Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a book that unflinchingly answers the question of why readers read: to try and experience, however secondhand, someone else’s life. In this case, we get a small taste of what life might have been like for the millions of Africans and their descendants who were enslaved in the United States. The story follows Edana Franklin as she inexplicably travels back and forth between the 1810s and 1820s and her own time of 1976. For reasons that are never explained in the novel, Dana keeps getting called back to the Maryland farm where her distant ancestors (black and white) lived. At each visit, Dana saves the life of the white landowner (her great-umpty-great grandfather).
Because Dana is from the twentieth century, all she knows about slavery is what she learned from books. Reading about casual racism and the violence and horrors of slave life is very, very, very different from actually experiencing it. Even Dana comments more than once that she doesn’t know how her ancestors lived with it. It’s a heart-wrenching read. What makes it worse is that Dana’s many times great grandfather never seems to learn that just because a person’s skin is dark doesn’t mean that they don’t think and feel like human beings. Rufus is, by turns, kind, jealous, irrational, and violent. He’s the ultimate spoiled brat. And yet, Dana keeps saving his life because, if he dies, she never gets born.
Kindred is a short, but intense books. It’s exactly the kind of book that I like as it’s packed with ethical dilemmas that have no easy solutions. It’s the kind of book that immediately makes you ask “What would I do in this situation?” The characters, for once, are sensible and rational. It’s just the situation that’s bizarre. In an interview, Butler said, “I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.” While 1976 had its racism, it was a haven of racial harmony compared to 1820s Maryland. Slaves did escape to the North, but this book successfully showed me why that was so rare. The whole damn deck was stacked against African Americans. Patrollers traveled back and forth across the South, looking for people who weren’t where they were supposed to be. Butler shows a small hint of the terror they caused among the free and slave populations. Except for running away and maybe making it North, there were no other options. And instead of living quietly with her writer husband in 1976, Dana keeps getting pulled back into the past to repeatedly save one of the perpetrators of slavery.
Kindred is tightly written, with no spare scenes or language. It’s under 300 pages, but in those 300 pages, Dana has to decide whether or not to teach her fellow slaves how to read, help them escape, treat their ailments, or try to resist what her so-called masters order her to do. It’s a wonder that Dana didn’t just give up and despair after just one or two visits to the past.
All this makes it sound like Kindred is on par with Russian novels for depressing narratives. What redeems it is Butler’s care to show the characters’ humanity. If nothing else, Kindred showed me that people are people. We respond to our circumstances and environments. It doesn’t matter what color your skin is. Some people are saints. Others are assholes. Most of us fall into the wide area in the middle.
The talent and sophistication of Kindred makes me wish that Octavia Butler had more success than she did. I have a few of her books on my shelf, waiting to be read. I’m looking forward to diving in and seeing what I can learn from them.