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Although Octavia Butler's 1979 novel about slavery and time-travel, Kindred, occupies a privileged position within the African American literary tradition, at its center is what we would have to admit is a rather unconventional portrayal of a black female-white male sexual relationship. In fact, I suspect such a portrayal would compromise any other literary text's canonical standing. In the case of Kindred, however, just the reverse occurs. Butler's portrayal of a black female-white male coupling is unconventional not only because the primary interracial relationship survives the novel's closure. It is unconventional also because the couple's mutual love for one another is not depicted, at least on the surface, as psychologically unhealthy--two things do not generally occur in black literary works after the Second World War. (1) Just how is it Butler is able to create such a portrayal while at the same time continuing to garner praise for what many in the African American literary community regard as her novel's invaluable contribution to the antiracist operation implicit throughout much of black letters? (2) This essay argues Kindred manages to conceal the subversive nature of what initially appears to be a genuinely loving, healthy interracial relationship between a black female writer and her white husband by shrewdly masking the cultural and political implications of relationship behind a rather sophisticated narrative ruse. That ruse happens to be, in this case, a graphic and harrowing portrayal of a historical scenario would normally represent within African American literary and cultural discourse what Claudia Tate would call a sanctioned social of racial oppression--namely, the sexual degradation of enslaved black females by white slave masters and other white men (12). Because the latter narrative, to borrow another phrase from Tate, safeguards readers' racial expectations (14) by faithfully depicting a well-known black victimology narrative (albeit one centers a black female rather than a black male), it successfully satisfies the group demand that a black text explicitly represent [black readers'] lived experiences with racial oppression (3). Put differently, the novel's realistic depiction of an enslaved woman's physical and sexual torture at the hands of her owner Rufus Weylin, and her eventual suicide, both of which are witnessed by the novel's modern-day narrator, distracts readers critical of literary and cultural narratives of interracial intimacy deviate from conventional portrayals. These portrayals are often grounded in what scholars refer to as surrogacy. In an invaluable essay titled Representing Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions, Surrogacy, and Performance, Diana Paulin defines surrogacy as multiple levels of substitution in representations--white bodies standing in for black ones, romantic relationships standing in for social conflicts or even the past standing in for the present--that trouble the identities and subjects they depict as well as those they indirectly invoke (417). I argue by adopting this complex representational strategy for depicting consensual black/white desire (an approach Paulin ensures us yields reconstructed models revise and contextualize rather than replicate which they stand-in for), Butler's novel destabilizes and undermines key assumptions regarding the supposed causal relations between race, politics, and sexuality have been a stubborn, if historically variable, feature of African American cultural discourse (417-18; added italics). Even the most cursory reading of Kindred could not fail to recognize the deep anxiety circulates in the novel around interracial sex and intimacy. Because of the narrative's unusual dual plot structure--with action taking place simultaneously in 20th-century Los Angeles and in 19th-century Maryland--this anxiety is both the same and different from what we might usually expect from a black-authored literary work of the late twentieth century. …
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