“Out of Blood”: the best-known novel by the great African-American author Octavia E. Butler
THE “OUT OF BLOOD” PUBLISHED in 1979 is the best-known novel by the great African-American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. It is her only work that is not part of science fiction literature, combining historical fiction and fantasy elements in a unique way.
It remains popular and is currently taught in colleges and universities. It is one of the most important texts of the 20th century that speaks of slavery through the eyes of a modern and proud African-American woman who finds herself in a paradoxical circumstance that brings her face to face with her past and her ancestry.
In 1976 Dana has just turned twenty-six and she and her husband Kevin move into their new home in Los Angeles. Suddenly, while they are putting their books away, Dana loses consciousness. When she comes to, she finds herself at the edge of a dense forest and immediately realizes that a small child is drowning in the river next to her. Without a second thought, she dives into the water and saves the child, but on her way out, a man is waiting for her on the bank, pointing his gun at her. And while her life is in danger, she finds herself back in her apartment, soaked to the bone. She has just experienced the scariest experience of her life, but little did she know then that it would happen to her again and again…
Octavia E. Butler was a pioneer, both as an African-American woman in the then male-dominated field of science fiction, and with the themes she approached through her books, such as gender, race, and power.
Butler’s work is chronologically linked to the emergence of Black History Month and emerged from the ferment of the 1960s, when the notion that US history is also the history of African Americans emerged and the inclusion of the latter in official historical narratives, in the national education system, in academia became a demand.
“When I started attending college in Pasadena, the Black Power movement had broad appeal to youth. I happened to hear a statement from a young man my age at the time, who apparently did not realize the significance of his parents’ sacrifices. He blamed them for their humility and tolerance of violent and racist behavior by their employers and others. He had said: “I would like to kill all the old people who have held us down for so long. But I can’t do that because I would have to start with my own parents.” That was the seed of the idea to write Ex Blood. I kept that phrase inside me for thirty years. This young man was so deeply ashamed of what the older generations had been forced to endure that he did not realize that it was dictated not only by their need to survive, but also by his own. This is what I wanted to demonstrate in writing Ex Blood, to make it clear to people like that young man. I wanted to touch them emotionally in ways that history can’t.”
Ex’ Blood will be published for the first time in Greek translation on 10 March by Aeolos.
The author Octavia E. Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California. Orphaned by her father, she grew up with her mother. She was dyslexic and introverted as a child. She began writing stories at age ten determined to become a writer.
Butler apprenticed under the great science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who first spotted her writing talent and encouraged her to pursue it.
Butler was a student of the great science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
In 1976 her first novel, Patternmaster, was published, launching the Patternist series of novels. In the 1980s she published the science fiction trilogy Xenogenesis and continued in the 1990s with the dystopian series Earthseed, which became a commercial success many years later (New York Times bestseller list for 2020) due to its prophetic nature.
Octavia E. Butler was a pioneer, both as an African-American woman in the then male-dominated field of science fiction and with the themes she approached through her books, such as gender, race, and power. Butler took a critical approach to the hierarchical patterns of thought that for her were at the root of all forms of racism, sexism, nationalism or class discrimination.
She has received many honours for her work, including the prestigious Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 1995 she received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the first ever awarded to a science fiction writer.
In the last years of her life, Butler suffered serious health problems and was only able to complete one novel, her last (Fledgling, 2005).
She died in 2006, aged just 58, at her Seattle residence.
* * * * * *
The River
THE PROBLEM HAD BEGUN long before June 9, 1976, when I first became aware of it, but the day I remember is June 9. That day I turned twenty-six. It was also the anniversary of my meeting Rufus – the day he invited me to meet him for the first time.
Kevin and I hadn’t planned anything to celebrate my birthday. We were both too tired to celebrate. The day before, we had moved from the apartment we had in Los Angeles to a house of our own a few miles outside of Altadena. The move was quite a celebration for me. We were still unpacking things – or, rather, I was still unpacking. Kevin had stopped once he’d put his desk in order. Now he was stuck in there, either staring or thinking, because I couldn’t hear his typewriter. Finally he came out into the living room where I was arranging books in one of the large bookcases. Only novels. We had so many books, it took constant effort to keep them in some sort of order.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
“Nothing.” He sat down on the floor near me. “I’m just struggling with my difficulties. You know, yesterday, at moving time, I had half a dozen ideas for that Christmas short story.”
“And now that you have the time to write them down, you can’t come up with any.”
