HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE SCIENCE FICTION

OF OCTAVIA ESTELLE BUTLER

A Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the degree Master of Arts In the

Graduate School of The Ohio State University

by

Ben Davis Jr., B. S. Ed. *****

The Ohio State University

1992

Master's Examination Committee: Approved by

Christian K. Zacher Patrick B. Mullen ~ef~ College of English Copyrig ht by Ben Davis Jr. 1992 To my mother and father, Leontyne and Ben

i i ACKNOWLEOOEMENTS

My sincerest thanks, appreciation, and gratitude to everyone who has encouraged me and helped me realize this graduate thesis. To my very first literature professor, the late Dr. Stanley J. Kahrl, my mentor and friend who instilled in me the drive for excellence and love for the written word; Dr. Christian Zacher, who took a chance on me to guide me through my research and my writing on this project;

Dr. Patrick Mullen, my second reader and guide; my closest friends,

Albert, David, James Daniels and James Moorer, who are always behind me; my brothers Michael and Thomas, whose love and admiration I will forever cherish; Viola Newton, who is both a wonderful colleague and friend; and Octavia Estelle Butler, the beauty and magic of whose words have inspired me with the means to do my work.

iii VITA

April 28, 1962 Born - Cleveland, Ohio

1990 - 1991 Graduate Research Associateship, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS0 FSTUDY

Major Field: English

Studies in: Twentieth Century American Literature, African American Literature, and Science Fiction

iv TABLEOFCONTENTS

DEDiCATION ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

ViTA iv

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE SCIENCE FICTION OF OCTAVIABUTLER 1

II. SLAVE HISTORY AND TIME TRAVEL IN KINDRED 9

III. RACE, GENDER AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN WILDSEED 28

IV. KINSHIP AND RACE IN MINDOFMYMIND 55

V. CONCLUSION: BLACKCONSCIOUSNESS IN OCTAVIA BUTLER'S SCIENCEFICTION 68

LISTOFREFERENCES 77

v CHAPTER I

INTRODUCllON:

HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER

IN THE SCIENCE FICTION OF OCTAVIA BUTLER

Octavia Estelle Butler's pathbreaking novels offer a new perspective on the dimensions of science fiction by focusing on important themes in Black history and culture and also on issues of race and gender. Butler addresses many controversial questions concerning Black people in a modern world, and does so by creating a world peopled with superhuman telepaths, psychic vampires, telekinetics, mutant humanoids, and alien beings. Responding to various theories about Black life, Butler creates characters who represent a radical alternative to learning and understanding Black culture. In Contemporary Authors, Butler addresses her purpose for choosing a genre almost "alien" to the Black literary tradition:

When I first began writing science fiction,

I was disappointed at how little creativity and

freedom was used to portray the many racial,

ethnic and class variations. Also, I could not

1 2 help noticing how few significant woman

characters there were in science 'fiction.

Fortunately, this has been changing over the

past few years. I intend my writing to

contribute to the change. (73-74)

For these reasons, Butler creates significantly strong Black science fiction/fantasy characters that are anything but stereotypical. Robert Crossley notes that during the 1940s and

1950s science fiction offered no Black writers (male or female) and focused on very few Black characters. Crossley also posits that many science 'fiction stories were "provocatively racist, including

Robert Heinlein's The Sixth Column (1949), whose heroic protagonist was unsubtly named Whitey" (Kindred xiv); additionally, Crossley notes:

The highest tribute paid to a character of color in such

novels was for the author to have him sacrifice hls life

for his white comrades, as an Asian soldier named Franklin

Roosevelt Matsui does in Tile Sixth Column, as does the one

black character in Leigh Brackett's story "The Vanishing

Venusians" (1944). (xiv)

Equally interesting, Crossley states that many science fiction works tried to be "colorblind...imagining a future in which race no longer 3 was a factor...embodying the White liberal fantasy of a single black character functioning amiably in a predominantly White society"

(xv). An example of this is Jan Rodricks, earth's last survivor in

Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), whose race, as Crossley notes, supposedly does not matter. Thus, science fiction readers did not have (or perhaps were not interested in having) a non­ stereotypical or non-underrepresented perspective on Black characters whether they were heroic or not.

What is distinctive about Butler is that she makes the presence of her Black characters known, especially her female characters.

Furthermore, some of her critics have labeled the women characters in her stories as heroines. Ruth Salvaggio in her article "Octavia

Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine" says that the "female protagonists. . .shape the course of social events" (78). Salvaggio calls this "changing the typical scenario" (78). Butler states that during the 1940s and 1950s (and even into the early 1960s) an

"insidious problem with science fiction is that it has always been nearly all white, just as until recently, it's been nearly all male"

(Transm ission 17-18). Thus, Butler's science fiction heroines usurp the masculine world. Also, Salvaggio recognizes that Butler's concern with racism and sexism is "a conscious part of her vision"

(78) but she defines Butler's works only through her science fiction 4 heroines. Indeed, most of Butler's critics examine only the characteristics of the modern "liberated" woman that typify the heroines of her stories. In fact, the only importance seen in her work is that it offers entertainment with some "historical and contemporary truth" (Friend 55). However, Butler's fiction is important for much more than its presentation of strong female figures, and it is in the series of stories she calls the Patternist and

Non-Patternist forms that her strength as a science fiction writer is revealed. The elements of science fiction, speculative fiction, and science fantasy are used as vehicles to deal with racial and social themes to create a consciousness of Black culture and and history in the genre. Mixing normal and mutant human beings,

Butler explores stories that speak directly to contemporary racial, sexual, historical, political and economic issues.

In the Non-Patternist novels Kindred (1979), Clay's Ark

(1984), Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989),

Butler's characters are psychics and storytellers who unearth facts about the Black race by traveling into the past to learn about the conflicts of miscegenation, and the male and black female characters reveal critical, revolutionary views of the life and society of black people during the period of slavery. The women characters in the Non-Patternist novels triumph over the white male 5 characters to establish the strength of the black woman within their race. In Butler's novel Wild Seed, two mutants, Doro and Anyanwu, are concerned with the negative forces that control them during the

Slave Trade. Doro is a ruthless 4000-year-old Nubian mutant who has the terrifying ability to steal bodies of other beings; out of pride, he prefers the form of a strong black male. His name means

lithe east, the direction from which the sun rises. II During his search for one of his people's villages, he encounters the woman Anyanwu, who appears in the form of an ancient crone and is worshiped by her people as an African (Onitsha) goddess; her form is only a disguise meant to discourage any young male suitors. She is a shape-shifter, a healer, and a kindred spirit to Doro. Anyanwu is virtually immortal and her name means lithe sun." Butler's aim in her works is not to patronize an image of Black assimilation on White terms" (Crossley xv) as Clarke does with the Rodricks character in Childhood's End, but to acknowledge and portray, as realistically as possible, her characters' blackness, for race is a crucial fact for Butler, as a presence in science fiction/fantasy through the framework of the culture and history of Black people. How her stories address racism and sexism as the Black characters of her Non-Patternist and

Patternist works speak to and deal with, in ways that real people do, issues of race, gender, relationships, feelings and historical truths 6 is what is important in this thesis.

This study will focus on the characters in Butler's Patternist and Non-Patternist works remarkable both for their variety and for the realism of details that suggest, in the combination of humans and mutants, relationships strongly relevant to the history of Black people. This study will also be developed around several questions:

1. How do the characters help to focus attention on continuity

between past and present?

2. What lessons do the characters reveal about historical

realities?

3. How do the characters provide a kinship with others and

events in history?

4. How do the characters enrich the reader's understanding

of history?

Chapter one will address the first question by showing how

Butler's Non-Patternist novel, Kindred, the basic elements of science fantasy are at work in her characters. Butler's main character in the novel, Dana Franklin, travels back and forth from her present time of 1976 in Los Angeles, California, to the past of

1824 in Talbot County, Maryland. In the past, she encounters and comes to the aid of Rufus Weylin, the son of a plantation owner, and saves him from drowning. Dana is unwillingly drawn into the past 7 whenever Rufus is in danger and she comes back to the future of the late seventies whenever she herself is imperiled. She comes to realize why: Rufus is destined to rape Alice Greenwood, a slave and also Dana's great-grandmother, thus creating Dana's existence in the twentieth century. Dana must, reluctantly, ensure the survival of

Rufus, who grows to be a very cruel and ruthless slave owner, so that her family will come to be. Butler creates Dana as a vehicle to delve into the past and uncover some startling truths not only about her family history but about slavery and its cruelties. Dana is a fixture that bridges the paradox of her own present, she is married to a white man named Kevin, and that of her cruel ancestor Rufus.

An analysis of Butler's narrative strategy, which blends science fantasy with the literary form of first-person slave narrative, is necessary to answer question one. In fact, Robert

Crossley states that this novel is possibly "a hybrid of both the autobiographical narrative and scienti'fic fantasy" (Kindred ix). This thesis will show how Dana and the other prominent characters focus our attention on the continuity between the past and the present.

Chapter two of this thesis will analyze what lessons the characters in the Patternist novel Wild Seed reveal about historical realities. My focus will be on the novel's two most prominent characters, the mutants Doro and Anyanwu, and certain other 8 supporting characters. The novel deals with the tumultuous relationship of Doro and Anyanwu within the historical backdrop of the Slave Trade of the seventeenth century and up through the present period. Butler employs a different narrative scheme than in

Kindred and the characters function more within the comparatively realistic expectations of science fiction than than within the marvelous guidelines of scientific fantasy; unlike Dana, these characters are super beings of great psychic power and mutant abilities--though no explanation of the origin of their powers is provided by Butler--yet they are created to function as real individuals who must master their own foibles as well as deal with their abilities and the forces in the universe.

An analysis of the way characters provide a kinship with other characters and events in history in Mind of My Mind, another of

Butler's Patternist novels, will be the concern of chapter three.

This novel has been considered by most of Butler's critics as a further treatment of Doro's story, yet it is the emergence of Mary,

Doro's psychic and telepathic daughter/lover as the novel's protagonist that dominates our attention. The novel's plot begins during the late twentieth century and chronicles Mary's attainment of power over the Patternists, the society of thriving superhuman telepaths and telekinetics also dubbed Homo Superior, through her 9 weaving of the mental network of the "Pattern" that binds these super men and women. In effect, the novel explains the birth of a new society, of Homo Superior, that will soon have dominion over the predominating non-mutant communities in the world; in fact,

Butler uses the theme of mankind's genetic and psychic evolution which is common in science fiction and is very much along the same lines as Clarke's Childhood's End and Theodore Sturgeon's More

Than Human.

