On Page 42: Kindred

[Source: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, Beacon Press, paperback, 1988]

Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred is about Dana, an African American woman that spontaneously gets transported across space and time from 1970’s LA to the mid 1800’s in slave country Maryland. The text explores America’s heritage of control and trauma with some of the complicated emotions that are mixed in.

Kindred’s page 42 falls in Dana’s second visit to the past during a moment of action and terror. Dana while out in the woods at a slave’s cabin is found by a patroller that plans to capture her for a quick buck. His greed quickly turns to lust and Dana is in faced with a perilous situation. In this scene, there is a focus on ‘sight’ and ‘blindness’ that can offer a dynamic reading of this moment.

As Dana is running from her attacker, she describes, “Now I longed for darker denser woods that I could lose myself in.” We first read this as if one could get lost than one’s attacker could also lose themselves, hence forth losing their attacker altogether. As we get farther into the passage, the danger blindness caused to Dana became a possible weapon.

Dana fought for her life with her attacker on her and she realized the man’s mushy eyes as a weakness: “I had only to move my fingers a little… gouge away his sight and give him more agony than he was giving me.” The darkness that entrapped her was now a tool to inflict on her assailant. However, she could not find within herself the destructive instinct that the man on top of her had, and did not plunge in his eyes.

As she put away the weapon of darkness, she was met with the danger of sight and clarity:

“I could see that I had left a few scratches on his face… The man rubbed his hand

across them, looked at the blood, then looked at me.”

Dana could see that her defense was not enough and that she had yet to fight hard enough. She could see her assailant’s reaction to her fighting back. Just as the danger of darkness was recycled as a tool, Dana recycles the danger of sight in setting up her next defensive actions.  

Through ‘sight’ and ‘blindness,’ we can read “Now I longed for darker denser woods that I could find myself in,” as I looked for a weapon within myself to defend myself with. The statement that opens the top on the page is both a statement of fear and a statement of courage.