Butler is a brilliant writer. Her methodologies in writing Kindred are exactly what draw me into a great book. The accurate portrayal of Dana’s experiences in the past was remarkable. Remarkable and many times disturbing due to the subject matter: ubiquitous rampant racism.
By now, the man had been securely tied to the tree. One of the whites went to his horse to get what proved to be a whip. He cracked it once in the air, apparently for his own amusement, then brought it down across the back of the black man… He took several more blows with no outcry, but I could hear his breathing, hard and quick…The man’s resolve broke… Finally, he began to scream” (Butler, 36).
This racism is not the same racism, that we might be familiar with today. This, indeed, is a whole other variety of racism; one that’s not even cognizant of itself, due to its ever-present authority. Before this time period and during, there was not a soul (white soul anyway…) within a hundred miles of the Weylin plantation who would’ve dared question the idea of treating a black man woman or child like a dog, or property of any kind. Dana becomes disillusioned, as a black woman, to the brutal truths of her ancestor’s existence. There was no shining light at the end of the tunnel. Even for those who dared to run, the dogs, the guns, the whip, and the auction block were often standing guard, waiting for them at the end.
While she witnesses the beating of the black man in the clearing in the woods, she is suddenly aware of the chasm of difference between story violence and real violence. “I had seen the too-red blood streaked across their backs, and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat, ore heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves,” (Butler, 36). Today in America, we live cushy lives, eat cushy foods, drink cushy drinks, and play with Nerf balls. Our society is, for the majority of us, at a complete disconnect with the elements of violence in this world. Despite the unbridled racism and violence that still permeates places like Africa, the Middle East, and Los Angeles, most of us would not have the faintest clue how to react, and fight back if necessary.
At one point in the book, Dana expresses her feelings to Kevin saying something along the lines of: the smells are more pungent, the tastes are more flavorful, the heat is hotter, in short, life was more potent. Butler shows that in her description of the past. The most graphic passage in “The Fire” chapter depicted the same beating mentioned above.
I could literally smell his sweat, hear every ragged breath, every cry, every cut of the whip. I could see his body jerking, convulsing, straining against the tope as his screaming went on and on. My stomach heaved, and I had to force myself to stay where I was and keep quiet. Why didn’t they stop! (Butler, 36)
By placing the reader directly next to the victim of this crime, it becomes real. We get to feel the shame, we get to feel the pain. Butler has made this a reality.
When Dana is confronted by the Patroller outside Alice’s cabin in the woods, he begins to beat her. At one point, she is simply shocked that she is able to “absorb so much punishment without losing consciousness,” (Butler, 42). In this survival situation, there is no way her body would just let her pass out, what with all the adrenaline, norepinephrine, and endorphins pumping through her veins. And so she must continue to fight. As her struggle continues, her violence-oriented thought processing skills peak for a moment when she has an epiphany: she could completely disable the Patroller if she were to gouge her fingers deep into the man’s eye sockets. She almost does it, but it seems the mere mental tactile imagery of penetrating another human’s soft fleshy eyeball was enough to nauseate her. After he knocks her hands away from his face, her window of opportunity vanishes. “My squeamishness belonged in another age, but I’d brought it along with me. Now I’ would be sold into slavery because I didn’t have the stomach to defend myself in the most effective way,” (Butler, 42). Ringing true for readers in this time, each of these examples of violence, or a disconnected feeling towards one’s self-defense jump from the pages. Butler’s ability to deliver accurate portrayals is not limited to the violent aspects of the story.