Lastly, this thesis will analyze in the fourth and final chapter the way Butler's characters enrich the reader's understanding of history. This chapter will largely focus on the Patternist and Non­

Patternist novels discussed in the early chapters to provide an answer to how the characters and her narrative techniques function within the conventions of science fantasy, speculative fiction, and science 'fiction. CHAPTER II

SLAVE HISTORY AND TIME TRAVEL IN KINDRED

The im portance of Butler's science fiction novels and short stories lies in their suggestion of new ways of understanding

culture central to the history and artistic development of American society. Octavia Butler combines science fiction--more specifically the theme of time travel--and the slave narrative in order to

investigate the history of nineteenth-century American society in

general and a portion of Black history in particular. Taken together, time travel and slave narratives call into question a host of assumptions about that period of Black history, implicitly revealing views of miscegenation that underlay many nineteenth-century social practices among Blacks and Whites. Butler places slave

history and time travel in perspective along with other cultural factors in Black slave women's lives; her insight recovers not merely tile events in their lives, dramatic as they were, but major themes, movements and connecting threads. Chapter one of this study asserts that the characters in Butler's novels, historicized by

10 11 her, to focus attention on the continuity of redressed and recreated elements of Black culture of both the past and the present.

Kindred is Butler's non-Patternist work that most of her critics say is primarily historical fiction rather than science fiction. Even Butler herself has admitted that the novel is not science fiction since there is "absolutely no science in it" (Black

Scholar 14). Other critics, such as Robert Crossley, however, say that Kindred is a hybrid of science fantasy and autobiographical narrative; more specifically, in acknowledging her characters' blackness in her works as a presence in the genre--a presence that is virgin to science fiction and fantasy, little known and as yet to be known by her readers--time travel and the literary form of the slave narrative are blended together so that the novel, as Crossley says all good works of fiction do, "lies like the truth" (viiii).

Indeed, the novel does this without ever inundating the reader with blatant explanations of the complexities of any theoretical science involving time travel.

The focus of Kindred is nonetheless on the time-traveling escapades of the novel's main protagonist, Edana Franklin. She is a black woman who, unexplainedly, is whisked away from her present of 1976 in suburban Los Angeles back into the past of nineteenth­ century Talbot County, Maryland. Dana soon discovers that time and 12 time again she will be drawn into the past of the Antebellum era of slavery in Maryland by a boy, named Rufus Weylin, who is the son of a ruthless slave owner. She becomes a both witness to and an unwilling participant in, as Rufus' slave herself, a particular past history which covers perhaps the darkest era for black people in

America. What is even more compelling for Dana Franklin is that the visitations into the past reveal many twists for her. The young boy whom she saves is--and/or will be--her grandfather several times removed, and it will be her task, mostly alone, to ensure his survival so that he will rape a black freewoman who will bear a child named

Hagar, who is and/or will be Dana's great-grandmother, and create

Dana's family line. Dana ultimately and quite reluctantly serves as

Rufus' guardian to ultimately ensure her own future existence in the past where black people are only considered property. After each trip back to her present time and many times during her visit in the past, Dana presents a recollection of her experiences both to her husband Kevin and simultaneously to Butler's readers. Thus, Dana's adventures become "a form of fantastic travelogue to a restoration of the genre of the slave memoir" (Crossley xii).

The Prologue

Dana's narrative begins with an account of the events of her 13 trips into the past. In fact, the prologue gives a re-account of her last trip into Antebellum Maryland:

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I

lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort

and serenity I had not valued until it was gone. When

the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and

stayed with me so that I would know I hadn't lost him

too. (9)

Dana's narrative foreshadows what is to come and what is to be.

The novel's prologue functions well as a retrospective "teaser" to capture the reader's attention and the set the pace of a recapitulation of the events in the novel that are soon to follow.

Chapter One: The Fire

In this chapter, the recapitulation of the events begins as Dana begins her first odyssey across tim e and geography. She recollects her experience of nausea and dizziness as she and her husband Kevin, a W~lite writer, begin to unpack their belongings after moving into their home in Altadena, California. The day is Dana's birthday and the year is 1976. As the nausea deepens, Dana soon discovers herself to be in unfamiliar surroundings. Her home disappears and is replaced by a wooded area and a river. She hears in the distance 14 screams for help and discovers a small boy drowning in the raging waters. She rescues nlrn and, after being nearly attacked by a White woman, who is apparently the boy's mother, she nonetheless applies respiration and saves the child. Afterwards, Dana is threatened by the sudden presence of the barrel of a musket rifle pointed directly into her face. As a consequence, she returns, wet, muddy safely within the confines of her llvinq room. Her husband stands aghast at her mysterious disappearance and reappearance.

For many readers of science fiction and fantasy and specifically time travel 'fiction, "The River" chapter presents a pertinent convention. A river is transient, and many believe that time is much like a river full of the unknown with its myriad eddies and currents. The chapter establishes several things for Butler's readers. The river is the locale that represents Dana's being inexplicably displaced in time, for she is not aware at first of where she is but only "when" she is. The river itself has been a location of healing as well as of time. One can think, for instance, of the river locale in Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River".

The river in this short story is the site of Nick Adams' recovery from the psychological wounds of war. In her doctoral dissertation,

"The Patterning of History in Old English Literature, Margaret

Monteverde has offered a useful general explanation of the 15 metaphoric relevance of the river:

The analogy of history being like a river is a valuable

one. A river derives its existence not so rn uch from

the volume of water contained within it as from the

shape of the bed which holds that water in place.

Without the bed, the water would spread out in a form

so nebulous and chaotic that the human eye could not

perceive it, a form so lacking in permanence that the

mind could not fix it in memory. Similarly, the sheer

volume of moment-to-moment incident...is so vast and

amorphous that without the form placed upon it by

general, culturally significant ideas, we could neither

establish any points of reference by which to fix our

own positions nor see any markers on which to focus

recollections of past events. Our past quite literally

would slip through our fingers like water. (59)

Assurn ing that we view history as both the events of the past and the concurrent meaning we derive from them, then Monteverde's river analogy is a correct and effective one. Yet, It is not Butler's purpose to use this same analogy to drive the narrative in Kindred.

The novel's river scene is simply the location of Dana's first trip into the past, and readers are given a glimpse of when Dana is as she 16 informs us how out of place the clothing of the woman and her husband whom she encounters at the river bank after saving the boy are (16). As Dana's revelation of this serves to intensify the mystery of her trip and its circumstances, the presence of the river and the boy itself in the novel each have the "river bed" characteristics of Monteverde's analogy; in fact, it can be argued that Butler's river and Rufus both serve as sources or "markers" through and for which Dana can establish her position to focus her own recollections of the past.

Nonetheless, as history in this novel is juxtaposed with Butler's renovation of the slave autobiography, details of Dana's adventures into the past establish her in the novel as Butler's "reporter," and we gain a subjective view about the nineteenth century's events. The next passage foreshadows what is to follow as she suspects that her first trip will not be her last:

Maybe I'm just like a victim of robbery or rape or

something--a victim who survives, but doesn't feel

safe anymore. I shrugged. I don't have a name for the

thing that happened to me, but I don't feel safe any

more. (17)

Dana expresses not only her own trepidations but also a sense of the pattern of the things she experiences. Strangely enough her memory 17 of her brief visitation seems to wane. Much like a drying river, Dana says that the memory "begins to recede from me somehow... becoming like something I saw on television or read about--Iike something I got second hand" (17). With the river as one of her "markers," Dana can now begin to travel a path along time's river to uncover the mysteries of her heritage and the cause of her being in the past in the first place.

Chapter Two: The Fire

In this chapter, many things become evident for Dana as she again makes her second trip into a strange place--specifically to the bedroom of the boy whom she saved earlier and who sets it on fire.

She learns that the boy, Rufus, has the ability in times of his own peril to inexplicably "call" Dana into the past; thus, a link between her and the boy is established. Through a dim recollection of some of her own family history, she also discovers that Rufus is destined to rape her great-grandmother Alice Greenwood, who she remembers is mentioned in her family's bible, and thus he will be Dana's grandfather several times removed. She also learns that Rufus is the son of Tom Weylin, who is a ruthless slave owner. The boy also reveals that the year and place in which Dana finds herselt is 1815

Maryland. The reason why Dana is in the past is because Rufus 18 inexplicably "calls" for her whenever he is in grave danger.

As the plot develops, Dana's narrative voice becomes increasingly polemical concerning relationships between black people and white people; moreover, Dana is becoming, unknowingly, a witness to the indignity of slavery and to the fundamental attitudes expressed and behaviors exhibited by this era's people.

This is most noticeable during Dana's second trip into the past.

Rufus tells Dana of his mother's reaction to her administering mouth-to-m outh resuscitation after she rescued him the river:

Mama said what you did for me after you got me out of

the water was like the Second Book of Kings...

The what? (Dana asks)...

Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy's mouth, and the

boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop

you when she saw you doing that to me because you

were just some nigger she had never seen before.

Then she remembered Second Kings. (24)

This passage reveals an historical constant, for it shows the reader the lack of respect that was accorded black people (whether they were slaves or not). More specifically, as far as Rufus' mother, Margaret Weylin, is concerned, even though Dana saves the boy's life she is given the accolade of being "a strange nigger"; 19 consequently, Dana begins to learn firsthand of the personal impact of slavery in racist terms. This notion, Sandra Govan states, is one of the "recurrent patterns" (81) in slave narratives, and Dana is at first a witness to it. She attempts to educate the boy via use of her own twentieth-century values on equality and respect so that he may treat the black people his father owns with respect and dignity; moreover, when Dana strongly urges him to not use tile term

"nigger," she tells Rufus "I'm a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that's it" (25), and she tells the boy to "say blacks anyway" (25). Thus, the inherent values of a liberal-minded and nationalistic Black woman from the late twentieth century challenge those of Maryland's Antebellum slave era. Dana exhibits, quite ironically, the very same feelings, beliefs and pride most notably cherished and fought for by the forbearers of modern Black culture and history such as Sojourner Truth and

Frederick Douglass.

Next, "The Fire" chapter reveals the extent of Rufus' father's brutality, for he not only whips his horses and slaves but he also beats Rufus and establishes other recurrent patterns of slave narratives: "the punishment factor, the resistance motif, and the glim pse of life-in-the-quarters" (Govan 81). As Dana materializes into the past for the second time, she prevents the boy from setting 20 fire to the house; Rufus claims that his goal was to destroy the one thing he says his father values the most, his money profits from sales of his slaves. Moreover, Tom Weylin's cruelty and subsequent abuse of his son create in Rufus the very fire of hatred and contempt he will later feel for his father and for other people.

