Like many folks right now, the issues surrounding George Floyd’s murder has got me thinking about my own place within an unequal society. I’ve spent time reflecting on the times when I myself have been part of the problem, either through conscious action or through casual inaction. This is “deep thinking” stuff and while I’m making a point of reading some nonfiction books on race relations (stay tuned for future reviews), nonfiction has never really been something I read for enjoyment. It should come as no surprise that 99% of what I’ve read during my life (that wasn’t assigned by a teacher) has been science fiction or fantasy.
I definitely came as a surprise to me that when I looked over my bookshelves, I was hard-pressed to find any authors of color there. Like, any. This was by no conscious decision on my part, it just sort of happened. In middle school, I went through a serious Piers Anthony kick, spurred by the Xanth series that was for sale at the Scholastic Book Fair. During high school, my reading selection was most often influenced by which omnibus Science Fiction Book Club tomes had the best novel-per-price cost. More recently, I’ve picked up books by recommendation or ads, or for my kids (such as the Percy Jackson series).
Now, if you were to tell me that Suburban Houston book fairs and multi-book contracts from large publishing houses favored one racial group over another, it wouldn’t come as a major shock. In terms of my own personal selection, though, it was through pure happenstance.
So…I was ready to pick up a new book, there are people of color writing fantasy and sci-fi, why not grab one of theirs instead of another Heinlein or Donaldson or Stephenson? And that brings me to today’s book: Kindred, by Octavia Butler, a writer who won two Hugos, two Nebulas, a Locus. Seems like a pretty darn good place to start.
Kindred begins in the 1970s (the same decade the author wrote it), and while it is technically a time travel story, it’s definitely not your typical sci-fi with lasers, aliens, or other obvious tropes of the genre. Dena Franklin, a Black woman married to a White man, finds herself mysteriously transported from her living room to what she later learns is the antebellum South. There, she discovers a little boy (Rufus Weylin) drowning in a river, and she does what anyone would do – she wades out to save him. After Dena administers rescue breathing, the mother, rather than being grateful, hurls slurs at her. When the boy’s father shows up with a gun, back to the twentieth century our heroine goes. This is only the first of many such experiences, and to avoid spoilers I will only say that she and the boy are powerfully linked, with her trips “back” coinciding with other times the boy was in mortal danger.
Ok, so maybe it’s a little tropey, but where many stories like this would take the path of silliness or romance, this story uses the trip to narrate the daily lives of African slaves and their owners from the perspective of a modern-day Black woman. Suffice to say, it’s not pretty. We see, through Dena’s eyes, the brutality of the masters, the overseers, and the “patrols” that traveled about to catch runaway slaves (which made me immediately think of John Oliver’s recent, excellent, monologue). We also see the Black-on-Black racism that Ibram X. Kendi describes in his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. The house slaves look down on the field slaves, and the field slaves look back at the house slaves with disgust. Most interesting was the love/hate relationship between Rufus’ family and Dena herself. Having seen her disappear into thin air only to return to once again save the boy’s life, the Weylins knew that she wasn’t like the other slaves. And, of course, the fact that she was far more literate than any of the nearby Whites made her stand out even more. Yet, when all was said and done, their sense of entitlement and superiority kept them from seeing her as anything more than just another ****** whose purpose was to serve her masters. After all, she kept showing up to save the plantation’s scion, just like a good slave would.
This book isn’t for the squeamish – there are lynchings and whippings and rapes. This is definitely no romanticized Gone With the Wind version of the antebellum South. But then again, perhaps it is for the squeamish after all. With all the people complaining about taking down statues or the removal of the confederate flag from NASCAR because “it’s heritage, not hate,” perhaps a little reminder of exactly what that heritage was is just what’s called for.