Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

I felt as though I had another hand. I tried again to look, and this time he let me. Somehow, I had to see to be able to accept what I knew was so.

Then the man, the woman, the boy, the gun all vanished. I was kneeling in the living room of my own house again several feet from where I had fallen minutes before.

Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels — perhaps the cause of them.

“All right then, you do me the courtesy of calling me what I want to be called.”

The possibility of meeting a white adult here frightened me, more than the possibility of street violence ever had at home.

Patrols. Groups of young whites who ostensibly maintained order among the slaves. Patrols. Forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan.

and now, the Proud Boys. America First members. 😡

“A patroller is … was a white man, usually young, often poor, sometimes drunk. He was a member of a group of such men organized to keep the blacks in line.”

“Then … Rufus’s fear of death calls me to him, and my own fear of death sends me home.”

He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying.

I lay sprawled on the ground under a tree. Kevin lay beside me still holding me.

😱

“You’re to go out to the cookhouse and get some supper!” she told me as I got out of her way. But she made it sound as though she were saying, “You’re to go straight to hell!”

“West,” I said bitterly. “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!”

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

I said nothing. I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman—to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one.

He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased.

Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.

I stared at it, then at the young man holding it. I kept thinking I knew him, and he kept proving to me that I didn’t.

South African whites had always struck me as people who would have been happier living in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth. In fact, they were living in the past as far as their race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt. Tom Weylin would have felt right at home.

I was afraid that even if I managed to hurt him, I wouldn’t hurt him enough to keep him from killing me. Maybe I should make him try to kill me. Maybe it would get me out of this Godawful place where people punished you for helping them. Maybe it would get me home. But in how many pieces?

In other words, he was sorry. He was always sorry. He would have been amazed, uncomprehending if I refused to forgive him. I remembered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him.

“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.”

I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite of all my talk. But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I had saved so many times. So hard to kill …