Equally important, the plot takes a decided turn as Dana witnesses firsthand the brutality of slavery. While seeking out the

Greenwoods, the people on Weylin's plantation whom Dana suspects are her ancestors, to seek shelter and to remain hidden from the elder Weylin, she watches several slave patrollers beat a runaway slave who is visiting the Greenwoods:

One of the whites went to hls horse to get what proved

to be a whip. He cracked it in the air. ..then brought it

down across the back of the black man...he took several

more blows with no outcry...then the man's resolve broke.

I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge

to vomit. I had seen people beaten on television and in

the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute

streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed

screams. But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat

or heard their pleading and praying, shamed before their

families and themselves. I was probably less prepared 21

for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In

fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face

too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from

one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping. (36)

Not only is the indignant nature of a slave's life revealed here, but a connection is made between Dana and the weeping child who witnessed the whipping. The child is (and will be) Dana's ancestor

Alice Greenwood, and it had been established earlier in "The Fire" chapter that she is indeed Rufus's friend. Incidentally, Dana notices how strikingly similar she and Alice's mother, a freewoman, are;

Dana notes "she was fine-boned, probably not as strong as she needed to be to survive in this era. But she was surviving, however painfully. Maybe she would help me learn how" (38). Dana indeed discovers her other ancestors to be "the bed which is formed by the characteristics both of the land through which it flows and the water which it contains" (Monteverde 59). Nonetheless, Dana recognizes the necessity of blood-ties in this era. She must seek out the knowledge of her resident ancestors if she is to survive such a brutal time period, and consequently Dana must learn in the past or she will be doomed to die in it.

"The Fire" chapter also symbolizes the inflammably raw hatred which the White characters express towards the Black characters, 22 especially where it concerns Tom Weylin and the slave patrollers, but also the terrible sexual lust exerted upon black people--more specifically upon black women. This notion expresses yet another of

Govan's recurrent patterns, that of "abusive sexual misconduct and immoral behavior"(82) toward black females in the slave era. An exam pie of this is evident when Dana is attacked by one of the returning patrollers. Mistaking Dana for Alice's mother, he attempts to rape her. Dana's account of the attempted rape and subsequent beating sickens her physically and she is whisked back to the future before the attack becomes much more grave for her. She tells her husband Kevin of the experience and, in effect, does what Sandra

Govan says that slave memoirs do, "to arouse moral indignation"

(91). This is exactly the reaction her husband has concerning Dana's predicament.

Chapter Three: The Fall

In this chapter, Dana returns to the past for the third time because of a terrible fall Rufus has out a tree while playing with one of the slave children. However, because he embraces her before the time trip, Kevin accompanies her. They masquerade not as man and wife, because miscegenation in the Antebellum was quite unpopular and very dangerous, but as master and slave when they meet Tom 23

Weylin. After being invited to stay at the plantation for saving

Rufus' life, Dana again witnesses, now as an unwilling participant, the life of a slave as a much broader view of life on the plantation enfolds. As the life-in-the-quarters pattern is even more evident in this chapter, the reality of the way of life for the master in the Big

House and the lifestyles within the slaves' cabins hits Dana with a sorrowful and stark profundity; for instance, the house slaves eat the leftovers of their masters while field slaves must live off even less though they are supposed to toil even harder than the house slaves. When she meets Sarah, the house slave/cook, and her mute daughter Carrie, she is told that Carrie is "my fourth baby... the only one Marse Tom let me keep ... Marse Tom took my children, all but

Carrie. And, bless God, Carrie ain't worth much as the others 'cause she can't talk. People think she ain't got good sense" (76). Thus,

Sarah's dialogue reveals to Dana and the reader "the theme of family separation... that almost every slave narrative dramatizes" (Govan

90) as Carrie is deemed "defective" and is valueless for the profiteering slave owner Weylin.

Not only is the life-in-the-quarters slave narrative pattern relevant to this study of Butler's work, but so is the motif of the slave's quest for forbidden education (Govan 82-83). For example,

Dana also discovers the contempt Weylin has for her because she is 24 an educated black, and she experiences the same contempt from her fellow blacks.

When she explains that she taught school in New York, she is called a "nigger teacher" by Sarah's husband Nigel. Later she is brutally beaten by Tom Weylin when she is caught teaching Nigel how to read and write (107). Dana also discovers how plantation life affects the wife of the slave master; consequently, Margaret

Weylin has "no viable authority" (Govan 90) and is only typically accorded the respect of being put on a pedestal by her husband.

Regarding Butler's handling of the slave memoir as a narrative device to describe the slaves'--and ultimately Dana's--experiences of life in Antebellum Maryland, Govan asserts:

The large, panoramic slice-of-plantation life we see

in this segment of the novel is deftly handled "faction,"

that blend of authentic verifiable historical fact and

well-rendered fiction. Butler treats the recurring themes

of casual brutality, forceable separation of families, the

quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous

work loads expected of slaves as effectively as any of the

narratives or documentary histories discussing the slavery

experience. (Melus 90) 25

Chapter Four: The Fight

Dana endures the woes of miscegenation as she recalls her relationship with Kevin before they were married. The plot shifts to a scene where Dana has evidently survived a whipping at the hands of Tom Weylin, for she finds herself on the floor of her apartment, bruised and bloodied, in the present and without Kevin.

On her fourth trip into the past, she discovers that Rufus has grown into something much worse than she feared. He is beaten senseless in a fight with a black man whose wife Rufus sexually assaulted; the woman is revealed to be her yet-to-be ancestor Alice

Greenwood.

Dana views her family's history in the making. Butler's polemical voice in the following passage emerges as Dana gives

Rufus a lesson in history concerning slavery and White-to­

White/White-to-Black relations that will have repercussions in a future yet unmade:

You're reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you'll

find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery

is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites

someone to look down on. That's history. It happened

whether it offends you or not. (140) 26

Furthermore, Dana's "history lesson" reveals that the institution of slavery has created class conflicts not only between whites and blacks but also between the rich plantation owners and poor lower class whites. As C. Vann Woodward has explained, "Slave commentary on white society provides insights on antebellum social history. Black observers were capable of shrewd perceptions of lower class deference or subservience that punctured the myth of

Herrenvolk democracy--the equality of all whites" (The Slave's

Narrative 57). Dana tries to make Rufus understand how the complex aspects of slavery--"perpetual class warfare" (Woodward 57)-­ affect all who are involved.

Dana is reunited with her husband Kevin later but only after she is beaten again and nearly sold into slavery to Rufus; Rufus is rejected by Dana in much the same fashion as Alice rejected him.

Thus, "The Fight" chapter ends with both Kevin and Dana being transported back into the future after a near-death encounter with a rifle-toting Rufus who desires Dana for more than a mentor and teacher; he now lusts for her as he did for her ancestor-to-be Alice.

Chapter Five: The Storm

Dana finds herself once again transported into the past, in the midst of a rainstorm, and discovers a drunken and older-vthouqh 27 still foolish--Rufus Weylin beneath her feet. Dana witnesses not only the slaves' appreciation of their plight but their acceptance of who and what they are despite any deprecation by their masters.

Carrie reveals this truth to her:

Carrie made quick waving aside gestures, her expression

annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my

face with her fingers--wiped hard. I drew back, and she

held her fingers in front of me, showed me both sides. But

for once, I didn't understand. Frustrated, she took me by

the hand, and led me out to where Nigel was chopping

firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-

rubbing gesture, and he nodded 'She means it doesn't

come off, Dana,' he said quietly 'The black. She means

the devil with people who say you're anything but what

you are.' (224)

What is even more monumental for Dana is the birth of Alice's daughter--and Dana's great-grandmother--Hagar. The end of the chapter is a tragic one in that Rufus threatens to sell the rest of her children if she--and Dana--will not be his concubines. After being blamed for the selling of a black woman slave's husband, Dana cuts her wrists and instantly and rather painfully returns back to

1976. 28

Chapter SiX: The Rope

As Dana reappears for the sixth and final time into the past, she finds in a barn the lifeless body of Alice at the end of a noose.

Her ancestor has committed suicide because Rufus tricked her into believing that he had sold her children into slavery. Now he turns his lustful desire toward Dana, for he wants to keep her in the past to replace Alice as his concubine and tells her "You're so much like her, I can hardly stand it...You were one woman...you and her. One woman. Two halves of a wholel" (257). To save herself, she kills

Rufus, and for the "final time she is whisked back to the future-­ without her left arm, because Rufus held on to it during his death throes.

The Prologue brings us full circle as Dana and Kevin make their journey to modern-day Talbot County, Maryland. Dana discovers that all of Rufus' slaves, with exceptions of Nigel, Carrie and Sarah and his daughter Hagar and son Joe, were sold into slavery. Her great­ grandmother Hagar had remained in Baltimore lived long enough "for the Fourteenth Amendment to free her" (263). Dana herself has come full circle and she has come to grips with her heritage. As

George Lukacs, in The Historical Novel, has said in stressing the importance of the "dramatic character of action," Dana's vivid depiction of her own personal experience in the life as a slave and 29

Butler's rendering of Kindred create a splendid blend of action,

drama, fantastic literature and slave autobiography. While many of

her critics, many of whom are science fiction and science fantasy

purists, argue that the novel functions more as historical fiction in that it "increases the historical awareness of the decisive role

played in human progress by the struggles of classes in history is

specifically historical and not mere costumery" (Lukacs 19, 27-28), this is not necessarily an inaccurate or even unfair appraisal of

Kindred because it reveals these elements of concern to Lukacs. Yet, the novel should also be viewed as a work of the fantastic even though Butler chooses not to offer technical explanations of Dana's time traveling. Dana does witness, though rather sorrowfully, the

progress of her ancestors, Wl10 were both Black and White. By her

odyssey into her family's past, readers are made aware of the racial,

social, sexual and political issues, exemplified within Govan's

recurring historical patterns of slaves and their narratives, in a

manner characteristic of a slave's narrative through Butler's use of imagery, diction and polemical voice. Butler may be telling us that

by evoking and examining our pasts we can best examine ourselves in the present and gain enlightenment and put the past into a better perspective. As Monteverde's river analogy holds, we do not want

history to "literally slip through our 'fingers like water" (59), for 30

Butler's craft "recreates and redresses the historically significant in a new light" (Govan 95). CHAPTER III

RACE, GENDER, AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN WILDSEED

As Kindred conveys the continuity of past and present created

in the form of a slave narrative combined with science fantasy in

order to focus attention on the history and culture of Black people,

Wild Seed, Butler's Patternist novel, informs readers that science

fiction does not so conventionally have to begin in some far-flung

future time nor take place on an alien world in a distant galaxy. The

novel's setting is in the not-too-distant past and it still maintains a focus on Black history and culture. What is significant about Wild

Seed is that it is more a work of science fiction than Kindred. Wild

Seed is a novel that is 'filled with characters possessing nearly

unlimited superhuman psychic powers; they are mutants, or members of a group that is technically called Homo Superior. Sandra Govan describes them as " people with nascent or lateral mutant abilities who know things or hear things or see things others cannot" (Melus

83); they are also beings who interact with each other and normal human beings, and their interactions are placed wlthln the historical

31 32 setting of the seventeenth-century slave trade; furthermore, a specific relatlonshlp between the novel's two main characters, Doro and Anyanwu, frames the plot. The wilderness of West Africa and the colonial frontier of America during the slave era are the settings

Butler uses for "history and cultural anthropology do more than simply illuminate the text or serve as mere coloration" (Melus 82).