“Not a single one.” He picked up a book, opened it and flipped through a few pages. I took another book and tapped him on the shoulder with it. As he looked at me in surprise, I placed a stack of essays in front of him. He looked at them glumly.
“Damn, why did I go out?”
“To give you more ideas. Don’t forget they come to you when you’re doing something.”
He gave me a look that I knew didn’t hide as much malice as it appeared to. He had pale, almost colourless eyes that made him look distant and angry, whether he was or not. He often used them to overpower others, even strangers. I smiled at him and got back to work. After a while he picked up a stack and started shelving the books in another library.
I bent down to push another full box towards him, but I stood up again quickly because I felt dizzy and nauseous. The room around me blurred and darkened. I stood up for a while, leaning against the bookcase while I wondered what was going on, and finally fell to my knees. I heard Kevin let out a cry of surprise, then ask:
“What happened?”
I looked up and found I couldn’t focus on his face.
“I’ve got something,” I said, gasping.
I heard him approaching, saw his grey trousers and blue shirt blurred. And then, before he could touch me, he was gone.
Gone was everything, the house, the books. Suddenly I was outside, kneeling on the ground under trees. A place of green. I was at the edge of a forest. In front of me was a wide, calm river, and somewhere in the middle of the river a child was beating, screaming…
Drowning!
I reacted immediately. Later I could ask questions, try to find out where I was, what had happened to me. Now I rushed to help the child.
I ran to the bank, got into the water with my clothes on and swam quickly towards the child. When I reached him, he was unconscious, a small red-haired boy floating face down. I turned him over on his back, gripped him firmly so his head was above water, and began to pull him toward the bank. A red-haired woman was now waiting for us there. Or rather she was running up and down the bank crying. As soon as she saw me walking in the shallows, she ran to me, took the child from me and carried him all the way out, all the while examining him, feeling him up.
“He’s not breathing!” she screamed.
CPR. I’d seen it done, it had been explained to me, but I’d never done it. Now was the time to try it. The woman was in no condition to do anything useful and there was no one else around. As soon as we reached the bank, I grabbed the child from her. She was four or five years old at most and not big.
I put him on his back, turned his head back and started giving him CPR. I watched his chest move as I blew air into him. Suddenly the woman started to hit me.
“You killed my child!” She screamed. “You killed him!”
I turned and managed to grab her hands.
“Stop!” I yelled, making my voice as stern as I could. “He’s alive!” But was he? I couldn’t understand. Please, God, please make him live. “The child is alive. Now let me help him.”
I pushed her away – luckily she was a little smaller than me – and turned back to her son. Between successive breaths, I watched her stare blankly at me. Then she dropped to her knees beside me and began to cry.
Moments later, the child began breathing on her own, coughing, choking, vomiting and crying for her mother. Since he could do all of that, it was okay. I sat behind him, feeling dizzy, relieved. I had done it!
“He’s alive!” the woman shouted. She grabbed it and clutched it with all her strength. “Oh, Rufus, baby…”
Rufus. What a terrible name. Why would they name a rather beautiful child that way?
When Rufus saw that his mother was holding him, he clung to her, screaming as loud as he could. His voice was definitely not in any trouble. And suddenly there was another voice, a male voice, angry and demanding:
“What the hell is going on here?”
I turned, startled, and found myself staring down the barrel of the longest rifle I’d ever seen. I heard a metallic click and froze at the thought of him killing me for saving the boy’s life. I was going to die.
I tried to speak, but suddenly I was speechless. I felt nauseous and dizzy. My vision became so blurred that I couldn’t see the gun or the face of the man holding it. I heard the woman speak sharply, but I was so immersed in nausea and panic that I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
And then the man, the woman, the child, the gun, all gone.
And then the man, the woman, the child, the gun, all gone.
I was on my knees in the living room of my house again, a few feet away from where I had fallen a few minutes before. I was back in my house, soaked and muddy, but unharmed. Further down, Kevin stood frozen, still looking at the spot where I had been before. How long had he been there?
How long had he been there?
“Kevin?”
He turned to me in amazement.
“What the hell… How did you get there?” she whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“Dana…” He walked over to me, touching me tentatively as if he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was real. Then he grabbed my shoulders and hugged me tightly. “What happened?”
I tried to loosen his grip, but he wouldn’t let go. He dropped to his knees beside me too.
“Tell me!” he insisted.
“I would tell you if I knew what to tell you. Stop hurting me.”
He finally let go of me and looked at me as if he had just recognized me.
“Are you okay?”