In order to paint an accurate picture for the reader to follow, it was imperative for Butler to develop the natural world of the early nineteenth century Maryland. She not only had to provide the Maryland landscape, but it was also crucial to deliver the perspective of a woman from California in the 1970’s. After the fire incident with Rufus, Dana steps out for the first time into that early 19th c. Maryland night. When she looks up, she sees the “half-moon and several million stars lighting the night as they never did at home,” effectively setting the stage of a time where the terms metropolis and street lights were still a century away (Butler, 32). On her way to Alice’s cabin, she mentions seeing, “trees, tall and shadowy—trees everywhere,” (Butler, 33). This too is a very important thing for Dana to note; not only because there would be many more trees then in Maryland than there would be now, but also the fact that Dana is coming from the chaparral of southern California, and walking out into the temperate forest that Maryland once was. As she ventures out of the woods and down the road toward the Greenwood home, she could hear the, “few night birds and insects [that] broke the silence—crickets, an owl, some other bird I had no name for,” (Butler, 34). Again, due to human-imposed extinction rates, several of 1815 Maryland’s birds are more than likely gone, but also, this is a southern Californian in Maryland, of course there’ll be birds she can’t identify at night in the woods. All in all, Butler was able to draw me in to her narrative because of her attention to accuracy describing both the time, and the perception of that time.
Text—Text
Bob Marley has long been known to sing out against injustice. Marley as an artist speaks toward racism from an international perspective. Having toured and traveled to countries all over the world, including places in North America, Europe, East Asia, and Africa, he speaks from a broadened outlook on the subject. His song War, released 1976 on his “Rastaman Vibration” album, was one of his most outspoken works of protest. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned/Everywhere is war.” (Marley). He first calls out on the individual level to each human holding this philosophy at heart to recognize the superficiality of their perspective, and to refuse to participate in that type of thought process. “Until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation/Until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance that the colour of his eyes/Me say war,” (Marley). While still identifying with the individual level (as is evident in the second half of this lyric) Marley begins to call into question the values of those at the top: governments. For it is the government who sets the trend by its own actions, by the legislature it passes, and by the legislature it puts at the forefront of its priorities. “Until that day the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship, and rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued but never attained/Now everywhere is war,” (Marley). He points out three beautiful utopian ideals that all humanity should be able to agree on, but are inherently impossible to achieve at our present state. By fostering any construct of a hierarchy of races, neither we nor any other nation will know these virtues first hand. “Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, in Mozambique, South Africa sub-human bondage have been totally toppled, utterly destroyed/Everywhere is war… We find it necessary and we know we shall win as we are confident in the victory of good over evil…” (Marley). With an attitude of hope, he leaves us with specific entities that need to be stood up against.
Dana, of all the characters in our book, knows this first hand. Having history books, and the advantage of hindsight, she can look over the progression of time, noting the change in international morality improve, but never lose its racist feelings altogether. On the personal level in Dana’s life, it seems that for the most part, “the color of a man’s skin is of no more importance than the color of his eyes. She and Kevin have overcome the racist hegemony of their culture and transcended skin color, opening a door into a loving life-long relationship.
Now I am a white male from the United States of America; so while I may not be able to speak from personal experience of being victimized by racism, as a human being, I can certainly understand and have compassion for with those who have, do, and probably will suffer from racial injustice. bell hooks is an author who can speak from experience, and from her essays I have learned to appreciate the rage. She published a book in 1995 titled Killing Rage, wherein she wrote an essay called “Beyond Black Rage.” “Black rage” is a term used to describe the retaliation of black people against a target(s) representing the population(s) by whom the individual has been oppressed. “Beyond Black Rage” is her response to an incident that occurred in New York on a commuter train, wherein a black man shot several people randomly. Some were white, some were not. The gunman carried a list of names which included multiple black male leaders. On his notes, he articulated contempt toward, “racism by Caucasians and Uncle Tom Negroes,” (hooks, 21). hooks points out that it was, in fact, the white-dominated media who a.) made it sound as though the man had only killed white people and b.) chose to reduce the man’s “complex understanding of the nature of neo-colonial racism to ‘rage against whites’… while representing [the white culture] as a group that is never carried away by killing rage,” (hooks, 22). This image, however, is only a charade. Without paging back through the annals of racist history, we know the track record of white people in this country. We have all heard the torturesome stories involving a lone black man against a posse of (usually drunk) white good ol’ boys. These attacks were usually random, and carried out regardless of class or upbringing.