Additionally, Butler utilizes the historical and cultural texts of

Black people's relationships with each other and with White people, whether superhuman or not, to permit her "to employ a more original approach to the old theme of the trials of immortality, the theme of the spiritual disintegration of the man who cannot die" (82). It is these relationships and the author's use of science fiction themes, action and character that best reveal the lessons about historical realities to readers.

Book One: Covenant 1690 :

Wild Seed deals with loneliness, alienation, power and love.

As the novel opens with "Covenant 1690", one of the novel's two main characters, Doro, is introduced. He is a four-thousand-year old

Nubian mutant who searches for hls people in the wilds of the West

African wilderness and encounters Anyanwu. Doro has the uncanny ability to use his senses to "track" any and all of his people. He has 33 searched for many months to find hls people, only to discover that slavers had ravaged his village and taken many of them into bondage.

Doro is immortal but his immortality is based on one deadly

precedent; he has the ability to change bodies as people change

clothes by reflexively killing the hosts in the process whenever the

body he presently inhabits is exposed to life-threatening danger. He searches for the genetic "wild seed," those poor souls who are tormented, sometimes to a point of insanity, by their mutant psychic abilities. Furthermore, Doro's abilities make him not only a form idable threat but also feared and hated by those whom he seeks;

nevertheless, Doro himself fears no one. His goal is to use the genetic seeds, "people too valuable to be casually killed" (Wild Seed

13), to create a race of Homo Superior; and, once he has bred them,

he will rule them all. "Eugenics", tile science and methodology of

improving the quality of the human race through selective breeding,

is a topic in many science fiction stories, and Butler uses it (though she offers no scientific explanations) in conjunction with the theme of miscegenation; incidentally, Doro's goals, as Sandra Govan posits,

are far 'from altruistic for he needs his people in a

very special way. He enjoys their company and, sadly,

they provide his most satisfying "ki lis"... he transfers

his psychic essence to any human host; thus he he kills 34

to live... he literally feeds off the spirit of the host body

and gains more sustenance from the host body of one of

his own people than from ordinary non-mutant human

beings. (Melus 83)

Doro is also not necessarily interested in the specific racial

heritage of the genetic seeds but only in their mutant potential necessary to create his new race of Homo Superior. Nonetheless,

Doro and people like him are treated "in their home communities... as

misfits or outcasts or "witches" because of their abilities" (Govan

83).

The novel's opening sequence effectively conveys Doro's character and his "subtle awareness" (Govan 83) of the kindred spirit he finds in Anyanwu as well as the place and setting:

He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as

he had arrived--alone, unarmed, without supplies,

accepting the savanna and later the forest as easily

as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several

times--by disease, by animals, by hostile people.

This was a harsh land. Yet he continued to move

southwest, unthinkingly veering away from the section

of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while,

he realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his 35

seed village that drove him. It was something new--an

impulse, a feeling, a kind of mental undertow pulling at

him. (3)

As Doro is made more and more aware of her presence, readers are also subtly informed about powers:

Anyanwu's ears and eyes were far sharper than those of

other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliber­

ately after the 'first time men cam e stalking her,

their machetes ready, their intentions clear. She

had to kill seven times that terrible day--seven

frightened men who could have been spared--and

she had nearly died herself, all because she let

people come upon her unnoticed. Never again. (4)

Using the ancient myths of the "Earth Mother Goddess", Butler also makes readers aware of Anyanwu's other abilities in subtle fashion:

Giving no outward sign, she went on tending her garden.

There were weeds among her coco yams and her herbs.

The herbs were not traditional ones grown or gathered

by her people. Only she grew them as medicines for

healing, used them when people brought their sick to her.

Often she needed no medicines, but she kept that to her­

self. She served her people by giving them relief from 36

pain and sickness. Also, she enriched them by allowing

them to spread word of her abilities to neighboring

people. She was an oracle. A woman through whom a

god spoke. (4)

Characteristically, Anyanwu is the Earth/Mother Goddess of her people; furthermore, Butler employs the African mythology of the

Onitsha/lbo culture. Richard Henderson, an ethnologist, explains, in

The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha and Ibo Society and Culture, that Onitsha society was "a community strongly concerned with maintaining oral accounts of the past and they lacked an elaborate mythology as its cultural charter, and instead emphasized a quasi-historical ideology based on stories tracing the founding of its villages to prehistoric migrations and political fusions" (31). This notion is made particularly evident in Wild Seed when, after they meet, Doro and Anyanwu discuss each other's origins and historical roots. After he reveals that he is immensely old, Anyanwu inquires about who Doro's people were. Doro replies:

They were called Kush in my time. I was born to them,

but they have not been my people for perhaps twelve

times as long as you have been alive. When I was thirteen

years old, I was separated from them. Now my people are

those who give me their loyalty. (7) · 37

He also informs Anyanwu of her people's origins as he knew them

during antiquity:

Your people have crossed the Niger--he hesitated,

frowning, then gave the river its proper name--the

Orimuli. When I first saw them last, they lived on

the other side in Benin. (8)

Anyanwu replies:

We crossed long ago...children born in that time have

grown old and died. We were Ado and Idu, subject

to Benin before the crossing. Then we fought the

Benin and crossed the river to Onitsha to becom e

free people, our own masters. (8-9)

Thus, Butler's narrative here reveals "the embedded signs of

heritage and culture" (Govan 84) and Doro's immortality. Equally

im portant, Anyanwu's reply to Doro "com presses years of African

history, years of tribal warfare and tribal development, years of

gradual adaptation to change" (84).

The historical and sociological aspects which support the notions of tribal--and also cultural--development, especially where it concerns the Black female's interactions in African society, are explained by Robert Staples, in The Black Woman in America. and they are related to Anyanwu's and Doro's origins. He states his 38 position:

The roles of women in African societies--many of

which were male-dom inated--were im portant. Many

females helped to politically organize various tribal

societies and this fact has been recorded by early

travelers to the West African regions. (11)

Consequently, the roles of women in ancient Africa foreshadowed the roles of women in America "from the very moment they were brought to the shores of America. Anyanwu, because of her unexplained inbred power as a "goddess" (she has the amazing mutant ability to change her shape into any form male or female-­ human or animal), has the wherewithal to contribute to and participate in the development and survival of the Onitsha people in

Wild Seed. Also, I would argue that she best exemplifies a kind of model, though somewhat mythic and superior, for the roles assumed by Black women, roles which were "fashioned out of the racial and sexual oppression they endured and the need to assume the task of

Black survival" (Staples 11); she reflects the historical reality of the nature of the treatment of Black women speclflcally and of Black people generally in American society. Anyanwu is not a typical

Earth/Mother Goddess because she is more than an oracle, a healer and protectress of the Onitsha; she is also a willing participant in 39 tile survival of her own culture; she shares the same kind of self­ reliant attributes as the real-life women who were reputed to have founded the Ashanti, Wenchi, Mampong and Nigerian societies.

Nevertheless, like Doro, Anyanwu suffers from loneliness and alienation, for she is also long-lived--she reveals to Doro that she is several centuries old--and that on many occasions she has endured the fear and hatred her people express towards her.

Doro, on the other hand, represents something even more than human. He is ruthless and often fatally dispassionate in his dealings with either mutants or normal human beings. While he asserts his role as the so-called progenitor of the mutants and seeks to raise them as hls "children", he is not morally capable of adhering consistently to tile African credo ("children are worth") which

Anyanwu lives by. Furthermore, Doro states in Wild Seed that

"som etimes a child must be sacrificed" (36), and he punishes one of his people who made the mistake of crossing him by stealing the body of an innocent child (35); thus, Doro's statement reveals his inherent ruthlessness. Margaret A. O'Connor characterizes Doro as

"the powerful masculine hunter whose survival is based on his predatory instincts, his capacity to kill not only enemies but all whose deaths can best serve the dynasty he dreams of founding"

(pictionary of Literary Biography 36, 40). Anyanwu calls him an 40

"abomination" (14) as Doro exercises his deadly powers and deems her abilities as gentle. Anyanwu nonetheless tells him "you are a spirit!" (12), and her statem ent echoes Butler's em ploym ent of the changeling theme that is extant within both African and Western cultures:

He was like an obanje, an evil child spirit born to one

woman again and again, only to die and give the mother

pain. A woman tormented by an obanje could give birth

many times and still have no living child. But Doro was

an adult. he did not enter and re-enter his mother's

womb. He did not want the bodies of children. He

preferred to steal the souls of men. This man was

far more unusual than she was. This man was not

not a man. (12 -13)

Butler's blend of African myths and ethos with the science fiction them e of psychic mutation and selective breeding best establishes

Doro's and Anyanwu's character. Furthermore, this blend reveals that the notions of African mythology also express the im portance of children and family as "Anyanwu's sense of protection and concern for her people is part of the African ethos which pervades the text"

(Govan 85). Henderson also asserts, 41

The Onitsha are rooted in the notions of filiation and

descent. When Onitsha people assess the career of a

person, their primary criterion is the number of children

he has raised to support and survive him. Children are

extolled in proverbs above any other good, even above the

accumulation of wealth; 'children first, wealth follows'

is a proverb affirm ing the route to success. (Henderson 10)

Notwithstanding, Doro threatens the very traditions he knows

Anyanwu strongly em bodies; thus, he has a psychological advantage over her. He desires to take her away with him from her native

Africa to the New World. Doro's proposition to Anyanwu is a terrifying one: he will not kill any of her descendant children if she agrees to help him create offspring that will be as long-lived and powerful as he and Anyanwu. Doro appeals to her "innate sense of isolation and loneliness, proclaiming her place is among her own kind" and also to her "maternity spirit" (Govan 85). The Nubian tells her:

A mother should not have to watch her children grow old

and die. If you live, they should live. It is the fault of

their fathers that they die. Let me give you chlldren who

will live! (26) 42

Readers will discover that Doro is a character who is "totally devoid of scruples... but possesses a keen insight into Anyanwu's psychological makeup" as he employs "a time-encrusted masculine ploy" when he decides to take her to one of his seed villages in

America and thus control her fate once she is brought there:

She had already assumed he wanted her for his wife.

