Kindred
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KINDRED
Other Volumes in the Black Women Writers Series
Series Editor: Deborah E. McDowell
Marita Bonne
Frye Street and Environs
Octavia E. Butle
Kindred
Alice Childress/Lzfce One of the Family
Frances E. W. Harpe
o/a Leroy
Gayl lones/Co
egidora; Eva’s Man
Ann Petry/The Na
ows; 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 pape
ack in 1988
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX
Li
ary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Butler, Octavia E.
Kindred.
(Black women writers series)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3552.U827K XXXXXXXXXX' XXXXXXXXXX
ISBN XXXXXXXXXX
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!
Ha
iet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861
I
The American slave na
ative is a literary form whose historical bound¬
aries are firmly marked. While first-person na
atives about oppression
and exclusion will persist as long as racism persists, slave na
atives
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 hy
id of autobiographical na
ative 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 subu
, is overcome by
nausea while unpacking cartons. A
uptly she finds herself kneeling on
a rive
ank; hearing a child’s screams, she runs into the river to save
him, applies artificial respiration, and as the boy begins
eathing again
she looks up into a rifle ba
el. 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 ho
or 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 remem
ance of things past.
Because of this dual time level a
ief absence from Los Angeles may
esult in months spent on the Maryland plantation, observing and suffering
the back
eaking field work, persistent ve
al 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
utal, 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 na
ative comes full circle to the book’s
strange and distu
ing 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
elative, 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¬
olic meanings Kindred yields are powerful and readily articulable. The
literal truth is harder to state. In The Time Machine XXXXXXXXXXH. 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 i
esistible 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 i
elevant 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 distu
ed
y 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 na
ative, 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
etween 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
ealistic in presentation and depends on the author’s reading of authentic
slave na
atives 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 na
atives 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,
igorously applied to fictional invention—Kindred is not science fiction.
Butler’s own prefe
ed 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¬