Octavia Butler's Kindred: Review and Discussion

Kindred, by Octavia Butler (1979)

(Some plot details discussed here)

This thoughtful and disturbing novel is almost forty years old now, but like the recently-published Lovecraft Country, which I also read and reviewed this summer, it pushes readers into a different time period and place in order to reflect on fraught relationships between American blacks and whites. Butler introduces us to main characters Dana and Kevin in a pain-filled hospital room in 1976, where they discuss the inexplicable “accident” that severed Dana’s arm. For the rest of the novel, she carefully narrates her story, in which she—a 26-year-old aspiring novelist, an African-American married to the Caucasian Kevin, who is a published writer—is suddenly transported to an antebellum Maryland plantation, to save a young white boy, Rufus Weylin, son of a slave-holding plantation owner and Dana’s ancestor, from drowning. The boy is accident-prone and destructive, so needs Dana’s saving powers numerous additional times as he is growing up. Each time, Dana is stuck in the past longer, but when she gets back home, not much time has passed.

On one of those trips, Kevin was holding on to her when she got summoned and ended up in 1800s Maryland, too. Dana learns first-hand the horrors, humiliations, and accommodations of slavery, while her husband—positioned of course differently as a white man—endures his own ordeals and uses his more enlightened attitude and love for his African-American wife to negotiate the slave-holding south in a way that is dangerous for him, too. Butler draws us in to feel the pain, the frustration, the rage, and the powerlessness of the slaves, while making us think about inter-racial relationships, the affront of one human being thinking he can own and completely control others—while also loving them, in his way—and the question of just how much and how people can get used to some kinds of mistreatment. By the end, we see how the legacy of the past can be psychologically deforming, represented by the literal deformation of Dana’s body when her arm is torn off.

Through the character of Rufus, who Dana realizes does love his free black neighbor, Alice, in his way, Butler shows us how love and basic human relationships were perverted by slavery, by the belief and mindset that one can own other people. When Alice chooses to marry Isaac, a slave whom she loves, Rufus rapes her and is beaten by Isaac, who seeks to protect his wife. Dana is summoned and negotiates the newly-married couple’s escape, but they are apprehended, Isaac is tortured and sold farther south, and Rufus buys the brutally beaten Alice to be his sex slave, all the while asserting his love for her. He does treat her gently while she recovers, but cannot understand why she hates him. He wishes she would freely love him, but since she does not, his belief that white men are owed sex by any woman they desire overrules his version of love—or is so intertwined with it that his ability to love is severely compromised and increasingly lost to him, so that his need and perceived right to dominate and control threaten to undo him.

Butler’s exploration of how a sexual/marital relationship between a black woman and white man could be is through Dana’s and Kevin’s 1976 marriage. Their relationship is based on their shared passion for writing, their willingness to sacrifice much for their craft, and their identification as rebels against the lives of respectable and dependable work at mundane jobs that their families urged upon them. While they can have—in 1970s California—a very different inter-racial relationship that was possible in the antebellum South of the Weylins and their slaves, it is not without its costs. Both of them face severe disapproval from their families for the marriage. And, while Dana never reports Kevin exhibiting personal racism, he does have some sexist attitudes, wanting her—for example—to type his manuscripts and resenting her refusal to do so. And, Dana worries about systemic racism when Kevin travels back in time and place. She tells us: “A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. . . . The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility” (77). We are all shaped by our physical, political, and attitudinal environments; ideologies shape and embed themselves. We can be aware of them, critically reflect on them, consciously work to uproot and confront and change them, but nonetheless, they are part of who we are. Systemic racism infects us all, and obviously does so differently for white and black Americans.

The ways that black people internalize racism and can accommodate themselves to a hostile and cruel environment like that created by slavery is also a focus of the novel. After observing a group of enslaved children on the Weylin plantation playing slave auction, Dana says to Kevin, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (101). A number of the slaves she encounters do resist in a variety of ways, some attempting to escape. After her own attempt to flee the Weylins failed, and she was badly beaten by Rufus’ father, Dana wonders about her own resolution to run again: “why was I so frightened now—frightened sick at the thought that sooner or later, I would have to run again? I moaned and tried not to think about it. The pain of my body was enough for me to contend with. . . . I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came. See how easily slaves are made? they said” (177). Later she wonders, after one of the slaves verbally attacks her and she just walks away: “Was I getting so used to being submissive” (220)? She recognizes that slaves do the back-breaking work the overseer demands of them not because they want to, but “They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies” (237). She comes to understand how complicated—and perverse—the institution of slavery and the system of racism are.

After Dana’s act of self-defense that leaves her an amputee, she and Kevin, in 1976, return to the Weylin’s area of Maryland, the place of her slave-holding and slave ancestors, to try to come to terms with the past that had intruded so violently into their present. While science fiction’s device of time travel cannot happen literally to us readers, the time travel afforded by books like Kindred is open to us, with its many invitations to reflection on history, race, and how they construct and impact our present. In our volatile time of American hostility against people of color and immigrants, we all should reflect on what it takes to internalize and become too accommodating of toxic situations we might think we cannot control. Resistance—as Dana discovered—might forever mark one, but is most definitely possible. And necessary.