This was a natural assumption to take make. He had

been asking himself which of his people she should be

mated with first, but now he knew he would take her

himself--for a while at least. He often kept the most

powerful of his people with him for a few months...if

they were children, they learned to accept him as a

father. If they were men, they learned to accept him

as master. If they were women, they accepted him best

as lover or husband. (20)

In Doro's view, Anyanwu's best role in his new society will be primarily that of a concubine; he seeks, therefore, to impregnate her.

Anyanwu would like to serve him as lover and mistress but never be on equal terms with him:

Her independence would vanish without a struggle. She

would do whatever he asked then to keep her child safe.

She was too valuable to kill, and if he abducted any of her 43

descendants, she would no doubt goad him into killing her.

But once she was isolated in America with an infant to care

for, she would learn submissiveness. (27)

Anyanwu, who in her native land was worshiped as a goddess, will not be accorded that same respect by the psychically vampiric Doro for he only expects from her total subservience to him shown by other people, both human or mutant and men or women, who fear him.

As a consequence, an underlying insecurity on Doro's part begins to grow the more he gets to know about the Sun woman and her incredible powers. As Anyanwu stands firm and resilient in her regard for the "historical legacy of appropriate manners" (Govan

86), it can be argued that Doro's growing anxiety rests in the distinctions that her shape-shifting and healing abilities are most formidable and, most importantly, that she is not predatory.

Anyanwu only kills when absolutely necessary; thus, her instinct for--and actions of--self-preservation are justifiable:

I took shapes to frighten people when they wanted to

kill me... 1became a leopard and spat at them ...then I

became a sacred python, and no one dared to harm me.

The python brought me luck. We were needing rain

then to save the yam crop, and while I was a python,

the rains came. The people decided the magic was good 44

and it took them a long time to want to kill me again. (15)

This passage also echoes her estranged people's fear and reverence of her. Anyanwu and Doro indeed share this, and nevertheless she is not the typical Earth Mother Goddess of Onitsha myth. When faced with the possibility of her descendant children's, namely Nweke's and Okoye's, destruction at Doro's hands and being unaware of his plans for her, Anyanwu risks her personal welfare and freedom for her people and she negotiates with the Nubian immortal for their right to existence in the New World; Anyanwu also bargains for the lives of the "defective stock" that Doro finds to be the most satisfying kills.

According to Dorothy Allison in "The Future Female," Anyanwu represents a type of character like so many of Butler's superwomen who "are always in some form of bondage, captives of domineering male mutants or religious fanatics who want to im pregnate them"

(Village Voice 67-68), and thus we see here a historical parallel with the slave era concerning the interactions between Black men and women. Doro assumes the role of an ultimate "slave master" in much the same fashion as his white counterparts in seventeenth­ century America. He raises seed villages on plantations, to conceal his eugenics program from the prying eyes of any potential enemies, and he uses his deadly powers to threaten the existence of those he 45 dom inates. He also uses Anyanwu's steadfast beliefs in the social and cultural tenets of Onitsha society to hls advantage when he threatens to destroy her Homo Superior kinsmen, and he seeks to make her his concubine her once she is in America. This nation also parallels the historical precedent Angela Davis cites in her article

"Reflections of the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves" in that Black females were "subjected to the most elemental form of terrorism distinctly suited for the female: rape" (13). Granted,

Doro does not attempt to rape Anyanwu in the sexual sense and he fears that she will make him destroy her as she suspects that she is an enormous asset to his selective breeding program, yet the program's very existence in Wild Seed reflects the historical reality in which tile slave master purchased breeders to raise the population of his slaves for both his economic needs and for his own lustful desires. Many white slave owners often employed illicit sex to punish female slaves who resisted their power; thus,

"unacknowledged miscegenation" (Govan 91) was a reality during the slave era. While rape of the Black female was a constant during the period; so too was the master's selling of the children she had borne and the disrespect he had for the maintenance of the Black family unit; many slave children were sold for the masters's profit to keep the slaves in check and also to maintain his authority and power over 46 them. To a certain extent, Doro uses the same tactics on Anyanwu: he demands that she mate with his son, Isaac, a mutant telekinetic he created when he was in the body of one of his former white associates that he had taken. She must also mate with Doro's other

"children" within his seed community in Wheatley, Maryland--and his other thralls. Consequently, his power and authority make him

"master" in the most pejorative sense.

Notwithstanding, this reality in the novel does not invalidate the kind of heroism Anyanwu represents, nor is she in any way defeated by the Nubian, for "Butler's women are forced painfully to confront the difference between surrender and adjustment" (Allison

67); death becom es the fate of those who give up while the resistors "struggle, adjust and live by their own ethical standards and survive to mother the next generation--Iiterally to make the next world" (68). Anyanwu wants to spare the mutant children whom Doro considers to be defective stock. Thus, it is her elemental love and compassion for life that will save them from him; Anyanwu is the "embodiment of the feminist ideal and compassionate exercise of power. Her capacity for love is both her strength and greatest point of vulnerability" (O'Connor 40).

As "Covenant 1641" closes, Isaac, who loves Doro in his own way, beckons to Anyanwu to humanize the Nubian, for he feels that 47 his ruthless father is not totally incapable of humanity:

It is not yet real to him. Don't you see? He has lived

for thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the son

of God of most white people in the colonies, was born,

Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always

been temporary for him--wives, children, friends, even

tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but

him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make

him know you're not like everyone else--make him feel

it. Prove it to him for a while... reach out to him ... make

him know he's not alone anymore! (129)

Isaac also asks her to submit to Doro to keep him from "ever making animals out of us"; furthermore, he tells her "When I hear you speak of him, I think you love him more than he loves you ... he might turn out to be what you need as I think you're what he needs" (130). Yet,

Anyanwu comes to this conclusion during her trip to America:

She knew how slaves felt as they lay chained on the

bench, the slaver's hot iron burning into their flesh. In

her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She could

no longer deny it. Doro's mark had been on her from the

day they met. She could break free of him only by dying and

sacrificing her children and leaving him loose upon the 48

world to become even more of an animal. So much of what

Isaac said seemed to be right. Or was it her cowardice, her

fear of Doro's terrible way of killing that made his words

seem so reasonable? How could she know? Whatever she

did would result in evil. (130-131)

Butler again makes it evident that Anyanwu is not the typical

Onitsha/lbo Earth Mother Goddess suggested by tile lore and legend.

Because of her choices, Anyanwu's is one of many of Butler's strong and complex Black women.

It is important to note that Butler does not suggest Doro only enthralls Black females. He enslaves other individuals, especially those who are not Homo Superior, along with those who have very limited or even any uncontrollable psychic abilities, in order to raise his mutant children.

Book Two: Lot's Children 1741 :

This section begins the middle of Wild Seed; more than one hundred years has passed. As Doro checks on tile care of one of his mutant daughters, readers are introduced to Lann Sloane and his wife, who are both suggested to be Doro's "children" and he considers them to be his newest "wild seed" because they are both unstable telepaths. Lann's wife, incidentally, mirrors Margaret 49

Weylin's character in Kindred for she, in much the same fashion as

Margaret felt for Dana Franklin, fears and hates Anyanwu's

"blackness and power" (137) and is allowed no viable authority or power in Doro's plantation households. In fact, no mutant, whether psychically stable or not, are expected to obey Doro even if they have any economic power. Thus, the Sioanes' usefulness in life on the plantation is quite limited; Doro even considers Lann to be good prey.

They are charged only with raising Doro's other mutant offspring and obeying Anyanwu's wishes and authority. Many characters in the novel are more or less sympathetic and child-like as well as heroic and admirable. Isaac and Anyanwu are mated together, and through such a liaison he comes to respect and to a certain extent supports her admonition against Doro. Francis Smith Foster notes "one way in which Butler's women will compensate for their physical limitations is by forming liaisons with persons of power"

(Extrapolation 43). These liaisons are formed in much the same way, for example, that abolitionists, many of whom were White and affluent, allied themselves with people such as Sojourner Truth or

Frederick Douglass to fight against slavery in the Old South during the Civil War. Further, the activity is analogous to the manner in which the liberal community in America, which was predominately

White, added its polemical voice in allegiance with many Blacks who 50 were involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

The novel's middle section reveals how Anyanwu's and Doro's feelings have changed for one another. She hates the Nubian and he tries to fathom the root of her hatred:

She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an

enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could

hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever known. She was

alive because of Isaac...now and then Doro tried to

penetrate her polite, aloof hostility, tried to break her,

bring her back to what she was when he took her from

her people. He was not accustomed to people resisting

him, not accustomed to their hating him. The woman was

a puzzle he had not yet solved. (139).

The passage dramatically reveals the deterioration of Doro's and

Anyanwu's relationship and the growing enmity they mutually feel.

The middle section also reveals another, though short-lived, alliance between Anyanwu and one of Doro's other mutant sons,

Thomas. Apparently, in Doro's new society, when mutants undergo tile "transition" phase of their psychic growth and development, they become violently and psychically intolerable to their parents--and to those in particular with "latent" genetic potential who are. powerless to bring their own offspring through the phase. In fact, 51 many latent parents suffer psychic abuse themselves or abuse their own offspring. Thomas, who hates both Doro and Black people, is an individual with latent telepathic powers whom Doro charges

Anyanwu to mate with while simultaneously and purposely disregarding her marriage to Isaac and the family that they have raised; incidentally, this notion also reflects the historical truth in which White slave-owners disregarded and disrespected the Black family. "Lot's Children" offers a bleak mosaic of the social realities of hatred and racial prejudice between Whites and Blacks in eighteenth-century America:

Race prejudice was growing deeply in the colonies-­

even in this formerly Dutch colony things had once been

so casual. Earlier in the year, there had been mass

mass executions at New York city. Someone had been

setting fires and the whites decided it must be the

blacks. On little or no evidence, thirty-one blacks

were killed--thirteen of them were burned at the

stake. Doro was beginning to worry about this upriver

town. Of all his English colonial settlements, only in

this one did his Blacks not have the protection of

powerful White owners. (143) 52

At first, like the Sioanes, Thomas feared and hated Anyanwu, not only because of her powers but also because of her race. However, he adjusts to the idea of what Anyanwu is and, after she displays her shape-changing abilities, he respects her. Thomas shares the same feelings toward Doro with one exception: he does not resist Doro as willfully as she does. Tragically, nevertheless, Doro takes Thomas' body to punish her for her disobedience and defiance. As Thomas heroically stood up to his ruthless father before he was killed, he

"bought Anyanwu's life" (174) with his own, and thus Thomas is redeemed even as Doro cruelly inquires of Anyanwu "What will I have to do next to teach you to obey?" (175).

