50books_poc | 11: Kindred

Butler, Octavia. Kindred.

in short: Why am I even summarizing this? You all know what this book is about. For the record: Kindred is the story of 20th century black woman who finds herself transported back in time to the antebellum Southin order to save the life of a young white boy whom she suspects may be her ancestor. Not for the faint of heart.

in which it is all about me: Y'all, I fail at book club so hard. I read it in time to do book club? I just, y'know, never wrote it up.

actual analysis: Damn. Butler doesn't spare the reader at all, does she? (Note: this is not an indictment. Slavery = bad. It's something we all 'know' but I think too few people take the time out really examine and realize how bad; kind of like the way I know the buildings in my city are tall without really ever taking the time to think about it or even look at them.)

Butler's writing connects very well with the reader, and is devastating as a result. I knew from what I'd heard from other people that this book wasn't going to take any easy outs, but it still kept taking me by surprise as I read the novel. It would have been so easy to characterize the whites of the antebellum South as inhumanly evil, and they are not, and what wrong and evil they do hits harder because of that. It would have been easy to reform Dana's little ginger ancestor. Guided by Dana, he would have gone on to be a great anti-racist abolitionist with a side of feminism, who marries a black woman with whom he has a consenting relationship, and there is much danger, but also much reward. Dana could go on knowing that her saving a helpless drowning child has made a positive difference in the world. That doesn't happen - though, God, I'm sure I've read that book somewhere, probably more than once - and it is a better story for it. It would have been easy to make this story about triumph and uplift. They escape North! They rebel! Just this once, the people and the circumstances are extraordinary enough to overcome and break free of what so many unnamed others could not! But, despite the time travel, this is not that story and it is devastating.

I don't have the book on me anymore so I can't quote. But there is this one scene where it's after Dana's been whipped and the Ginger (I told you it's been a second, and I'm too lazy to look up his name) says something along the lines of, he hopes it didn't hurt too much. Questions like that are next to being rhetorical though and it's obviously how he meant it. He wanted an answer like 'not too bad', or 'I'll live', or some variation on that theme. Dana doesn't let him get away with it though. She tells him it hurts a lot. That she's never been in as much pain in her life. Which about sums up the book for me.

(OT: Dana's ginger ancestor and his black-woman loving ways, to me, has shades of Thomas Jefferson. A mental image I would happily rid myself of, but unable to do that would happily pass on to you.)