Seeing With Eyes Unclouded: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

To wrap up Black History Month, why not pick up a heavy hitter of a novel from one of the grandmasters of speculative fiction? Yes, Kindred has a weighty premise and an unflinching gaze at the horrible realities of the African American experience in the antebellum South, but it also has a lot of emotional depth, resonance, and a surprising amount of playfulness in the language and the way the story is told.

The nutshell is pretty well known both in speculative fiction community and African American history circles. Outside that, maybe not so much. So, allow me the chance to present it here:

On June 9, 1976, on her twenty-sixth birthday, Black writer Dana and her white husband Kevin find their ritual of moving into a new home together interrupted in the strangest way possible. For just a moment, Dana feels a jarring sensation and then she is catapulted to someplace completely different. At a riverside, she encounters a young white boy who is drowning while his ineffectual mother watches. After fishing the lad out and performing rescue breathing despite the panicking woman’s efforts to stop her, Dana realizes that she’s not only come a long distance but somehow been thrown over one hundred years into the past. When the boy’s father shows up and points a gun, Dana is returned to the present. Although she spent minutes saving that young man, only seconds passed in her native timeline.

This process will repeat, with steadily lengthening stays in the past and disappearances in the present. The flashes back (to various times between 1815 and an unspecified year some decades later) are triggered whenever Rufus Weylin, a distant relative she knows little about, is in danger. And her return trips are triggered whenever she is placed in jeopardy. And since the destination of her journey is a plantation in the deep south and she is a Black woman, her life is put into jeopardy quite a few times. And things that she is holding onto when she makes the trip then or back again come along for the ride, so she can pack a satchel or accidentally deliver a loved one from one timeline to the next.

In the past, she finds work on that plantation, learns about the people who live, struggle, and die there. She discovers quite a bit about both the origins of her family and about the situations of slavery and slave ownership, of survival at all costs, and about appearing as a bootlicker or an Uncle Tom. She is neither of these things, but the strange relationship she has with Rufus often puts her at odds with her distant kin and people.

While the process of her bodily transportation through time and space is never explained, the real mystery is how many times will this recur, and will she wind up trapped somewhere she does not belong. Can she survive in this far-flung time, and can she subtly change the past and the people who live there without wrecking the future?

Kindred sounds like a heavy trip, all right. A book about a modern-day woman thrown back into slavery days, herself being among the oppressed? And the book, as I mentioned, has no hesitation about showing us how bad things can be. However, it also takes pains to present a full picture. Every age straddles the line between hope and horror, and Butler’s narrative finds time to indulge both of these aspects. Dana knows, unlike those she is visiting, that there will be an end to slavery in the near future (just fifty years off!), and while many of these people will not live to see it, there is hope for their children and children’s children.

When her husband takes a trip back with her, he is surprised to find it the conditions very different than his expectations, which leads to a conversation about his own blindness:

Kevin frowned thoughtfully. “It’s surprising to me that there’s so little to see. Weylin doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what his people do, but the work gets done.”

“You think he doesn’t pay attention. Nobody calls you out to see the whippings.”

“How many whippings?”

“One that I’ve seen. One too goddamn many!”

“One is too many, yes, but still, this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage …”

“… no decent housing,” I cut in. “Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inadequate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason—or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”

“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.” I sat down against a tall pine tree, pulling him down beside me. We were in the woods now. Not far to one side of us was a group of Weylin’s slaves who were cutting down trees. We could hear them, but we couldn’t see them. I assumed that meant they couldn’t see us either—or hear us over the distance and their own noise. I spoke to Kevin again.

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer,” I said. “I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.”

“There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t eventually get you whipped or killed!”

I shrugged.

“You … you haven’t already done anything, have you?”

“Just started to teach Nigel to read and write,” I said. “Nothing more subversive than that.”

“If Weylin catches you and I’m not around …”

“I know. So stay close. The boy wants to learn, and I’m going to teach him.”

He raised one leg against his chest and leaned forward looking at me. “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North, don’t you?”

“At least he’ll be able to.”

Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories (LOA #338) (100)

There is an additional emotional cue triggering this conversation. It follows the visitors witnessing a children’s game mimicking a slave auction. Kevin tries to excuse it as the youths simply finding a way to understand the reality they see every week or month, and Dana is appalled by the very idea. The difference in perspective is something Kevin and Dana cannot quite together on. She sees the human ugliness for what it is, and he sees a situation that could be so much worse than it is.

Kevin’s attempts to see the silver lining is one of the draws Dana had when originally meeting him. Here, however, it is a less welcome ability. Of course, their perspectives are ultimately shaped by the era’s assumptions. He receives a very different treatment when coming to the house than she does. He is a visitor, a guest, a potential teacher (paid worker) and therefore receives a room and all the hospitality and welcome. Dana, on the other hand, is seen as his property, given space in the cramped attic with other house slaves. Her return trips without Kevin find Dana always welcome on the Weylin plantation, so long as she works and knows her place. In future trips, she is welcomed by Rufus (since she has saved his life and confided with him on numerous occasions) but she is never really more than a beloved object, a prize to possess. However, if she gets out of line then patriarch Weylin will punish the infraction; later, Rufus will have others do the worst. Thus, Kevin can never understand her situation since he is never in danger of the whippings or field work that hang over Dana like the Sword of Damocles …

The book is a keystone in high school and college courses among other outlets. It is a crucial work, which attempts to connect past and present, to take a look at what happened and evaluate how far we’ve come from that. The road ahead is still a long one, especially since historical timelines seem to take a two-steps forward, one-step back approach to progress, but there is hope aplenty in this nevertheless grim book. Dana’s own seldom flags for long, though it is tested again and again.

I’m sorry I put off reading the book so long. Luckily, the work is one that has not gone out of print since its original publication. The Library of America volume inaugurating Octavia Butler into the canon includes this one first and foremost, front and center, so the odds of it not being available in the future are slim.

This is the kind of book I long to share with others. Kindred is not an easy book to speed read through, but it is a rewarding read. Always compelling, never a wasted word or sentence, and provocative without being pedagogic, it’s a breathtaking and powerful novel.

#

Kindred is available in a standalone paperback, eBook, and audiobook editions. As well, it is included in the Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories omnibus hardcover from Library of America.

Next week, we will kick off women in horror month with a look at Catherine Cavendish’s newest novel of gothic horror, Those Who Dwell in Mordenhyrst Hall. It is available in paperback and eBook editions.

“Seeing With Eyes Unclouded: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Library of America edition, released in 2021. Cover image also taken from the Beacon Press eBook edition, released 2004.

Disclosure: Considering Stories is a member of the Amazon Associates. Under that program, purchases made using the product links in any of our articles can qualify the Considering Stories site for a payment. This takes the form of a percentage of the purchase price, and it is made at no additional cost to the customer.