Book Two ends with Isaac's death of old age; Anyanwu flees

Doro's seed community and becomes a dolphin to live among the creatures in the ocean. It is her hope to never return to the world of humans. She also never wants to be found by Doro ever again lest he destroy any more mutually-beneficent relationships. Doro seeks

Anyanwu not to enslave her but to destroy her.

Book Three: Canaan 1840 :

In 1840, the starting point of the final section of Wild Seed, it is revealed that another hundred years have passed and that Anyanwu's and Doro's children have all perished due to the Revolutionary War 53 and the War of 1812. Doro senses Anyanwu, who is at present in the guise of an elderly White man named Edward Warrick, in the

Avoyelles Parish in the state of Louisiana. Doro later discovers

Warrick's true identity when he visits a Louisiana plantation run by mutants and, before he decides to kill Anyanwu for her flight, he discovers that the mutants running her own plantation are racially diverse "superior human children" (203). Anyanwu has created her own version of a seed village run benignly and without Doro's sadism. Sadly, however, while America has gained its independence the presence of servile oppression and racism is much stronger.

This historical reality is best revealed in Anyanwu's conversation with Doro after they meet again:

Haven't you seen the men slaves in this country

who are used for breeding? They are never permit­

ted to learn what it means to be a man. They are

not permitted to care for their children. Among my

people, children are wealth they are better than

money, better than anything. But to these men,

warped and twisted by their masters, children

are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other

men. One thinks he is greater than another because

he has more children. Both exaggerate the number 54

of women Wl10 have borne them children. neither is

doing anything a father should for his children, and

the master who is indifferently selling off his own

brown children is laughing and saying, 'You see?

Niggers are animals!' (215)

Anyanwu's narrative stands as Butler's commentary on the issues of racism and power. She asserts pol em ically that Black people, especially Black men, had no viable social or economic authority and power even in their own households--since Blacks were deemed only servile property--during slavery. Black men's responsibilities were limited to working the land, or toiling in some other menial capacity for their masters and breeding more slaves; incidentally, Black women, on the other hand, were allowed more freedom than their male counterparts on the plantation in much the same fashion depicted in Kindred and more particularly in many historic slave narratives. While many of the recorded slave narratives presented views of what life on the plantation was like, they also revealed the multiple roles of Black women: they were either wives, mothers, or sexual consorts (to either Black males or their White masters). Additionally, many were also charged with raising the slave master's own children as well as their own.

Anyanwu's statement speaks not only to the issue of racism, and the 55 underlying sexism, but also to the issue of the power struggle between Black patriarchy and matriarchy still prevalent within the modern American family structure. The institution of slavery in the

Old South created the effect whereby Black male slaves could only delight in their professed sexual prowess, another allusion Butler makes is to the Black male sexual myths, but nothing more because they had no power. The effects of slavery are far-reaching even later as Black women suffered 'from a racist and sexist ideology which sought to ascribe their "place" in society imposed on them by both Black and White males.

Butler challenges her readers with a romanticized and gripping blend of the racial memories of African and American history, culture, and even myth with science fiction, and it is clear that the strength of the human spirit and determination can neutralize slavery and dominance. Nearly one-hundred and fifty years have passed before the novel's two most strong-willed and powerful characters come to terms about each other and the forces at work about them. Doro must "salvage what humanity remains to him" if he is to ever regain and maintain the Sun Woman's companionship (Govan 88). He relinquishes his desire to destroy her for her willfulness and defiance of him as she demands that he stop his predation of his children and hers and allow her to be free from 56 his dominance or she will simply lie down and die. Anyanwu informs

Doro that Isaac was foolish in believing that she could save Doro's humanity. She admits "I cannot save it. It's already dead" (276); nevertheless, readers are made aware that Doro needs Anyanwu more than she needs him. This is most evident when he tells her "I tried hard to make myself kill you ... it would be easier than trying to change you" (253). The two later psychically meld with each other, and Anyanwu is made aware of Doro's "hunger" for her, not out the need to kill but out of the need for her love and com panionship and the need to have "allies not rivals" (258). The price for such things is Doro's respect for her autonomy and her children, as she tells Doro that as a thrlvlnq super society "they should learn to help themselves" (268) and strength of will, and perhaps more importantly, a reciprocation of his love. They rebuild their old alliance based on mutual respect and compromise instead of mutual brutality and destruction. At the novel's end, Doro concedes to

Anyanwu's wishes and cooperates with her to threaten her mutant children, defective or not, no more. On this basis, they both ensure the survival of the new society and thus the struggle for power is abated. Doro is pleased that Anyanwu will remain at his side as co­ overseer of the ascendance of the race of Homo Superior alive and as equals. 57

Butler attributes a great deal of real, effervescent human substance to the characters and their interactions with one another in Wild Seed. Her characters are individuals of depth and wonder.

The themes she employs challenge readers with a unique exarnlnation of the lessons of historical realities that reaches from the past into the present period by juxtaposing Black history and culture with mainstream history and culture in America. CHAPTER IV

KINSHIP AND RACE IN MINDOFMYMIND

As Wild Seed begins the saga of the origin of Doro and

Anyanwu's new society of psychically superior men and women during the era of slavery on both the African and the American continents, the next novel, Mind of My Mind. continues the saga of

Homo Superior into the latter half of the late twentieth century. An even more appropriate name is given to this new society, for they are called "Patternists", due to the fact that these mentally superior humans are enmeshed within the mental network called the

"Pattern"; furthermore, many of this novel's characters are in the network not by choice but because they were drawn into it like moths to flame by the novel's protagonist Mary. Two of the principal characters from Wild Seed are also present. Nearly one hundred years after the events in Wild Seed, the Nubian mutant Doro is still selectively breeding the new society covertly. Anyanwu, whose name has been changed to Emma--which means "grandmother"-­ reappears in the novel as well to ensure the safety and protection of her descendants and Doro's. Readers will learn that many of the

58 59 characters in this novel, especially tile women, are llhealers, teachers, and artists," as noted by Francis Smith Foster

(Extrapolation 47); this Patternist saga is set in Forsyth, California and focuses on the emergence of not only Patternist society but also the growth of the super-telepathic character Mary Larkin, who links the new society by weaving and ensnaring it within the psychic

Pattern. Readers are given a panoramic view of life in suburban Los

Angeles and the life of a diverse group of superior beings who are either Black or White; the themes of miscegenation, racism and power are integral to theme, character, action and the setting of

Mind of My Mind. creating "a serious confrontation between conflicting manifestations of power... and the resolution of basic questions concerning race that are vital to the overall theme"

(Foster 43). The relationships between the mutant characters-­ particularly within the First Family of psychically superior beings-­ and also their actions in the novel are important in the examination of power and race issues. They best provide a klnshlp with the

"mutes" (the normal non-telepathic Homo Sapiens who represent the old values of American mainstream society) and the events in history to satisfy Butler's need to create a form of multi-cultural society in her science fiction. 60

The novel, sectioned into three parts, begins with a prologue as

Doro seeks out Rina, once his wife, now an alcoholic and a prostitute, to appraise Mary's growth and development. Doro, who presently inhabits the body of a White man, promptly kills her

"guest" and steals his body. Doro is angered because he learns that

Rina has been beating Mary. Butler employs the theme of child abuse and alcoholism in the novel, but with a twist. Rina not only beats

Mary because of her drunkeness but also because of Rina's psychic intolerance to Mary's presence; her daughter's genetic and Psi, telepathic and telekinetic, powers makes this impossible. Rina is oblivious to the actual reason for this fact and Doro is not. Rina's intolerance and Mary's emerging powers of telepathy are foreshadowed as Doro states:

She (Mary) is part of my latest attempt to bring

my active telepaths together. I'm going to try to

mate her with another telepath without killing

either of them. And I'm hoping that she and the

boy I have in mind are stable enough to stay

together without killing each other. That will be

a beginning. (17)

Doro asserts that Mary's role in the new society will be to create the psychic web to hold them all together. Thus, Doro sees Mary--in 61 much the same fashion as the Onitsha credo--as something of great worth, but it is the power that she will bring him and not any altruistic reasons for her growth and development that motivates

Doro. He also wishes to "keep her in line" (19) in much the same way he tried with Emma when she was Anyanwu in Wild Seed. As a consequence, Emma, who is the novel's second near-godlike figure next to Doro, is charged with raising Doro's daughter instead of having Mary's own abusive mother do so.

Part One:

Butler gives a view of life in the city of Forsyth in Mary's narrative, and we learn that Mary lives her life as a "ghetto" child of the streets. Here is how she surveys the city's setting:

Forsyth was a dead town. Rich people, old people,

mostly white. Even the southwest side, where we

lived, wasn't a ghetto--or at least not a racial ghetto.

It was full of poor bastards from any race you want

to name --all working like hell to get out of there.

Except us. Rina had been out, Doro told me, but she

had come back. I never thought my mother was very

bright. (25) 62

It can be said that Butler is also suggesting the need or desire for

Black people to leave the ghetto, which in American society is usually considered a racial one and predom inately Black, to seek fame and fortune (this is reminiscent of the "promised land" of the

"American Dream") and assimilate into mainstream White society.

Also, Mary's sentiments concerning statements speak to the failures many Blacks have made in the attempt. Another theme--Doro's denial of his humanity--echoes a historical precedent whereby many members in the Black bourgeoisie on occasion denied any "inside" ties to their own racial identity in an attempt to preserve their status and find acceptance in mainstream White society. Doro's denial is particularly evident in his conversation with Mary, who inquires about his origins:

[Mary]: Who were your people?

[Doro]: They had another name then, but you would call

them Nubians.

[Mary]: Black people!

