Kindred

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I hesitated, then shook my head. “I wasn’t. I guess in a way, I was defending myself. You see, I know why he wouldn’t make that kind of will. I asked him, and he told me.”

“Why?”

“Because of me. He was afraid I’d kill him afterwards.” “You wouldn’t even have had to know about it!”

“Yes, but I guess he wasn’t taking any chances.” “Was he right … to be afraid?”

“I don’t know.”

“I doubt it, considering what you took from him. I don’t think you were really capable of killing him until he attacked you.”

And barely then, I thought. Kevin would never know what those last moments had been like. I had outlined them for him, and he’d asked few questions. For that I was grateful. Now I said simply, “Self-defense.”

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“Yes,” he said.

EPILOGUE

“But the cost … Nigel’s children, Sarah, all the others …”

“It’s over,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to change any of it now.”

“I know.” I drew a deep breath. “I wonder whether the children were allowed to stay together—maybe stay with Sarah.”

“You’ve looked,” he said. “And you’ve found no records. You’ll prob- ably never know.”

I touched the scar Tom Weylin’s boot had left on my face, touched my empty left sleeve. “I know,” I repeated. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.”

“You probably needed to come for the same reason I did.” He shrugged. “To try to understand. To touch solid evidence that those peo- ple existed. To reassure yourself that you’re sane.”

I looked back at the brick building of the Historical Society, itself a converted early mansion. “If we told anyone else about this, anyone at all, they wouldn’t think we were so sane.”

“We are,” he said. “And now that the boy is dead, we have some chance of staying that way.”

Reader’s Guide

Critical Essay

ROBERT CROSSLEY

University of Massachusetts at Boston

“What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!” Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

I

First-person American slave narratives should have ceased being written when the last American citizen born into institutionalized slavery died. But the literary form has persisted, just as the legacy of slavery has per- sisted, into the present. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of what has been christened the “neo-slave narrative,” a fictional mutation of the autobiographies of nineteenth-century Americans who lived as slaves. Among the many historical novels, often with first-person narrators, that have recreated the era of slavery, some of the best known are Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Mor- rison’s Beloved (1987), and Charles R. Johnson’s Middle Passage (1990). Octavia Butler’s hybrid of memoir and fantasy is a distinctive contribu- tion to the genre of neo-slave narrative. Although Kindred is not itself a work of science fiction, Butler has brought to the creation of this narrative the sensibilities of an author who works largely outside the tradition of realism. When Kindred first appeared in 1979, no one had thought of using the fictional conventions of time travel to transport a modern African American to an antebellum plantation. Time-traveling narratives

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READER’S GUIDE

are always replete with paradoxical questions: If you travel back a century and a half and kill your own great- great-grandfather, can you yourself ever be born? Is it as possible for the future to influence the past as it is for the past to shape the future? But then every good work of fiction is par- adoxical: It lies like the truth.

Kindred begins and ends in mystery. On June 9, 1976, her twenty-sixth birthday, Edana Franklin is overcome by nausea while moving with her white husband, Kevin, into a new house in the Los Angeles suburbs. Abruptly she finds herself kneeling on a riverbank, hears a child scream- ing, runs into the river to save him, performs artificial respiration, and as the boy begins breathing she looks up into a rifle barrel. Again she sick- ens and finds herself back once more in her new house, but soaking wet and covered in mud. She has not hallucinated; she has been transported, physically as well as psychically. This inexplicable, nightmarish transit from one place to another is the first of six such episodes of varying dura- tion that make up the bulk of the novel. Sometimes Dana (the shortened form of her name she prefers) is transported alone, sometimes with Kevin; but the dizzy spells that immediately precede her movements occur with- out warning, and she is returned to Los Angeles only when she believes her life is threatened. The second time this happens, Dana discovers that she is moving not simply through space but into the past as well—to the Maryland plantation of a slave owner who is her own distant ancestor.

Dana’s involuntary trips to the past, like convulsive memories dislocat- ing her in time, occupy only a few minutes or hours of her life in 1976, but her stay in the alternative time is stretched as she lives out an imposed remembrance of things past. Because of this dual time level a brief absence from Los Angeles may result in months spent in the nineteenth century, observing and suffering the backbreaking field work, enduring verbal abuse, whippings, and other daily brutalities of enslavement. Rufus Weylin, the child Dana rescues from drowning on her first trip to her ancestral home, periodically “calls” her from the present, whenever his life is in danger. As he grows older he becomes more repugnant and dan- gerous, but she must try to keep him alive until he and a slave woman named Alice Greenwood conceive a child, Hagar, who will initiate Dana’s own family line. Only upon Weylin’s death can Dana return permanently to 1976, but she comes back without her left arm. This is the shocking premise on which Kindred depends, and the author makes no effort to rationalize it. That is, Butler does not attempt to explain what she describes so graphically at the end of the sixth chapter: How could Dana’s

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arm, from the elbow down, be physically joined to the plaster of her liv- ing room wall? The author is silent on the process by which Dana’s arm is severed in the twilight zone between past and present. Kindred, one could say, is no more rational, no more comfortably explicable than the history of slavery itself. But that is a little too easy. The fiction has a ruth- less logic to its design, and in an interview Butler has stated that the mean- ing of the amputation is clear enough: “I couldn’t really let her come all the way back. I couldn’t let her return to what she was, I couldn’t let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn’t leave people quite whole.”1

Time damages as well as heals, and genuine historical understanding of human crimes is never easy and always achieved at the price of suffering. The loss of Dana’s arm becomes, as Ruth Salvaggio has suggested, “a kind of birthmark,” the emblem of a “disfigured heritage.”2 The symbolic meanings Kindred yields are powerful and readily articulable even if the literal truth is harder to state. It is the paradoxes of kinship, of family, of history, of home that engage Butler’s imagination, not the paradoxes of time travel. In