What’s New?
Welcome, newcomers and old friends! For a good part of the last weekend, I tuned out the world so I could fiddle with design templates from
and to give the Enchanted in America website and the email letter an extra touch of visual interest. This effort is probably not finished, but I’m happy with it for now. Also updated this week is The Mudroom, which provides a quick entry point and overview of the whole Enchanted in America website.The last month has enlarged and enriched this project. There are now four sections, searchable at the top of the home page. In Personal essays and Poems, the prevailing notes are lush observation and extravagant fun. Community pages feature enchanting works by other Substackers. Today’s post belongs to the newly named section, E Pluribus Unum, for the unofficial slogan of the U.S., translated: from many, one. Here is where I write about literary texts that offer insight into the making and breaking of (lower case) united states, or their cultivation and care.
Previously, the essays in this series (e.g., here, here, and here) have drawn attention to the way a mood of enchantment can relax prejudices, politics, ideologies, and other barriers, so that individuals have the sense of being part of a larger whole. But the formation of an unum (one) from a pluribus (many) is not always voluntary or uplifting. The bonds in today’s featured book are both implacable and toxic.
“Kindred”
In Octavia Butler’s 1979 sci-fi historical thriller, Kindred, a California woman from 1976 drops back into antebellum Maryland to keep an ancestor alive until he can sire her family line. But the novel is not just a paradoxical game. Because protagonist Dana is Black and her ancestor is the white son of slaveholders, trips to the past put her in literal bondage to the Weylin family. With all her knowledge of the future, the bond she cannot shake with history forces her into living as a slave.
In light of the strained and extreme political condition of the U.S. (and other areas of the world), I have been thinking about how accurately this book depicts an unwanted unum — the embeddedness of all of us in a larger historical narrative we cannot change as much as we might like. Dana has just enough agency to prevent her own existence, but not enough to protect herself or people she cares about from harm. Butler knows exactly how it feels to be bound to a loathsome story and an unwanted person. So where do we go from there?
“I lost an arm on my last trip home,” the novel begins. The history of race in America is not just an abstract subject for Dana; it causes visible, life-altering harm even to someone as smart, resourceful, and modern as this protagonist.
Prior to her disorienting time-leap to the past, Dana and her husband Kevin, who is white, suffer from the consequences of the nation’s racial history in real time. Marrying five years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized “interracial” marriages by nullifying local laws against them,1 they meet resistance from both of their families. Dana’s uncle, who is Black, disinherits her because he does not want his property to “fall into the white hands” (112). And Kevin’s sister, who is white and married to “a good Nazi,” refuses to meet Dana (110). The main characters are narrowly free to marry, but they are never free of the toxic national history. Kevin is surprised by this; Dana is not.
Many times, Dana understands the burden of race better than Kevin does. He thinks about how she can remain autonomous and safe even in the midst of the slave society she drops into. “There were free blacks,” he reminds her. “You could pose as one of them.” After just two short trips to the past, Dana helps him understand that if someone wants to rape, imprison, or catch and sell her as a slave, she will not be able to “resist” (48). He must also be disabused of the hope that “Getting home may be simpler for you than you realize” (49). It is not. She can only get home when her life is in peril.
The perils for Dana are bodily and real. When she is kicked, beaten, or hit in the past, she comes back to 1976 with fresh wounds from each encounter. The loss of her arm at the end/beginning of the story is only the culmination of a series of abuses and losses scored into her flesh. Kevin’s experience is also harrowing, though differently. At one point, he travels back in time with Dana and is stranded for a time in the early 1800s, not knowing if he will ever see his wife or his century again. He ages, grows a beard, a scar, and stories.
It’s not that the U.S. fails at being a “free country” in Dana and Kevin’s present; it’s just that freedom is never total or absolute. Dana does have some freedom in this novel, but not enough to keep her from suffering, and not enough to sever ties with the past. Modern ideas of race are layered on top of old ones. Modern freedoms — such as the freedom to love and choose a spouse — are layered over the old, enduring, and violent bondage.
In a Dysfunctional Unum, a Little Freedom
Kindred reminds us in the U.S. that our national acrimony and disarray is our unum.2 We are not just a pluribus now, waiting for the golden future day of enchantment when we sing “America, the Beautiful” together, cat people holding hands with dog people holding hands with scorpion people, everyone gushing gratitude for the public servants in Washington, D.C., and apologizing for any offense. We are unum, a family, right now, with all our bitterness, acrimony, envy, stonewalling, lying, and the rest.
What makes us a family? A mutually embedded history for which the word “shared” seems like a euphemism. We have been both pluribus and unum all along.
The question for readers of Kindred is the same as the question facing anyone from a dysfunctional family: what do I do with this painful history spreading pain into the present, now? Therapists can help with this. Laws forbidding instruction in the history are going to do what repression always does: make the monster more powerful.
Here is what Dana does: Amid pages and pages of bondage, she finds the small windows of opportunity when she can act as the free person she insists on being. Even united to a history and an ancestor she doesn’t get to choose, even suffering extreme bodily abuse, she finds (barely) the narrow openings for asserting agency. Who said freedom was absolute?
Here is what I’m going to do.
The next time I teach a class in my regular rotation, Literature of the American West (Octavia Butler was a Californian, like Dana), we’re going to read Kindred alongside the 2021 state law that forbids me from “direct[ing] or compel[ing]” students to feel “responsible” because of their race, religion, or gender for the past actions of people from the same race, religion, or gender. (My liberty to teach is not absolute, but I can work with it.) This law does not prevent me from assigning books like Kindred, Tommy Orange’s There, There, or Lawson Inada’s Legends from Camp, but I do need to be careful that I am not behaving like an old-time slaveholder and “compel[ling]” modern students to take “responsibility” for something beyond their power. I find it helpful to put the law in front of students so they can form their own opinions about it and know where we’re not allowed to go.
There is plenty of room to talk about Kindred within the scope of my state’s “anti-woke” or “anti-Critical Race Theory” law. Because Dana has very little agency (and her husband Kevin, even less) over the past, the point is not that they are responsible for it; it’s that they are part of it. The question is: Okay, people, where then is Dana free? And where are you?
Freedom is exactly what Octavia Butler would want us talking about. It’s a topic both liberals and conservatives can bring to the family table.
Thank you for reading Enchanted in America, where awe and wonder prevail over prejudice, and literature maps the way to united states.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-based marriage restrictions at the state level in Loving v. Virginia, June 1967. Based on clues in their backstory, Dana and Kevin must marry in or close to 1972. “Under our Constitution,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in the unanimous Loving decision, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.” https://www.oyez.org/cases/1966/395
I’m going to write “we” for a bit. I don’t presume to tell you whether Butler’s novelized history or my interpretation of it applies to you or not. I trust you’ll know.
Brilliant! Love the idea of contextualizing this book with today’s legal landscape. Especially that the past is with us as a shadow over everything we do. And it’s in the DNA of Black and white Americans. Have you seen the Hulu series of “Kindred”? It’s faithful to the book. I got partway, then fizzled. But it is very well done.
Thanks for posting this!
It’s fascinating to get this glimpse into what teachers have to contend with in the current legal situation.
I generally feel that literature and history ought to be taught in a way that helps students think for themselves about the significance of the material. I’m appalled by the “anti-woke” legislation, but I have problems with policing of speech and ideas that make students uncomfortable, regardless of which side is doing it.
I don’t think college students ought to be protected from reality.