Enough has been said about the uncomfortable sex of this novel. Octavia Butler has a reputation of showing odd sexual relationships between non-traditional couples: interracial couples (Kindred), inter-species relationships (Lilith’s Brood) and now this pseudo-pedophilic relationship between a man and a fifty year old child-like vampire.
I really wish Octavia E. Butler alive today to talk about it. I suspect it may have something to do with her own life as a lesbian in the eighties. She confessed once in an interview that she’d never been in love. Maybe that is why she could take our imaginations to such dark places unflinchingly.
There is more to this story than the age of vampires and how she gets her meals. One reviewer described the beginning of the story as a birth. We are with her from the moment she regains consciousness. She’s in a dark smelly cave, overcome by pain and instinctual hunger. She has push her way out into the world from the depths of Earthen cave that has sheltered her during a period of healing and growth. But when she stands up she is alone. She blind from left over fear, and hunger. She is an animal and moves on instinct to kill and feed because her body demands it. In the dark of night she is bloody, hurt, and savage. She moves without thought. But she isn’t afraid. She doesn’t know enough to be afraid, only confused.
She finds a place that she knows is important. We later learn that it is the home of her mothers. The women who have should have been taking care of her, showing love and society, have been butchered and burned. Their homes are ash. She seeks comfort among the rubble though she has lost all memory of this place and these people.
It will be several chapters before she learns of her profound loss; she has no memory of her infancy, her childhood nor her mother and family . She has lost everyone who could love and take care of her. She has lost the memory of maternal affection and paternal protection. She of love and family - she’s even lost all the people who could help her remember them. Even the relics that might jar a memory have been burned, crushed, and destroyed.
Who could hate someone so much as to take something so precious?
As usual Octavia has masterfully found a way to use the metaphors of horror to paint a picture of the experience of black people. We have lost all memory of history and ancestry. Our ancestors were taken ripped from their home lands. They were forced to forget their religions, their cultures, their homes. They weren't allowed to sing their songs or own their own memories. Their children were taken, and their families shuffled so that the stories couldn't even passed down through the generations.
Who could hate an entire people so much as to take something so precious?
The Fledgling is reborn at the cusp of adolescence. The first person to help her becomes her first meal. We learn later that he would have taken her to her father had she not been so hurt and blinded by hunger.
The second person to help her becomes her mate. She’s calmer now, and able to think. Her ‘humanity’ has returned - emerged from the ravenous beast she was hours ago. But her body is still in control. She conquers him without being aware that she can do so. All she knows is that she's hungry and that she needs help. She enslaves him without thought.
Some find this a slow beginning but Octavia uses the opening chapters of savagery to greater affect later in the book. It is the Fledgling's monstrous nature, her strength that keeps her alive after the attack, her instincts that keep her safe. But it will be this emerged ‘humanity” that will be called into question later on.
She begins, on instinct to seek out more people to gather into her new family. The morality of it isn’t so much her concern at first. She feeds on the man who would help her. The man is a good guy. A large white man named Wright who sees - what looks like - a twelve year old black girl walking down the street hurt and alone. He picks her up so a creep won't harm her. He has no idea that she's the monster. She drugs him with her venom and makes him her first simbiot. He is now addicted to her because she needs him to be.
Octavia uses this relationship to call love itself into question. Is it simply chemical hormone in the brain? Something we produce because humans are afraid of being alone, and because we need each other? The withdrawal symptoms are real enough. The Fledgling, Renee, (later called Sori) needs Wright like a bee needs nectar. Thanks to evolution of her species she has a way to make him enjoy the experience of feeding her - which happens to be sexual. In this way she gathers Wright, Theodora (an older woman) and a few others into a family of feeder humans she calls symbiotes.
Wright is a tall, heavy bodies white man. Sori is fifty year old vampire teenager who looks like a twelve year old. Octavia chose possibly the most volatile combination for this pairing that she could think in the eyes of her readers. Even I found myself making Wright a black man in my head to make it fit better somehow. Octavia did it to make a statement, not to just make the readers squirm. Sori is a child even the eyes of other vampires - but she’s old enough to start choosing her feeders and her choices are respected by the others of her kind.
The other vampires, or in this story beings known as Ina, have lived among humans for thousands of years. They believe themselves to be different, separate, more highly evolved than humans. They don’t bat an eye at the age and races of her symbiotes. It’s Sori herself that raises the conflict. She is a black Ina, born from an African American mother. She is the next step in their evolution; an Ina that can walk in sunlight.
It brings to mind two modern vampire stories: Wesley Snipe's character in Spawn and ______ from "Interview With a Vampire". She was a child when she was bitten by and transformed into a vampire. She takes to it right away loosing all memory of her former life as well. She becomes a vicious and unapologetic hunter using her youthful appearance to lore in pedophiles and well meaning adult humans alike. Mentally she matures sexually, but her bodies stays that of a child. She even tries a few times to seduce adults for pleasure. She does not enjoy her existence. She flirts with older vampires but any actual interest is vague or non existent. Is this more acceptable? Is it better to hate what she is and curse her creators, even try and kill the one who turned her? Is it better that she accepts behaving child-like in order to gain a new caregiver?
