Kindred

slaves as people rather than as encrusted literary or sociological types. Perhaps most impressive is Sarah the cook, the stereo- typical “mammy” of books and films, whose apparent acceptance of humiliation, Dana comes to understand, masks a deep anger over the mas- ter’s sale of nearly all her children: “She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house- nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter” (p. 145). Here we see literary fantasy in the service of the

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recovery of historical and psychological realities. As fictional memoir, Kindred is Butler’s contribution to the literature of memory every bit as much as it is an exercise in the fantastic imagination.

The artfulness of Kindred is the product of a single-minded and largely isolated literary apprenticeship. In her younger years Butler lived for her trips to the library, but her family paid little attention to what she read. Her teachers were unreceptive to the science-fiction stories she occasionally submitted in English classes. Her schoolmates also found her tastes in reading and writing strange and, increasingly, Butler kept her literary interests to herself. In adolescence she immersed herself in the science- fictional worlds of Theodore Sturgeon, Leigh Brackett, and Ray Bradbury, and the absence of black women writers from the genre did not deter her own ambitions: “Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”9

In the 1940s and 1950s no black writers and almost no women were visibly publishing science fiction. Not surprisingly, few black readers— and, we can assume, very few black girls— found much to interest them in the science fiction of the period, geared as it was toward white adolescent boys. Some of it was provocatively racist, including Robert Heinlein’s The Sixth Column (1949), whose heroic protagonist in a future race war was unsubtly named Whitey. The highest honor available for a character of color in such novels was sacrificing his life for his white com- rades, as do an Asian soldier named Franklin Roosevelt Matsui in The Sixth Column and the one black character in Leigh Brackett’s story “The Vanishing Venusians” (1944). Other books tried resolutely to be “colorblind,” imagining a future in which race no longer was a factor; novels like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) embodied the white liberal fantasy of a single black character functioning amiably and unselfconsciously in a predominantly white society.

A diligent reader in the 1950s, searching for science-fiction novels with something more than a patronizing image of black assimilation on white terms, could have turned up only a few texts in which race was acknowl- edged and allowed to shape the novel’s thematic and ideological con- cerns.10 Perhaps the most interesting example is a chapter in a book that Butler read in her youth, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950). Titled “Way in the Middle of the Air,” it is the story of a mass emigration of black Southerners to Mars in the year 2003. The Southern economy and the cultural assumptions of white supremacy are devastated when the

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entire black populace unites to ensure that all members of the community can pay their debts and arrive at the rocket base in time for the great exo- dus. Barefoot white boys report in astonishment this unanticipated strat- egy for a black utopia: “Them that has helps them that hasn’t! And that way they all get free!” In a speech that ironically skewers the myth of progress in African-American history, one petulant white man complains:

I can’t figure why they left now. With things lookin’ up. I mean, every day they got more rights. What they want, anyway? Here’s the poll tax gone, and more and more states passin’ anti-lynchin’ bills, and all kinds of equal rights. What more they want? They make almost as good money as a white man, but there they go.11

“Way in the Middle of the Air” may be the single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science fiction by a white author. But its very rarity demonstrates how alien the territory of American science fiction in its so-called golden age, after the second world war, was for black readers and for aspiring writers like Octavia Butler. She has often observed, in response to questions about her nearly unique status as an African-American woman writing science fiction, that you have to be a reader before you can be a writer.

Butler’s formative years and her early career coincide with the years when American science fiction took down the “males only” sign over the door. Major expansions and redefinitions of the genre have been accom- plished by such writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sar- gent, Alice Sheldon (writing under the pseudonym of James Tiptree, Jr.), Pamela Zoline, Marge Piercy, Joan Slonczewski, and Butler herself. The alien in much of the fiction by women has been not a monstrous figure from a distant planet but the invisible alien within modern, familiar, human society: the woman as alien, sometimes—more specifically—the black woman, the Chicana, the housewife, the lesbian, the woman in poverty, or the unmarried woman. Sheldon’s famous story “The Women Men Don’t See” (1974), about a mother and daughter who embark on a ship with extraterrestrials rather than remain unnoticed and unvalued on Earth, is a touchstone for the reconception of the old science-fictional rep- resentations of the human image. “Science fiction,” Butler writes, “has long treated people who might or might not exist—extraterrestrials. Unfortunately, however, many of the same science-fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extraterrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at-home human variation.”12 As American women writers have abandoned the character types that predominated in

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science fiction for a richer plurality of human images, they have collec- tively written a new chapter in the genre’s history.

During the course of Butler’s career a parallel, although slender, chap- ter began to be written by African-American writers. When Kindred was first published in 1979, the only recognized African-American writer of science fiction and fantasy was Samuel R. Delany. As Kindred celebrates its silver anniversary the landscape is visibly changing. Steven Barnes, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Charles R. Saunders, and Tananarive Due have joined Delany and Butler. And the publication of Sheree Thomas’s important anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) has showcased many contem- porary black writers of nonrealist fiction while excavating a few surprises from the past, like W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 story “The Comet.” In the years since 1979 Butler has emerged as the commanding figure among African-American writers of science fiction and fantasy, having become the first (and so far only) science-fiction writer to win a prestigious five- year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Since the first Beacon edition of Kindred in 1988 there has been an explosion of critical interest in Butler. In 1988 it was possible to list nearly every critical article that had been published on her work, and most of that small body of material was pub- lished in obscure journals with tiny circulations. Today the list of works about Butler must be more selective, and the critical studies appear from major university and trade presses and in the premier journals of contem- porary literature, African-American studies, and science-fiction studies. And the interest is not just academic, nor is it confined to science-fiction fans. In the spring of 2003 the city of Rochester, New York undertook its third annual event titled “If All of Rochester Read the Same Book.” An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people read Kindred, discussed it in local reading groups, and for three days had a chance to meet Butler and talk with her about the book at her numerous appearances at universities, libraries, and bookstores.

III

In 1980 Charles Saunders, himself the author of African-based heroic and mythic fantasies, wrote a lament titled “Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction.” Twenty years later he published a more sanguine sequel in the Dark Matter anthology: “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science

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Fiction.” If any contemporary writer is responsible for Saunders’s change of heart, it is Octavia Butler. She has redrawn science fiction’s cultural boundaries and attracted new black readers—and potential writers—to this most distinctive of twentieth-century genres. More consistently than any other African-American author, she has