[Doro]: Yes

[Mary]: God! You're white so much of the time, I never

thought you might have been born black.

[Doro]: It doesn't matter.

[Mary]: What do you mean 'It doesn't matter'? It matters 63

to me.

[Doro]: It doesn't matter because I haven't been any color

for about four thousand years. Or you could say I've been

every color. But either way, I don't have anything more

in common with black people--Nubian or otherwise--than

I do with whites or Asians.

[Mary]: You mean you don't want to admit you have anything

in common with us. But if you were born black, you are

black. Still black, no matter what color you take on.

Mary is forced to marry a White telepath named Karl Larkin, who is also not sure of Mary's or his own future. Karl reluctantly accepts his father's demands, for he, like Mary, is given no choice in the matter and is directed to monitor Mary's transition. The mentally superior mutants are called "Iatents," who Margaret

O'Connor says are "gifted in telepathic or healing powers" (DLB 37).

When they approach transition, a very painful psychic process, they become " 'actives' who can exercise their psionic powers effectively" (37), and unfortunately for many of them, Doro awaits to prey on any who may be physically more suited for his vampiric tastes. Thus Butler treats this activity as a psychic rite of passage.

After Mary is married off to Karl and subsequently moves into his manor, readers are confronted with the issue of race relations 64 between the Black and White characters. Mary is violently opposed to her being mated with Karl, and Karl is as equally opposed to such a union despite the fact that Mary is "kind of light-coffee skinned... with eyes that are traffic-light green" (30). Nevertheless,

Karl informs Mary that "you shouldn't get the idea that I dislike you because you're black... 1wouldn't want you here no matter what color you werel" (44), and their relationship as two highly developed telepaths does not begin under the best of circumstances. Despite their mutual animosity for each other, they are inextricably drawn together into a psi-link when Mary enters the final stages of her psychic transition phase, evidenced in the following passage:

Staying with her mentally, Karl opened his eyes

and moved away from her body. Something was

happening that he did not understand. She had not

been able to learn from him, but she was using him

somehow. She had ceased to protest his mental

presence. In fact, her attention seemed on something

else entirely. Her body was relaxed. Her thoughts were

her own, but they were not coherent. He could make

no sense of them. He sensed other people with her

mentally, but he could not reach them even clearly

enough to identify them ... Mary noticed him then, and 65

somehow drew him closer to her. He seemed to see

her arms reaching out, her hands grasping him, though

her body did not move. SUddenly suspicious, he tried

to break contact with her. Before he could com plete

the attempt, his universe exploded. (60)

This passage, near the end of the Part One in the novel, reveals the emergence of the Pattern. The psychic gestalt links all other

Patternists who, like Karl, are neither as powerful telepaths as Mary nor as able to break the psi-link with her. The Patternists become a psychic unit as Mary draws in other mutants who are scattered throughout most of America. This section of the novel foreshadows the upcoming confrontation between Doro and Mary as she becomes a

"madonna-like" Patternmaster. It is she who will guide the destiny of Homo Superior instead of her mutant father. Francis S. Foster states her position on the view of Mary's newly-emerged persona:

She is a "figure of courage, strength, and endurance."

As mother of the Pattern, she does give "birth and

sustenance to positive growth and advancem ent

among her people". But her people, Mary decides,

are of every race. Nor is she a stereotypical Madonna

in other ways. As a child, she would steal anything

that caught her fancy, particularly books, for she 66

declared, "If I didn't have anything to read, I'd go

really crazy" [25]. Throughout her life, Mary is

impetuous and often fights anyone who offends her,

including Doro, her father, and Karl, her husband.

Though she matures, her pugnacity remains. (45)

Part Two:

Mary inexorably reaches five other telepaths across the countryside and then draws them to her. In this section of the novel, the Patternist community grows as readers confront Seth Dana, a mutant telepath, who attempts to help his ailing, psychically-inert and latent brother, Clay, find peace from the mutant genes which wrack him with pain.

Rachel Davidson is also introduced as a Black woman character who uses her psychic abilities as a healer in a church congregation for a price (75-80). Rachel is characteristic of the kind of females

Butler says do not "struggle to make ends meet" (Conjuring 203) but exercise personal power. In Rachel's case, she does so behind the trappings of religion. Further, when we are introduced to the character Jesse Bernarr, we learn that the psychic super men and women take advantage of their abilities only at the expense of normal humans. Jesse also misuses the minds and bodies of the 67 normal human beings sexually and emotionally in the town of

Donaldton, Pennsylvania (80-85). Ada Dragan and Jan Sholto are the last of the first set of mutants who are drawn into Mary's psychic web. Both are powerful actives, and while Ada lives with an abusive husband, Jan, who is also White, has a very strong prejudice towards Black people. Consequently, she psychically attacks a Black family charged with watching the child she and Doro produced.

Butler reminds us of this unfortunate weakness present at the threshold of the growth of the thriving new society. Furthermore,

Butler handles a unique perspective on the subject of 'race' where it concerns the interactions between "mutes," normal Homo Sapiens without psychic powers of any kind, and the growing mutant society.

Doro's conversation with Emma on the the issue of the growth of the

Patternist society and Mary's power subtly reveals Butler's new use of the racial term "nigger":

[Doro]:They've completely taken over the best section

of town. They did it quietly, but still Mary thought it

safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the

police department, in-­

[Emma]: Mutes!

[Doro]: It's a convenient term. People without telepathic

voices. Ordinary people. 68

[Emma]: I know what it means, Doro. I knew the 'first

time I heard Mary use it. It means nigger! (161)

Dorothy Allison posits that both Emma's and Butler's use of the term

"nigger" is

as deliberate as her matter-of-fact handling of racism

in the everyday lives of her characters. By portraying

the "ordinary" ones as lesser people who are treated

with contempt, bred like animals (or slaves) for desirable

genetic material, and murdered as if they were not fully

human, Butler is commenting on the underlying structure

of racism. But those on top are also on the bottom. The

telepaths cannot function in normal human society; they

are prone to violence, madness, and unreasoning hatred.

Many are also black. In the early novels they are enslaved,

victimized, assaulted, and killed. In the later novels they

enslave, victimize, and kill normal humans. The nigger,

Butler suggests, is the one who's made slave/child/victim.

It is the concept of nigger, the need for a victim, and the

desire to profit by the abuse and misuse of others that

corrupts and destroys. (474)

As weaver of the Pattern, Mary draws in many more "pain-crazed people" with mutant, superior minds, and she begins to discover her 69 purpose, much to Doro's mixed feelings of delight and envy; Mary was his "experiment" created to unite his "children," and he surveys her work "with the interest of both parent and predator" (O'Connor 37).

Mary is more than Doro had hoped for:

She was a symbiont, a being living in partnership with

her people. She gave them unity, they fed her, and both

thrived. She was not a parasite, though he [Doro] had

encouraged her to think of herself as one. And though she

had great power, she was not naturally, instinctively,

a killer. He was. (217)

As Mary begins her evolution into a being of immense telepathic and psionic abilities due largely to the Pattern's growth and power, she realizes that soon she must confront Doro and possibly be destroyed by him who indeed sees her as "a complete version of him" (210).

However, as Thelma Shinn states, Butler's women "transform personal power into social power by teaching others", and Mary takes advantage of this fact. From Rachel Davidson, who is a healer and somewhat of a psychic vampire simultaneously since her powers drain off som e of the life force of her "recipients", she learns how to both heal and use the skill as a deadly weapon to prepare her for her confrontation with Doro. In much the same way "mothers are likely to teach their daughters about survival as they have been 70 taught, and daughters are likely to learn" {Veronica Mixon (Essence

13)}, Mary learns from her fellow telepaths many new skills and also augments her own psychic powers. Importantly, she also incorporates what she learns into the Pattern and dispatches that knowledge to educate and train the ever-growing population of Homo

Superior, and thus "personal power becomes social power" (Shinn

203) in Mary's gestalt. Mary is the Patternmaster of her people; she

"in one sense embodies both the aggressive strength of 001'0 and the nurturing concern of Emma" (O'Connor 38). Mary's character is a mixture of many of Butler's characters, particularly the female ones. She discovers that she can run the new society as benignly as

Anyanwu did her plantation in the Avoyelles Parish in southern

Louisiana.

Mary is representative of the novel's "perfect use of power, but not a future female monopoly nor a world of strong women alone" (47). Until 001'0 arrives to take her and Rina from this environment, readers are made aware that Mary is without the advantages that Karl Larkin has. Karl, as an affluent telepath, symbolizes the upper class, status, the ideals of wealth and prosperity though created by his own telepathic powers and the

Doro's economic influences; in addition, we are made aware that

001'0 established many businesses for his people to run as sources of 71 money (51). As Doro's son, Karl is brought up rich and powerful.

Until Mary marries Karl, survives her transition, and weaves the

Pattern, the scales of power psychically tip in her favor. Mary allies herself with Karl and other powerful male Patternists, such as

Jesse" Bernarr and Seth Dana; in fact, such alliances are evident in many of Butler's Patternist, and her non-Patternist, works. Also, just as mutual cooperation is the key to companionship and the avoidance of mutual destruction in Wild Seed. so too can the same be said for the relationships in Mind of My Mind; the men and women characters reconcile their differences with each other and work to share in the power they create to function as a new society.

Part Three:

The Patternists, who now form a powerful gestalt, decide to stand against Doro, who becomes both envious and fearful of his daughter's power; the man-god has become afraid of his child because he can no longer command the respect and fear of his people;

Mary becomes the head of the "First Family", the six actives who were brought in to form tile Pattern, and gives the Patternists the autonomy and the peace that Doro would never allow them to have.

Mary exercises her authority as a born leader; she does so without malice or fear, but with maturity and discipline as she subsumes the 72 credo of "qreat power means great responsibility" as well as great strength in great numbers. Again, Mary is not the ophidiophobe that

Doro is.

Soon Mary's Pattern grows, as she continuously brings other latent telepaths through transition, and Doro orders her to cease her actions as his envy reaches a climax. To her dismay, Mary discovers that Doro's true purpose is to take her body and thus gain untold power and total control of the Patternist gestalt. She believes this to be a confrontation that she will ultimately lose, for Doro has always been the most proficient predator of all his people. Her alliance with Karl has since transmuted to love and respect as he offers to assist her in killing Doro. His aspirations are soon shared by the other mem bers of the First Fam ily, thus setting the stage for

Mary's showdown with her Father. Mary is not wholly a Madonna but a "touqh-talklnq, hard-fighting woman who can be physically overpowered but not defeated" (Foster 45); in fact, the following scene during Mary's confrontation with Doro makes Foster's point all the more evident:

She was power J strength concentrated as Doro had

never felt it before--the strength of dozens, perhaps

hundreds of Patternists. For a moment Doro was

intoxicated with it. It filled him, blotted out all 73

thought. The fiery threads of her Pattern surrounded

him. And before... before him was a slightly smaller

replica of himself as he perceived himself through the

fading senses of his thousands of victims over the years.