The gunman in the story was an immigrant from Jamaica whose family belonged to the upper class. He had been living in the United States and had been going to school for some time. After Investigators questioned the man’s professors, it came to light that the man had been obsessed with race. In that period, the young man was subjected to repeated racist remarks/situations. Whether it was directly confrontational, or a simply refusing to make eye contact, each single racist event began to accumulate in the man’s psyche. hooks refers to this as the “maddening impact” of racism, caused by, “living in a white supremacist context, suffering racist discrimination and/or exploitation and oppression, can create and/or exacerbate mental illness,” (hooks, 23, 25-26). She moves to show that the “well-off” black community had a high level of sympathy for the gunman. This particular demographic of the black population knows all too well the rage that swells up after years of prejudice. For these people, hooks explains, much of their time has been devoted to assimilating to the white-dominated culture they grew up in. They must change their hair, change their clothing, they must even change the way in which they speak if ever they wish to be taken seriously in order to get a respectable job, family, or success. They often make such changes in the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, if they change enough, the white community will accept them as equals. The variety of rage they experience is:
…a narcissistic rage rooted in the ideology of hierarchical privilege that says “they,” not all black people, should be treated better. They see themselves as more deserving. Unlike underclass and underprivileged black people, they have a sense of entitlement. And it is the sense that they will be selected out and treated better, bred into them at birth by their class values, that erupts into rage when white folks arbitrarily choose to make no distinction between a black person from an “elite” class and someone from the underclass. (hooks, 28)
Whether superficial or deep, Dana knew these feelings all too well. For she was raised in a white 1960’s America as a little black girl. She would have witnessed the tail end of the riotous integration of public schools, and would have attended a school whose student body was primarily composed of white children. While in the 1970’s—Dana’s adulthood—the racist furvor had settled a bit in the U.S., Dana would have encounters utterly outside her experience when she traveled back in time. There was no doubt that the white population would inherently look down upon Dana as a black woman, but the extent to which the black population shuns her was astonishing. When Dana showed up wearing blue jeans, all the slaves asked her why she was dressed up as a man. Because of the way she articulated herself, the slaves wouldn’t trust her because she spoke “too white.”
Text—World
The 1960’s was arguably the most tumultuous decade in recent American history in terms of media-covered racial violence. In February 1963, a 24 year old white man by the name of William Zantzinger attended a socialite function wherein he got drunk and accosted several waitstaff (all black persons) which culminated in a display of violence: Zantzinger wielding his cane as a weapon. A woman by the name of Hattie Carroll, age 51, was accused by Zantzinger of taking far too long to serve him a drink. “’What's the matter with you, you black son of a bitch,’ he snarled, ‘serving my drinks so slow?’" (TIME). After he successively beat her over the head with his cane, she fell to the ground, only to leave the building by ambulance. It wasn’t until eight hours later that a brain hemorrhage killed Carroll. At the end of his three-day trial, William Zantzinger was found guilty of assult and fined $125. For the “manslaughter” of Hattie Carroll, he was fined $500 and 6 months in jail. “The judges considerately deferred the start of the jail sentence until September 15, to give Zantzinger time to harvest his tobacco crop,” (TIME).
Carroll was the 1960’s version of Sarah from the cookhouse. She was a working woman who dealt with the white people’s business. Both women had had several children, and while Sarah’s children were nearly immediately sold into slavery once old enough to work, Hattie Carroll’s children were fortunate enough to stay with her; although her death left them motherless—a few of them at a young vulnerable age, no less. While Tom Weylin was as ignorant as Zantzinger, he was a product of his time. He owned plantation land, owned plantation slaves, and that’s just how things were run. Zantzinger, on the other hand was not necessarily a product of his time—as it was very transitional in nature—so much as a parasite clutching to the previous dying age.
References
Butler, Octavia E.. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979.
"Deferred Sentence." TIME 06 Sept 1963:
hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995.
Marley, Bob. Rastaman Vibration. War. 1976.
