Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.’

I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.’

When would I ever go home? Would I ever go home? Or if I had to stay here, why couldn’t I just turn these two kids away, turn off my conscience, and be a coward, safe and comfortable?

We both had books shelved and stacked and boxed and crowding out the furniture. Together, we would never have fitted into either of our apartments. Kevin did suggest once that I get rid of some of my books so that I’d fit into his place. ‘You’re out of your mind!’ I told him. ‘Just some of that book-club stuff that you don’t read.’ We were at my apartment then, so I said, ‘Let’s go to your place and I’ll help you decide which of your books you don’t read. I’ll even help you throw them out.’

!

My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give – and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.

‘Yeah, don’t you want to marry me?’ He grinned. ‘I’d let you type all my manuscripts.’ I was drying our dinner dishes just then, and I threw the dish towel at him. He really had asked me to do some typing for him three times. I’d done it the first time, grudgingly, not telling him how much I hated typing, how I did all but the final drafts of my stories in longhand. That was why I was with a blue-collar agency instead of a white-collar agency. The second time he asked, though, I told him, and I refused. He was annoyed. The third time when I refused again, he was angry. He said if I couldn’t do him a little favor when he asked, I could leave. So I went home.

I hate him actually

‘Her husband would have made a good Nazi. She used to joke about it – though never when he could hear.’ ‘But she married him.’ ‘Desperation. She would have married almost anybody.’

She had done the safe thing – had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid.

No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.

‘I wouldn’t bother her. It would be like hurting a baby.’ Later it would be like hurting a woman. I suspected that wouldn’t bother him at all.

She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.

Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.

The couple dispensed candy and ‘safe’ Bible verses (‘Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters . . .’). The kids got candy for repeating the verses.

‘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.’

Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.

Sorry? For what he had nearly done, or for what he was about to do? Sorry. He had apologized to me many times in many ways before, but his apologies had always been oblique, ‘Eat with me, Dana. Sarah is cooking up something special.’ Or, ‘Here, Dana, here’s a new book I bought for you in town.’ Or, ‘Here’s some cloth, Dana. Maybe you can make yourself something from it.’ Things. Gifts given when he knew he had hurt or offended me. But he had never before said, ‘I’m sorry, Dana.’