Or is it better to be Sori, to learn what you are and accept it. To do what needs to be done for survival, because she isn’t hurting anyone. Sori will grow up now, despite her set back. But she will never regain the memories of her past. Sori goes out of her way to not hurt others, even once she’s captured one of the attackers she is kind to him, patient with him. She feeds him and talks to him gently. She uses empathy to get information from him. She wants to rip him apart, but she recognizes that his actions are not his own.
His actions are not his own. He’s being compelled by one who can control his mind, his thoughts, his body. She doesn’t want the servant. She wants the master. This is an elaborate show of her “humanity” her “civility”. We come to find out that it’s these very displays of compassion that will save her at the end.
Sori through this interview and some other detective work learns that it’s another family of Ina who have erased her family, all in a direct attempt to erase her. Her family had been experimenting with mating with humans - not just any humans but humans of African decent. Their experiments had born her and her brother. Ina who could walk in the sun. Ina who were not as inbred, and fragile looking as the others. She and her brother were stronger, faster, and more cunning.
The tension of the story comes from this prejudice as Sori tries to prove that race was the motivation for the murder of her kinsmen. She has to calmly, marshal her own rage when she has been so incredibly hurt, to prove that she is not the savage.
The culprits deny their actions at first. They claim ignorance but their hatred of her very existence reveals them. They try to anger her so that she will lash out, prove her lack of civility. This reminded me of how many times I’ve had to keep my cool at work because white managers, and customers who wanted a reason to have me fired thought they could bring my "natural savagery". They expected me to “act black” to curse and swear and stomp and threaten. But I didn’t, and the result is always them looking like the assholes.
This also reminds me of the more recent trails that have been in the news of late. Of cops and other white people trying to justify their killing of unarmed black men. They always say they their feared their lives, and didn't have a choice. They always justify it by way of the victim's natural savagery. The very strength, endurance and physical ability that drove the white slavers to still our ancestors, bring them to the Americas and breed them like cattle are the same traits they use to justify killing us today.
Sori remains calm. She holds her composure until she finds the right line of questioning. Then it all comes pouring out - racism disguised as civility; purism so strong one of the defenders is willing to die rather than live in the same world were Sori exists. Fear of white genocide shown for it’s true ugly nature.
Why hate someone so much when you don’t know anything about them except the color of their skin?
In my opinion this is where Octavia’s skill as a storyteller shines.
The third act of the story is comprised of a very formal trial to ferret out the clan responsible for the death of Sori’s entire family. It’s all court lingo and trails but it’s still quiet the page tuner. I was on the edge of seat, yelling at characters in the book, and begging Sori to remain calm. It’s even relevant to readers today because it feels like even once the guilty party is found out they may not suffer any serious consequences. The Ina consider themselves above all that human stuff. But Octavia throws us a bone recognizing that the ax must fall. The stakes are too high by this point. Sori is even attacked during the trail and one of her beloved symbiotes is killed right there while under the protection of the governing house.
Butler kept me turning pages eager to see how the conflict would be resolved. Would justice be served? Or would Sori have to deal with it in her own way.
The crux of the story is about race, but not for the sake of racism. It is about what the racists fear, what they are fighting against. And why their battle is a loosing one. "Embrace diversity or be destoryed" ~ The Books of the Living.
The purpose of the Ina experiment that created Sori was to introduce biodiversity to the Ina blood. As it stood the existing families had been mixing and matching for so long that each family was related to every other. In all that time their long lives were plagued by sunlight and gradual deterioration. With Sori and her brother more genetic diversity was introduced along with the brown skin capable of resisting sunlight for longer. Sori also seems to be faster, stronger, and more able than the others expected. She’s able to avoid three massacrers aimed at destroying everything about her.
Throughout the trial Sori is tasked with proving her civility to the people who killed her family. She has to prove that she is equal to the other Ina mentally, physically, and psychologically all while they are calling her awful names, and denying their responsibility for her homelessness.
Their motivation for this is to prove the opposite. of course. Fear of this darker skin and the enhancements of biodiversity would make their families “unrecognizable”. They believed that Sori being part human and part black human at that, would be somehow primitive and backwards. They push her to limit to prove that she is a savage on the inside. And when she manages to still talk to them with civility they use even that against her to show her lack of empathy and emotion and for her loss family. They claim that the very actions that should have killed her may have damaged her beyond usefulness, may have caused her to be defective. So naturally Sori’s contribution to their gene pool would be nothing but a step down lowering the quality of their race or species.
They are fighting loosing battle as are all who think as they do. The diversity of the blood makes it stronger. The mixing makes it more adaptable to genetic disease and fills the blanks left by careful breeding. The old families are dying off in this story. The houses destroyed by war or lost to time have caused the blood lines to shrink even further. Sori is the future.
As a result at the end of the story many of the males who have seen her hold herself upright against the assaults, and fend off attackers are interested in becoming her mate. She has her pick of the liters and will become the mother to a whole new type of Ina, one more adaptable, and probably more dangerous than any the world has seen previously.
