particular, the novel has much to say about the paradoxical nature of “home,” that magnet for American sentiment and homilies: “There’s no place like home”; “Home is where the heart is”; “You can’t go home again.” To all of those simplicities Kindred offers a challenge. By the time Dana’s time traveling finally stops and she is restored to her Los Angeles home in 1976, the meaning of a homecoming has become impossibly complicated. Her first act, once her arm has sufficiently healed, is to fly to present-day Maryland; both her California house and the Weylin plantation have become inescapably “home” to her.3
None of this reads like the classic time-travel stories of science fiction. In The Time Machine (1895) H. G. Wells had his traveler display the shiny vehicle on which he rode into the future to verify the strange truth of his journey; in Kindred the method of transport remains a fantastic given. An irresistible psycho-historical force, not a feat of engineering, motivates Butler’s plot. How Dana travels in time is a problem of physics irrelevant to Butler’s aims. Kindred has far less in common with Wellsian science fiction than it has with that classic fable of alienation, Kafka’s Metamor- phosis, whose protagonist simply wakes up one morning as a giant beetle, a fantastic eruption into the normal world. Butler has sacrificed the neat closure that a scientific—or even pseudo-scientific—explanation of time travel would have given her novel. Leaving the book’s ending rough- edged and raw like Dana’s wound, Butler leaves the reader uneasy and
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disturbed by the intersection of story and history rather than reassured by a tale that solves all the mysteries. She did not need to show off a tech- nological marvel of the sort Wells provided to mark his traveler’s path through time; instead, Kindred evokes the terrifying and nauseating voy- age that looms behind every American slave narrative: the Middle Pas- sage from Africa to the slave markets of the New World. In her experience of being kidnapped in time and space, Dana recapitulates the dreadful, disorienting voyage of her ancestors, just as her employment in 1976 through a temporary job agency—“We regulars called it a slave market,” Dana says with grouchy irony (p. 52)—operates as a benign, ghostly ver- sion of institutional slavery’s auction block.
In many ways Kindred, set in a historical past scrupulously researched by the author, departs from Butler’s characteristic kind of fiction. With the exception of Wild Seed (1980), all her other novels, from Patternmaster (1975) through Parable of the Talents (1998), have been situated in the future, often a damaged future, and have focused on power relationships between “normal” human beings and human mutants or extrasolar aliens. But if Kindred has some surface differences from the rest of Butler’s fiction, at its deepest levels it is a central text in her exploration of the webs of power and affection in human relationships, of the ethical imper- ative and the emotional price of empathy, of the difficult struggle to move beyond alienation to connection. In all her fiction she has produced para- bles that speak to issues of cultural difference, whether sexual, racial, political, economic, or psychological, and to issues of mastery and self- mastery. Kindred shares imagery with Butler’s futuristic novels, in partic- ular with Parable of the Talents, whose electronically controlled collars and neurological “lashings” are but science-fictional extrapolations of the plantation owners’ coffles and whippings. In both novels the degradations of slavery are a constant, as is the determination of the victims whose lives are under total control to resist and escape. But Kindred is techni- cally a much sparer story, without the multiple narrative perspectives of the later book, and without any of the conceptual or technological appa- ratus usually associated with science fiction. Apart from its single fantas- tic premise of instantaneous movement through time and space, Kindred is consistently matter-of-fact in presentation and depends on the author’s reading of authentic slave narratives, her assimilation of data from research at libraries and historical societies, the maps she used to plot her characters’ movements, and her visits to the Talbot County, Maryland, sites of the novel. Butler herself has repeatedly insisted that Kindred
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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
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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
