Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Please, Master,” the man begged. “For Godsake, Master, please …” I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge to vomit.

I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too- red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them plead- ing and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. ( p. 36)

At such moments of first-person intensity, Kindred reveals its own liter-

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ary kinship with the memoirs of ex-slaves published in the nineteenth cen- tury, for Butler’s greatest achievement in the novel is collapsing the gen- res of the fantastic travelogue and the slave narrative. She incorporates into Kindred both narrative strategies of the classic memoirs of former slaves and occasional deliberate verbal and situational echoes of those texts. In doing so she establishes a degree of authenticity and seriousness rarely attained by contemporary writers mining the conventions of the Wellsian time-travel story.

Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel V. Carby’s feminist revision of the traditions of American black women’s writing, contrasts the image of the slave woman as victim in men’s slave memoirs with a very different image that emerges in such autobiographies as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Lucy Delany’s From the Darkness Cometh Light, and Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. In those narratives, Carby argues, women define themselves as agents rather than as mere victims, and they record the brutality of their treatment by their owners in order to emphasize their resistance to victimization and their claim to freedom. Dana, Butler’s fictive autobiographer, extends that ideology and aesthetic of the slave woman’s memoir into the late- twentieth century. Much of Kindred is a record of endurance, but there are also numerous acts of heroism and humanity, culminating in the act of manslaughter in self-defense that finally liberates Dana, at terrible cost, from her tyrannical ancestor.19

Chained to her ancestral past by the genealogical link that requires her to keep the oppressive slave master alive until her own family is initiated, Dana works out the ethic of compromise that Harriet Jacobs tolerated to safeguard her children and herself. Despite her feelings of repugnance and shame, Jacobs compromised the sexual standards imposed on nineteenth- century women in order to maintain her central core of integrity and free- dom of will; she reluctantly practiced a situational ethics dictated by the extreme circumstances that constrained the ethical choices of black women under slavery. As several commentators on Jacobs’s memoir have argued, the crucial sentence around which our understanding of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl must be fashioned is her retrospective revision of the ethical norms that govern a woman’s choices and behaviors under systematic oppression: “Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”20 Butler’s Dana must move painfully toward a simi- lar ethical relativism as she discovers that the moral choices of a late-

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twentieth-century black feminist cannot be exercised with impunity in the world of the slave state. At earlier stages in her experience in Maryland, as Dana tells Kevin, she is able to cling precariously to the ethical imper- atives of her own time, though even then her perspective and choices must necessarily be fundamentally different from his:

You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer…. I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then … I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. ( p. 101)

The longer she remains in the nineteenth century, the thinner the pro- tective cushioning becomes, until Dana finds herself five years later (in Maryland time) divided against herself, torn between absolute standards and pragmatic choices. The Dana of 1976 California finds it unthinkable that she would assist in the sexual exploitation of another black woman by a white man, but the Dana of 1824 Maryland finds herself in a moral trap. Rufus Weylin asks her to persuade Alice Greenwood, her own great- great-grandmother, to go to bed with him. Although she knows that her family tree is traceable to a child that Rufus fathers and Alice bears, Dana initially finds Rufus’s proposal repulsive, and she angrily rejects it. But when Rufus tells Dana that he will beat Alice—perhaps even beat her to death—if she refuses his advances and if Dana does not try to change Alice’s mind, she is caught in Harriet Jacobs’s dilemma: “He had all the low cunning of his class. No, I couldn’t refuse to help the girl—help her avoid at least some pain. But she wouldn’t think much of me for helping her this way. I didn’t think much of myself ” (p. 164). The choice demanded by the situation will satisfy neither Dana’s own internal stan- dards nor the larger feminist principle of sisterhood; she suffers the same shame that Jacobs felt, but she also adopts the compromise.

In the end, what may be most powerful and valuable for readers of Kin- dred is the simple reminder that all that history occurred not so very long ago. In foreshortening the distance between then and now, Butler focuses our attention on the continuity between past and present; the fantasy of traveling backwards in time becomes a lesson in historical realities. We may also be reminded that historical progress is never a sure thing. In one of her brief respites in 1976 between bouts of enslavement in the nine- teenth century, Dana reads the memoirs of Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps: “Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in

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only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hun- dred” (pp. 116-7). The systematic horrors of American slavery could have provided a model for that later programmed oppression and genocide.

Like Dana and Kevin, the reader of Kindred may discover a closer kin- ship with the characters and events of the antebellum South than we often care to admit. And just as Dana feels compelled in the novel’s epilogue to travel to contemporary Maryland and “touch solid evidence that those people existed” (p. 264), readers of this fantastic invention may also find their felt understanding of history enriched and deepened. In Kindred Octavia Butler has designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader.

—May 2003

1. Kenan, 498.

2. Salvaggio in Barr, et al., 33.

Notes

3. Rushdy’s “Families of Orphans” comments astutely on the concept of home in Kindred ; the chapter on Kindred in his later book, Remembering Generations , makes an extensive analysis of family as a social construct. For the most compre- hensive discussions of Kindred and history see Govan’s “Homage to Tradition,” Levecq’s “Power and Repetition,” and Kubitschek’s chapter in Claiming the Heritage .

4. Beal, 14; Kenan, 495; Potts, 336–37. Not all her critics have been willing to accept Butler’s disclaimer, and some have seen genetics and sociobiology, not physics, as the sciences underlying Kindred . See the essays by Elyce Rae Helford and Nancy Jesser.