Butler, Octavia - Kindred

"Octavia Butler sa writer who will be with us for a long, lo time, and Kindred is that rare magical artif. ... the no,·el one returns to, again and again." - H A R LAE LLI SO

KINDRED

KINDRED

Octavia E. Butler

BEACON PRESS BOSTON

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 02108 www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

© 1979 by Octavia E. Butler

Reader’s Guide © 2003 by Beacon Press

First published as a hardcover by Doubleday in 1979

First published as a Beacon paperback in 1988

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

13 12 11 10 09 14 13 12 11 10

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper

ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Butler, Octavia E.

Kindred / Octavia E. Butler ; with an afterword by Robert Crossley. p. cm. — (Black women writers series)

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8070-8369-7 (alk. paper)

1. African American women—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)— Fiction. 3. Southern States—Fiction. 4. Slaveholders—Fiction. 5. Time travel—Fiction. 6. Slavery—Fiction. 7. Slaves—Fiction. I. Title.

II. Series.

PS3552.U827K5 2004

813'.54—dc22

2003062862

To Victoria Rose, friend and goad

Contents

PROLOGUE 9

THE RIVER 12

THE FIRE 18

THE FALL 52

THE FIGHT 108

THE STORM 189

THE ROPE 240

EPILOGUE 262

READER’S GUIDE 265

Critical Essay 265

Discussion Questions 285

Prologue

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.

And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and secu- rity I had not valued until it was gone. When the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and stayed with me so that I would know I hadn’t lost him too.

But before he could come to me, I had to convince the police that he did not belong in jail. That took time. The police were shadows who appeared intermittently at my bedside to ask me questions I had to strug- gle to understand.

“How did you hurt your arm?” they asked. “Who hurt you?” My atten- tion was captured by the word they used: Hurt. As though I’d scratched my arm. Didn’t they think I knew it was gone?

“Accident,” I heard myself whisper. “It was an accident.”

They began asking me about Kevin. Their words seemed to blur together at first, and I paid little attention. After a while, though, I replayed them and suddenly realized that these men were trying to blame Kevin for “hurting” my arm.

“No.” I shook my head weakly against the pillow. “Not Kevin. Is he here? Can I see him?”

“Who then?” they persisted.

I tried to think through the drugs, through the distant pain, but there was no honest explanation I could give them—none they would believe. “An accident,” I repeated. “My fault, not Kevin’s. Please let me see

him.”

10 PROLOGUE

I said this over and over until the vague police shapes let me alone,

until I awoke to find Kevin sitting, dozing beside my bed. I wondered briefly how long he had been there, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he was there. I slept again, relieved.

Finally, I awoke feeling able to talk to him coherently and understand what he said. I was almost comfortable except for the strange throbbing of my arm. Of where my arm had been. I moved my head, tried to look at the empty place … the stump.

Then Kevin was standing over me, his hands on my face turning my head toward him.

He didn’t say anything. After a moment, he sat down again, took my hand, and held it.

I felt as though I could have lifted my other hand and touched him. I felt as though I had another hand. I tried again to look, and this time he let me. Somehow, I had to see to be able to accept what I knew was so.

After a moment, I lay back against the pillow and closed my eyes. “Above the elbow,” I said.

“They had to.”

“I know. I’m just trying to get used to it.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. Then I remembered my earlier visitors. “Have I gotten you into trouble?”

“Me?”

“The police were here. They thought you had done this to me.”

“Oh, that. They were sheriff’s deputies. The neighbors called them when you started to scream. They questioned me, detained me for a while—that’s what they call it!—but you convinced them that they might as well let me go.”

“Good. I told them it was an accident. My fault.” “There’s no way a thing like that could be your fault.”

“That’s debatable. But it certainly wasn’t your fault. Are you still in trouble?”

“I don’t think so. They’re sure I did it, but there were no witnesses, and you won’t co-operate. Also, I don’t think they can figure out how I could have hurt you … in the way you were hurt.”

I closed my eyes again remembering the way I had been hurt—

remembering the pain.

“Are you all right?” Kevin asked.

“Yes. Tell me what you told the police.”

PROLOGUE 11

“The truth.” He toyed with my hand for a moment silently. I looked at him, found him watching me.

“If you told those deputies the truth,” I said softly, “you’d still be locked up—in a mental hospital.”

He smiled. “I told as much of the truth as I could. I said I was in the bedroom when I heard you scream. I ran to the living room to see what was wrong, and I found you struggling to free your arm from what seemed to be a hole in the wall. I went to help you. That was when I real- ized your arm wasn’t just stuck, but that, somehow, it had been crushed right into the wall.”

“Not exactly crushed.”

“I know. But that seemed to be a good word to use on them—to show my ignorance. It wasn’t all that inaccurate either. Then they wanted me to tell them how such a thing could happen. I said I didn’t know … kept telling them I didn’t know. And heaven help me, Dana, I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” I whispered. “Neither do I.”

The River

The trouble began long before June 9, 1976, when I became aware of it, but June 9 is the day I remember. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. It was also the day I met Rufus—the day he called me to him for the first time.

Kevin and I had not planned to do anything to celebrate my birthday. We were both too tired for that. On the day before, we had moved from our apartment in Los Angeles to a house of our own a few miles away in Altadena. The moving was celebration enough for me. We were still unpacking—or rather, I was still unpacking. Kevin had stopped when he got his office in order. Now he was closeted there either loafing or think- ing because I didn’t hear his typewriter. Finally, he came out to the living room where I was sorting books into one of the big bookcases. Fiction only. We had so many books, we had to try to keep them in some kind of order.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“Nothing.” He sat down on the floor near where I was working. “Just struggling with my own perversity. You know, I had half-a-dozen ideas for that Christmas story yesterday during the moving.”

“And none now when there’s time to write them down.”

“Not a one.” He picked up a book, opened it, and turned a few pages. I picked up another book and tapped him on the shoulder with it. When he looked up, surprised, I put a stack of nonfiction down in front of him. He stared at it unhappily.