Before him, where all the threads of fire met in tangle

of brilliance, was a sm all sun. (217)

Mary fights Doro to the death and uses every ounce of her being along with her "competitiveness and aggression tempered by a fine compassion" (45). Thus, Doro becomes a "Patternist and Mary's property" (220) as she consumes his soul and ancient essence.

Power and love work in unison to defeat the Nubian man-god. It is

Mary's power along with her love for Karl and all of her people which allow her to defeat, survive, and supplant Doro, and a new race stands triumphant at the threshold of its own destiny. CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN OCTAVIA BUTLER'S SCIENCE FICTION

Octavia Butler's works of science fantasy and science fiction,

Kindred. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, are

enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the

depiction of enslavement both in the present and in the

real past and in imaginary pasts and futures, and enacts

struggles for personal freedom and cultural pluralism

which redraws science fiction's cultural boundaries...

attracts new Black readers--and perhaps writers--as

Butler deploys the genre's conventions to tell stories

that speak to issues, feelings and historical truths

arising out of Afro American experience. (Crossley xviii)

Indeed, the novels discussed in this study reveal a consciousness that attracts not only followers of science fantasy and science fiction but also mainstream readers. This consciousness is not entirely or necessarily created by Butler exclusively for the enlightenment or pleasure of Black readers. General readers are

74 75 captivated by something that is considered somewhat "alien": science fiction characters who are non-stereotypical and not mostly male and White. Butler's unique blend of Afro American slave memoir coupled with the theme of time travel in Kindred is a new vehicle for presenting a focus on the experiences and the history of

Black people. Attention to Black history and culture is based on the historical continuities Butler calls to mind with characterization, action, and theme shifting between the past and the present. Dana's observations of how slavery affects everyone, including White people, and later on through her participation as a slave gives a twentieth-century Black female's slave memoir its force in Kindred.

Perhaps Dana's discovery of her familial roots and her understanding of the strictest term of "blood ties" is taken to extremes, yet this is how science fiction functions best. As John W. Campbell, Jr asserts, science fiction is "the literature of speculation as to what changes may come, and which changes will be improvements, which destructive, which merely pointless" (Critical Terms for Science

Fiction and Fantasy 109).

Butler employs the issues of race, gender, power along with the themes of eugenics, mutation, immortality, loneliness and alienation in Wild Seed. which are all set within the context of American slavery. Her science fiction characters thrive in the past and not 76 the present or some future world. They nonetheless convey the lessons of historical realities and the author's awareness of the im portance of history and transcendence via her characters' thoughts, motives, choices and actions.

Mind of My Mind depicts life in a present-day California within a covertly thriving new society of psychically superior human beings. Equally important, the novel chronicles the new society's power, personal autonomy and growth needed for it to survive.

Butler's characters provide among themselves and with readers as it is revealed that the Patternists are historically not as superior as they presume to be; they have to deal with their own foibles within their individual selves and within their growing collectivity. The characters' motives and actions provide an enriching and affective experience that allows Butler's readers to understand the Afro

American historical and cultural consciousness. Her use of mutants with nearly unlimited psychic powers, who are either Black or White in the novel, expresses a "mutant nationalism" rather than just a

"Black" nationalistic movement. This new idea is paradigmatic of the reality of the turbulent sixties that witnessed change in the attitudes toward and treatment of America's racial minorities and their strivings for power and self-reliance. It is by the author's choice that readers witness this movement through the experiences 77 of the novel's main Black protagonists, Mary and her father Doro.

Robert Crossley defines Kindred as "a fantastic travelogue" which blends uniquely time travel and the literary form of the autobiographical slave narrative. It is science fantasy which Gene

Wolf, in "What Do They Mean SF?", defines generically as "fantasy which uses the methodology of science fiction to show that these things are not only possible but probable." Also, Gary K. Wolfe denotes the term as "a generic categorization of science fiction as a branch of fantasy" (Critical Terms for Science Fiction And Fantasy

107). Her work is not considered "hard" science fiction, for Butler has openly adm itted she does not rely on the technical conventions of science in Kindred. The main character, Dana Franklin, is inexplicably "called" into the past by a ruthless White ancestor, and she guides readers through it as both observer and slave. Butler enlightens her readers by a depiction of the world Dana surveys and participates in; this past world conveys "historical and psychological realities" (Crossley, xiv) of nineteenth-century

American slavery and its effect on the people of the era. Dana enriches our consciousness and perhaps even our consciences since many of the novel's covert images are didactic on race issues about slave life. She and we are made aware of the resilience of slaves, who have "complex social and psychological relationships" with her. 78

We also learn, as Dana does, that the culture of Black slaves

"constitutes a rich human society" (Crossley xviii). Although they are enslaved, beaten and deprived of their right to history and culture, Dana's kindred such as freewoman Alice Greenwood, whom

Rufus must rape to create Dana's family's existence, and her husband

Isaac, who escapes slavery temporarily and is caught and mutilated, mute Carrie who understands that blackness is a thing to be proud of in Black people, Sarah and Nigel, who Dana educates, all draw their

"common strengths from its common suffering and anger" (Crossley xviii-xix). Butler "deepens and enriches readers' understanding of history" in that she has "designed her own underground railroad between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened imagination of the reader" (Crossley xxiii).

In her Patternist works, Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Butler's readers witness the development of the psychically powerful

"Patternists." Although many of the author's characters are predom inantly Black and/or fem ale, she "celebrates racial difference" as many of Mind of My Mind's, and also Wild Seed's, characters are racially diverse; Butler's Black characters are essential to the novel's plot and themes and her choice of predominating her novel with these characters is "a matter of course" (Crossley xviii), for race and gender as issues are 79 apparently important for the author who is herself both Black and female. Quite a few of her characters are not necessarily stock or simplistic, particularly such characters as Doro and Anyanwu in

Wild Seed. They are both complex and emotional, and they share at least one interesting quality: they persevere in their endeavors, whether for power, life or love. Doro, though he is a very powerful mutant with a deadly body-stealing ability, is capable of human feelings and desires. In fact, his presence is humanized to a certain extent by the Sun Woman Anyanwu, a mutant healer and shape­ changer, who becomes Doro's significant other. She also reveals

Doro's flaws as he fails to recognize that being human and clinging to humanity is important; this keeps us, as Doro's son Isaac says

"from truly being animals." Perhaps Doro is not wholly a monster, because he is ever drawn to Anyanwu and her strong will and compassion for all people; the trite phrase "opposites attract" is applicable here. Doro's character is generally and historically reminiscent of the Black Nationalists--Black men and women in

America who took a stand, militantly most of the time, to alleviate racist, economic and educational oppression of the 1960's and

1970's and pushed to gain social and economic autonomy, equality and power in order to make their own destiny. The same argument for Doro's character can be made, for he seeks the very same thing 80 for his people he has fathered in the New World during an historical period when it was dangerous to be different and Black people, or any other racial or ethnic minority, were considered both property and outcasts. The novel's subplot focuses on the turbulent relationship between Doro and Anyanwu, and readers learn that as love, power and alienation collide, the need for mutual reconciliation and compromise with respect and compassion are the most im portant aspects life has to offer; otherwise, the consequences are death and mutual destruction. Abuse of power and social relationships between men and women (especially those of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds) is neither necessary or desirable.

Mary Larkin, the emerging protagonist in Mind of My Mind, becomes the "mother" of Patternist society when she weaves the mental web of the Pattern. She also in turn ends the tyranny of her father/lover Doro and she supplants him in his seat of power over the community of psychic mutants. However, what separates Mary from her father Doro is the fact that she is not the psychic vampire or parasite her father is. Mary assists her people as a sym biont, and her exercise of power is derived from inner strength--her own as well as that of the multitudes of minds which are intricately linked to her in the psychic Pattern--mercy and compassion, and most of 81 all from love. She fulfills Doro's goal of establishing the Patternists without him. Mary's love for her people of this new society--in much the same fashion as Anyanwu's love for both her own descendant children and Doro's defective and inferior breeding stock--is the force that vanquishes her father. Butler's strange expression of love conquering all in this sense is both unique and ironic. The Patternists' kinship with one another becomes, in effect, as strong as the Pattern which binds them itself. A new society, and perhaps the next step in human evolution, stands at the threshold of mankind's future destiny. The events in Mind of My Mind sets up the plot and action in the next three Patternist works, Clay's Ark,

Survivor and Patternm aster.

By her use of history and culture, particularly of the Black

American aspects and portions of African and American history, mythos and culture, Octavia Butler has become the most challenging author of the genre. In 1951, science fiction writer Theodore

Sturgeon defined science fiction as "a story built around human beings with a human problem and a human solution," and so too do

Butler's stories function in this same manner. Indeed, as a teenager

Butler read many science fiction stories by Ray Bradbury, Leigh

Brackett, and Sturgeon, and her Patternist novels are loosely based on Sturgeon's More Than Human, which deals with "the coming 82 together of and growing to maturity of a group of misfit individuals with parapsychological talents into a gestalt entity with the potential not only to transcend but also to assist the human race in its survival and progress" (Masterplots 1453). What separates

Sturgeon's work from Butler's is that while her Patternist works are derived basically from the Gestalt's adventures of Sturgeon's story, the Patternists are not out to assist normal "mute" humans' survival but rather the continued growth and survival of its own

(mutant)kind. Nevertheless, it is important to note that within

Butler's Patternist novels this very point becomes evident: survival depends a great deal on mutual cooperation and human compassion if a society of any kind is to continue to progress. While Sturgeon's

Gestalt evolves into a powerful and amoral entity, Butler's characters, Patternist or even non-Patternist, must still deal with their own human foibles.

It is Butler's artistry and imaginative magic as a storyteller which make her a fascinating and fresh writer in science fantasy and science fiction. Her writing creates a "Black presence"

(Crossley xvll) in the genre. Octavia Estelle Butler is placed alongside Samuel R. Delany, who is considered the first male Afro

American writer of science fiction, because she can contribute to the enhancement of her readers' awareness and understanding of 83 that Black presence and of our human condition as well. LIST OF REFERENCES

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