Butler, Octavia - Kindred

READER’S GUIDE 275

ing 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 aes- thetic 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 fea- tures 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.

The most problematic white man in Kindred is not the Maryland slave owner but the liberated, modern Californian married to Dana. Kevin Franklin is a good man. He loves Dana, loathes the chattel system that governs every feature of antebellum life in Maryland, and works with the Underground Railroad while he is trapped in the past. Yet he is by gender and race implicated in the supremacist culture. Throughout the novel But- ler ingeniously suggests parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin: their facial expressions, their language, even after a time their

276

READER’S GUIDE

accents merge in Dana’s mind so that she mistakes one for the other. “I gave her that husband to complicate her life,” Butler has commented, mis- chievously.16 One of the novel’s subtlest touches is in the chapter in which Dana is obliged to become Rufus Weylin’s secretary and handle his cor- respondence and bills; in 1976 Kevin had, unsuccessfully but still reveal- ingly, tried to get his wife to type his manuscripts and write his letters for him. When Kevin and Dana are in nineteenth-century Maryland at the same time, the only way they can spend a night together is to make a pub- lic pretense of being master and slave, playing along with the prevailing belief that a black woman was the sexual property of a white man. But, as Dana realizes, the more often one plays such a role, the nearer the pre- tending comes to reality: “I felt almost as though I really was doing some- thing shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed” (p. 97). And, she fears, Kevin begins to fit into the white, male, Southern routine too easily. Shut- tling between the two white men in her life, she is aware not only of the blood link between herself and Rufus but of the double link of gender and race that unites Rufus and Kevin. The convergence of these two white men in Dana’s life not only dramatizes the ease with which even a “progressive” white man falls into the cultural pattern of dominance, but it suggests as well an uncanny synonymy of the words “husband” and “master.”17

The date of Dana’s final return to Los Angeles is July 4, 1976, the bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. In bringing the novel full circle from the protagonist’s birthday to the nation’s birthday, Butler deftly connects individual consciousness with social history and invites readers to meditate on the relationships between personal and political identities. What has been trivialized or sentimentalized—or erased—in the public celebrations of the past reemerges unvarnished in Dana’s homecoming on the fourth of July. Dana comes back to southern California with a truer understanding of African-American history than the sanitized versions offered by the popular media. Predictably, she scorns the image of the plantation derived from Gone with the Wind , but she also learns the inadequacy of even the best books as preparation for the firsthand experience of slavery. In her first trips to the past, Dana’s literacy, her education, and her historical knowledge sometimes lull her into a false sense of security. In one pas- sage, she records her pleasure in the friendly atmosphere of the cookhouse where the slaves gather to eat and talk, usually free from white overseers.

READER’S GUIDE 277

There she observes “a girl and boy, sitting on the floor eating with their fingers. I was glad to see them there because I’d read about kids their age being rounded up and fed from troughs like pigs. Not everywhere, appar- ently, not here” (p. 72). Although she does not name her literary source, Dana is recalling an episode from chapter 5 of Frederick Douglass’s 1845

Narrative (a work Butler read carefully during her research for Kindred )

that describes feeding time at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation:

Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons.18

Mistakenly, because the food and the treatment of children are better than Douglass’s Narrative seemed to promise, Dana behaves as if the cook- house is a sanctuary. That error in judgment leads to her first vicious flog- ging, when she is discovered teaching slave children to read. After her second whipping by Rufus Weylin’s father following her attempted flight from the plantation, she reflects angrily as another slave woman salves her wounds, “Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape” (p. 177). Books had not taught her why so many slaves accepted their condition, nor had books defined the kind of bravery pos- sible in the humiliating situation of being owned.

Films, Dana finds, are even less reliable guides to the past. Hollywood production values and the comfort of a theater seat insulate viewers from material purported to be historically accurate. Dana recalls witnessing the beating of a slave hunted out one night by white patrollers and how she crouched in the underbrush a few yards away from the man’s young daughter. The slave’s crime was being found in bed with his own free- born wife without having written permission from his owner:

I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the rope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop!