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 accomplished by such writers as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, 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 representations 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 science fiction for a richer plurality of human images, they have collectively written a new chapter in the genre’s history.
During the course of Butler’s career a parallel, although slender, chapter 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 contemporary 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 published 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 contemporary 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 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 deployed the genre’s conventions to tell stories with a political and sociological edge to them, stories that speak to issues, feelings, and historical truths arising out of African-American experience. In centering her fiction on women who lack power and suffer abuse but are committed to claiming power over their own lives and to exercising that power harshly when necessary, Butler has not merely used science fiction as a “feminist didactic,” in Beverly Friend’s terminology, but she has generated her fiction out of a black feminist aesthetic. Her novels pointedly expose various chauvinisms (sexual, racial, and cultural), are enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the depiction of enslavement both in the real past and in imaginary pasts and futures, and enact struggles for personal freedom and cultural pluralism.
At the same time, Butler has been eager to avoid using her fiction as a soapbox. “Fiction writers can’t be too pedagogical or too polemical,” she told one interviewer.
13
The route she pursues to her readers’ heads is through their guts and nerves, and that requires good storytelling, not just a good set of issues. Science fiction and fantasy are a richly metaphorical literature. Just as Mary Shelley in
Frankenstein
invented a monstrous child born from a male scientist’s imagination as a metaphor for the exclusion of women from acts of creation, and just as Wells’s
Time Machine
used hairy subterranean Morlocks and effete aboveground Eloi as metaphors for the upstairs-downstairs class divisions of Victorian England, so Butler has specialized in metaphors that dramatize the tyranny of one species or race or gender over another. In
Kindred
the most powerful metaphor is time travel itself. Traveling to the past is a dramatic means to make the past live, to get the reader to live imaginatively in the recreated past, to grasp it as a felt reality rather than merely a learned abstraction. The chapter titles Butler has given to each of the major episodes of
Kindred
further invite the reader to respond metaphorically: “The River,” “The Fire,” “The Fall,” “The Fight,” “The Storm,” and “The Rope.” As one commentator has observed, these chapter headings suggest something elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative.
14
Kindred
, after all, is not a documentary about racism, although the vividness of its invented details gives it a convincing “you are there” documentary power. But, finally, her work succeeds in engaging, terrifying, and moving readers because it is not fiction composed by agenda.
White writers, Butler has pointed out, have tended to include black characters in science fiction only to illustrate a problem or as signposts to advertise the author’s distaste for racism; black people in much science fiction are represented as “other.”
15
All Butler’s fiction stands in quiet resistance to the notion that a black character in a science-fiction novel is there
for a reason
. In a Butler novel the black protagonist is there, like the mountain, because she is there. Although she does not hesitate to harness the power of fiction as fable to create striking analogies to the oppressive realities of our own present world, Butler also peoples her imagined worlds with black characters as a matter of course. While her frequent use of women as protagonists has brought attention to the black feminist aesthetic she practices, it is just as important to notice that there is always a critical mass of characters of color in her novels. One of the exciting features of
Kindred
is its attentiveness both to the exceptional situation of an isolated modern black woman in a household under slavery and to her complex social and psychological relationships within the community of slaves she joins. Despite the severe stresses under which they live, the slaves constitute a rich human society: Dana’s proud and vulnerable ancestor, Alice Greenwood; the mute housemaid, Carrie; Sarah, the cook who nurses old grievances while kneading bread dough; young Nigel, whom Dana teaches to read from a stolen primer; Sam James, the field hand who begs Dana to teach his brother and sister; Alice’s husband, Isaac, mutilated and sold to Mississippi after a failed escape attempt; even Liza, the sewing woman, who betrays Dana to the master and is punished by the other slaves for her complicity with the white owners. Although the black community is persistently fractured by the sudden removal of its members through either the calculated strategy or the mere whim of their white controllers, that community always patches itself back together, drawing from its common suffering and anger a common strength. It is the white characters in the novel who seem odd, isolated, pathetic, alien.
The most problematic white man in
Kindred
is not the Maryland slave owner but the liberated, modern Californian married to Dana. Kevin Franklin is a good man. He loves Dana, loathes the chattel system that governs every feature of antebellum life in Maryland, and works with the Underground Railroad while he is trapped in the past. Yet he is by gender and race implicated in the supremacist culture. Throughout the novel Butler ingeniously suggests parallels between Rufus Weylin and Kevin Franklin: their facial expressions, their language, even after a time their accents merge in Dana’s mind so that she mistakes one for the other. “I gave her that husband to complicate her life,” Butler has commented, mischievously.
16
One of the novel’s subtlest touches is in the chapter in which Dana is obliged to become Rufus Weylin’s secretary and handle his correspondence and bills; in 1976 Kevin had, unsuccessfully but still revealingly, tried to get his wife to type his manuscripts and write his letters for him. When Kevin and Dana are in nineteenth-century Maryland at the same time, the only way they can spend a night together is to make a public pretense of being master and slave, playing along with the prevailing belief that a black woman was the sexual property of a white man. But, as Dana realizes, the more often one plays such a role, the nearer the pretending comes to reality: “I felt almost as though I really was doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed” (p. 97). And, she fears, Kevin begins to fit into the white, male, Southern routine too easily. Shuttling between the two white men in her life, she is aware not only of the blood link between herself and Rufus but of the double link of gender and race that unites Rufus and Kevin. The convergence of these two white men in Dana’s life not only dramatizes the ease with which even a “progressive” white man falls into the cultural pattern of dominance, but it suggests as well an uncanny synonymy of the words “husband” and “master.”
17
The date of Dana’s final return to Los Angeles is July 4, 1976, the bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. In bringing the novel full circle from the protagonist’s birthday to the nation’s birthday, Butler deftly connects individual consciousness with social history and invites readers to meditate on the relationships between personal and political identities. What has been trivialized or sentimentalized—or erased—in the public celebrations of the past reemerges unvarnished in Dana’s homecoming on the fourth of July. Dana comes back to southern California with a truer understanding of African-American history than the sanitized versions offered by the popular media. Predictably, she scorns the image of the plantation derived from
Gone with the Wind
, but she also learns the inadequacy of even the best books as preparation for the firsthand experience of slavery. In her first trips to the past, Dana’s literacy, her education, and her historical knowledge sometimes lull her into a false sense of security. In one passage, she records her pleasure in the friendly atmosphere of the cookhouse where the slaves gather to eat and talk, usually free from white overseers. There she observes “a girl and boy, sitting on the floor eating with their fingers. I was glad to see them there because I’d read about kids their age being rounded up and fed from troughs like pigs. Not everywhere, apparently, not here” (p. 72). Although she does not name her literary source, Dana is recalling an episode from
chapter 5
of Frederick Douglass’s 1845
Narrative
(a work Butler read carefully during her research for
Kindred
) that describes feeding time at Colonel Lloyd’s plantation:
Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons.
18
Mistakenly, because the food and the treatment of children are better than Douglass’s
Narrative
seemed to promise, Dana behaves as if the cookhouse is a sanctuary. That error in judgment leads to her first vicious flogging, when she is discovered teaching slave children to read. After her second whipping by Rufus Weylin’s father following her attempted flight from the plantation, she reflects angrily as another slave woman salves her wounds, “Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape” (p. 177). Books had not taught her why so many slaves accepted their condition, nor had books defined the kind of bravery possible in the humiliating situation of being owned.
Films, Dana finds, are even less reliable guides to the past. Hollywood production values and the comfort of a theater seat insulate viewers from material purported to be historically accurate. Dana recalls witnessing the beating of a slave hunted out one night by white patrollers and how she crouched in the underbrush a few yards away from the man’s young daughter. The slave’s crime was being found in bed with his own free-born wife without having written permission from his owner: