way in the Middle of the Air,” the
chapter describes 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 the history of black Amer¬
ica, 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.8
“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.
Butler’s formative years and her early career coincide with the years
when American science fiction took down the “males only” sign over
the entrance. Major expansions and redefinitions of the genre have been
accomplished by such writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Pamela
Sargent, Alice Sheldon (writing under the pseudonym of James Tiptree,
Jr.), Pamela Zoline, Marge Piercy, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Butler
XVI INTRODUCTION
herself. The alien in many of the new fictions by women has been not a
monstrous figure from a distant planet but the invisible alien within
modem, familiar, human society: the woman as alien, sometimes more
specifically, the black woman, or the Chicana, or the housewife, or the
lesbian, or the woman in poverty, or the unmarried woman. Sheldon’s
famous story “The Women Men Don’t See’’ (1974), about a mother and
daughter who embark on a ship with extraterrestrials rather than remain
unnoticed and unvalued on earth, is a touchstone for the reconception of
the old science-fictional motifs of estrangement and alienation. In a writ¬
ers’ forum Butler has commented on the paradoxical poverty of imagi¬
nation in science-fictional representations of the human image: ‘‘Science
fiction has long treated people who might or might not exist—extrater¬
restrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science fiction writ¬
ers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life
did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.”9 As
American women writers have abandoned the character types that pre¬
dominated in science fiction for a richer plurality of human images, they
have collectively written a new chapter in the genre’s history.10
But the dramatic numbers of women writers subverting and transform¬
ing the conventions, stereotypes, and thematic issues of science fiction
have not been matched by an influx of black writers of similar proportions.
Samuel R. Delany, the first and most prolific black American writer to
publish science fiction, beginning in 1962 with The Jewels ofAptor, has
specialized in stylish and complexly structured fictions more closely tied
to European literary theory than to black experiences. Another of the
handful of black North Americans writing in the allied genres of science
fiction and heroic fantasy is Charles Saunders, a Pennsylvanian trans¬
planted to Canada. Saunders’s most distinctive literary innovation has
been his effort to write fantasies set in Africa and based on historical
research into precolonial cultures and myths. His hero Imaro appears in
several novels and is meant to replace the Tarzan-image of the white
noble savage with an authentic African hero; he has also produced some
engaging short stories centered on a woman warrior of Dahomey named
Dossouye.11 Most recently Jewelle Gomez has begun publishing a loosely
connected set of fantasies about an escaped slave from 1850 who becomes
a vampire and extends her life over the next several centuries; the character
functions, according to Gomez, as “a super heroic black woman who
interprets our lives through a phenomenal perspective.”12
In an essay called ‘‘Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction,” Saun¬
ders proposes that black writers of science fiction and fantasy remain few
INTRODUCTION XVII
because the black readership has grown little since the 1950s. New readers
of science fiction, he suggests, frequently come to the fiction by way of
the nonprint media, and science fiction television and cinema remain
overwhelmingly white and uninviting to young black audiences. Fur¬
thermore, black readers
who share the common demographic characteristics of white science fiction
readers (i.e., young, educated, middle-class) tend to be more interested in
political and sociological works along with the fiction of black writers like
James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. To them, science fiction and fantasy may
well seem irrelevant to their main concerns.13
Saunders concludes that, despite his own interests in African-based heroic
fantasy, the prospects for black science fiction are dim. While welcoming
the enlargement of the genre’s racial horizons—and he singles out Butler’s
early fiction as the chief instance of a black presence in science fiction—
he fears that a specifically black science fiction will share the fate of so-
called blaxpoitation movies of the 1970s and be justifiably short-lived.
Ill
Perhaps Saunders would have been more sanguine about the possibility
of serious black science fiction if Kindred had been available when he
wrote his essay. If any contemporary writer is likely to redraw science
fiction’s cultural boundaries and to attract new black readers—and per¬
haps writers—to this most distinctive of twentieth-century genres, it is
Octavia Butler. More consistently than any other black author, she has
deployed the genre’s conventions to tell stories with a political and so¬
ciological edge to them, stories that speak to issues, feelings, and his¬
torical truths arising out of Afro-American experience. In centering her
fiction on women who lack power, suffer abuse, and are committed to
claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly
when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a “feminist
didactic,” in Beverly Friend’s term,14 but she has generated her fiction
out of a black feminist aesthetic. Her novels pointedly expose various
chauvinisms (sexual, racial, and cultural), are enriched by a historical
consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real
past and in imaginary pasts and futures, and enact struggles for personal
freedom and cultural pluralism.
At the same time, Butler has been eager to avoid turning her fiction
into polemic. Science fiction is a richly metaphorical literature. Just as
INTRODUCTION xviii
Mary Shelley in Frankenstein invented a monstrous child bom from a
male scientist’s imagination as a metaphor for the exclusion 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 England, so Butler has
specialized in metaphors that dramatize the tyranny of one species or race
or gender over another.15 But her work does not read like fiction composed
by agenda. White writers, she has pointed out, tend 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 most science
fiction are represented as “other.”16 All her fiction stands in quiet re¬
sistance 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. Events and
lives are usually in crisis in her books, but she celebrates racial difference.
While Butler’s frequent use of black women as protagonists has often
been noticed, it is also important that there are always numbers of char¬
acters of color in her novels. There is enough of a critical mass of racial
and sexual and cultural diversity in any Butler novel to make reading it
different from the experience of reading the work of almost any other
practicing science fiction writer. One of the exciting features of Kindred
is that so much of the novel is attentive not to the exceptional situation
of an isolated modern black woman in a white household under slavery
but to her complex social and psychological relationships with the com¬
munity of black 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 down the 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
…
