Butler, Octavia - Kindred

READER’S GUIDE 269

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 pro- tocols.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 writ- ers in 1970 at the age of twenty-three, Octavia Estelle Butler took a deci- sive 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 grand- mother 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 imag- inative 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 “pos- itive obsession.”6

Kindred, however, is anything but an escapist fantasy. If as a girl But- ler 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 novel- ist. 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

270

READER’S GUIDE

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 her- self 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 imagin- ing 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 ances- tors 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 rel- atives 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 stereo- typical “mammy” of books and films, whose apparent acceptance of humiliation, Dana comes to understand, masks a deep anger over the mas- ter’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

READER’S GUIDE 271

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 com- rades, 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 acknowl- edged and allowed to shape the novel’s thematic and ideological con- cerns.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