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 charac
ter 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.
Butler’s formative years and her early career coincide with the years when American science fiction took down the “males only” sign over the door. 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, Joan Slonczewski, and Butler herself. The alien in much of the fiction by women has been not a monstrous figure from a distant planet but the invisible alien within modern, familiar, human society: the woman as alien, sometimes—more specifically—the black woman, the Chicana, the housewife, the lesbian, 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 representations of the human image. “Science fiction,” Butler writes, “has long treated people who might or might not exist—extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.”12 As American women writers have abandoned the character types that predominated in science fiction for a richer plurality of human images, they have collectively written a new chapter in the genre’s history.
During the course of Butler’s career a parallel, although slender, chapter began to be written by African-American writers. When Kindred was first published in 1979, the only recognized African-American writer of science fiction and fantasy was Samuel R. Delany. As Kindred celebrates its silver anniversary the landscape is visibly changing. Steven Barnes, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Charles R. Saunders, and Tananarive Due have joined Delany and Butler. And the publication of Sheree Thomas’s important anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) has showcased many contemporary black writers of nonrealist fiction while excavating a few surprises from the past, like W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 story “The Comet.” In the years since 1979 Butler has emerged as the commanding figure among African-American writers of science fiction and fantasy, having become the first (and so far only) science-fiction writer to win a prestigious five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Since the first Beacon edition of Kindred in 1988 there has been an explosion of critical interest in Butler. In 1988 it was possible to list nearly every critical article that had been published on her work, and most of that small body of material was published in obscure journals with tiny circulations. Today the list of works about Butler must be more selective, and the critical studies appear from major university and trade presses and in the premier journals of contemporary literature, African-American studies, and science-fiction studies. And the interest is not just academic, nor is it confined to science-fiction fans. In the spring of 2003 the city of Rochester, New York undertook its third annual event titled “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book.” An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people read Kindred, discussed it in local reading groups, and for three days had a chance to meet Butler and talk with her about the book at her numerous appearances at universities, libraries, and bookstores.
III
In 1980 Charles Saunders, himself the author of African-based heroic and mythic fantasies, wrote a lament titled “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction.” Twenty years later he published a more sanguine sequel in the Dark Matter anthology: “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction.” If any contemporary writer is responsible for Saunders’s change of heart, it is Octavia Butler. She has redrawn science fiction’s cultural boundaries and attracted new black readers—and potential writers—to this most distinctive of twentieth-century genres. More consistently than any other African-American author, she has deployed the genre’s conventions to tell stories with a political and sociological edge to them, stories that speak to issues, feelings, and historical truths arising out of African-American experience. In centering her fiction on women who lack power and suffer abuse but 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 terminology, 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 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 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. 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 Kindred 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 Kindred, 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 moving 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 aesthetic 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 features 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.