59 pages • 1 hour read
Octavia E. ButlerA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
The Legacy of Slavery in the American South
Dana Franklin’s position in the novel as a Black woman reckoning with her white heritage is a literalization of a situation that is incredibly common in the Black American experience: through time travel, she is forced to bear witness to the violation of her Black ancestors by her white ancestors, putting a visceral point on the actuality of many Black Americans’ family trees. Slave owners raping or coercing sex from enslaved women was standard practice in the American South, and children that resulted were in a precarious liminal position as legally both slaves and potential heirs. This violence was further codified through laws and social mores that protected slave owners and ignored their indiscretions with Black enslaved women as an unseemly but normal part of life. Alice’s story is a depiction of the harrowing emotional conflict that most people in America (particularly white Americans) think of as settled history, and Dana serves as witness to all of this in order to dramatize what Black Americans must face when looking into their personal ancestry.
In this way, Dana’s journeys back in time serve as a representation of the psychic trauma that Black people struggle with as they think about their role in America and their legacy as the descendants of both enslaved people and slave owners. Her position on the plantation is another facet of this, as she reckons with her own complicity and guilt surrounding the fact that she needs Alice to bear Rufus’s children and struggles with her emotions about Rufus. Her desire to see the goodness in him, then, is a desperate search for the humanity in the brutal, inhuman system that is her legacy.
Dana is also thrust into the interpersonal sociopolitical reality among Black southerners, which highlights several complicated issues surrounding the legacy of Black survival under slavery. She is criticized by Black people for the privilege that she has, and many come to see her as a traitor to her race because of her closeness to Rufus and her marriage to Kevin. It was typical for Black people under slavery to see and keenly enforce the social hierarchy of enslaved people who worked in the home and enslaved people who worked in the fields, in part because it allowed them to have a degree of agency and power in an otherwise powerless position. Racist stereotypes such as mammy and Uncle Tom depict Black people who are caught between their subservience to their white slaveowners and their rejection by the Black enslaved community for being too loyal, and Dana’s plight deconstructs these stereotypes as the end result of Black people surviving in any way possible.
Throughout, the novel asserts that Black women must bear the scars of history, both literally and figuratively, in a way that others can avoid. Kevin returns from the past changed, as well, but Dana’s wounds are far greater (and are physically present on her body), and she has put in the brunt of the emotional labor in navigating the past while Kevin’s position as a white man shielded him from the brutality of the American South. Their tenuous relationship at the end of the novel is born out of the difference in their experience, suggesting that the tangled politics of complicity and guilt surrounding the power imbalance throughout the centuries of slavery in America is an intractable problem that has palpable effects on the present.
By Octavia E. Butler