“No.” I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment. I was shaking from the remnants of a terror that had taken away all my strength. I folded forward and wrapped my arms around myself, trying to calm myself. The threat was no longer there, but I could barely hold myself together to keep from starting to chatter my teeth.
Kevin stood up and stepped away for a moment. He came back with a large towel and threw it over my shoulders. This helped me somewhat and I wrapped it tightly around me. I was hurting in my back and shoulders, where Rufus’ mother had hit me with her fists. She’d hit me harder than I thought, and Kevin’s tight embrace hadn’t helped the situation.
We sat there on the floor together, me wrapped in the towel and Kevin with his hand on my shoulders just calming me with his presence. After a while I stopped shaking.
“Tell me now,” Kevin said.
“Tell me now.
“Tell you what?”
“Everything. What happened to you? How… how did you move like that?”
I stayed silent, trying to concentrate my thoughts while remembering the rifle pointed at my head. I’d never panicked like that in my life, never felt so close to death before.
“Dana,” he said softly. The sound of his voice put some distance between me and the memory. But still…
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. “It was completely crazy.”
“Why are you soaked? Start there,” Kevin said.
I gave an affirmative nod.
“I found myself in a river,” I said. “It was going through a forest. And a boy was drowning. I saved him. So I got wet.”
I hesitated, trying to think, trying to make sense of it. Not that what had happened to me made sense, but at least to narrate it with some logic.
I looked at Kevin and saw that he had a neutral expression. He was waiting intently. More calm, I started at the beginning, from the first dizziness, and remembered everything to tell him. I went over it all again in detail. I even remembered things I hadn’t realized I had noticed. For example, the trees near me were pine trees, tall and straight, with branches and needles mostly at the top. I had noticed this sometime before I became aware of Rufus. And I remembered something else about Rufus’ mother. Her clothes. She wore a long dark dress that covered her from her neck to her feet. Strange outfit to wear on a muddy riverbank. And she spoke with a southern accent. And then there was the unforgettable gun, long and deadly.
Kevin listened without interrupting me. When I finished, he took the edge of the towel and wiped some mud off my leg.
“This one must have come from somewhere,” he said.
“You don’t believe me?”
He looked at the mud for a moment, then looked at me.
“Do you know how much I missed you?”
“A few minutes. Not long.”
“A few seconds. It wasn’t more than ten to fifteen seconds from the time you were lost to the time you said my name.”
“Oh, no…” I gave a slow negative nod. “This can’t all have happened in seconds.”
He said nothing.
“But it was real! I was there!” I paused, took a deep breath, and spoke more slowly. “Okay, if you told me a story like that, I probably wouldn’t believe you, but, like you said, that mud had to come from somewhere.”
“Yes.”
“What did you see? What do you think happened?”
Kevin frowned a little and shook his head.
“You disappeared. It was as if he’d said the word under his breath. “You were here until my hand came within inches of you. And suddenly you’re gone. I couldn’t believe it. I was left there, martyred. Then you came back again, but on the other side of the room.”
“Do you believe me now?”
He shrugged.
“Done. I saw it. You disappeared and reappeared. Those are facts.”
“I reappeared wet, muddy and terrified.”
“Yes.”
“And I know what I saw and what I did – my own facts. They’re no crazier than yours.”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m not sure it matters what we think.”
“What do you mean?”
“That… it happened once. What if it happens again?”
” No. I don’t think so…”
“You don’t!” I started shaking again. “Whatever it was, I’ve had enough, I don’t want any more! They almost killed me!”
“Calm down,” Kevin said. “No matter what happens, it won’t help you to panic again.”
Weirdly, I shifted and looked around.
“I feel like it could happen again, that it could happen again at any time. I don’t feel safe here.”
“You’re just scaring yourself.”
“No!” I turned and glared at him; he looked so worried, I turned my gaze away again. I wondered bitterly if he was worried that I might disappear again, or that I might have gone mad. I don’t think he believed me. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I hope you are. Maybe I’m just like the victims of robbery or rape or something. A victim who survives, but doesn’t feel safe anymore.” I shrugged. “I don’t know how to characterize what happened to me, but I don’t feel safe anymore.”
Kevin said in a very soft voice:
“If it happens again, and if it’s real, the father of the child will know he owes you a debt of gratitude. He won’t hurt you.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know what might happen.” I stood up with difficulty. “Look, I don’t blame you for trying to reassure me, for going along with me.” I paused to give him a chance to deny it, but he didn’t. “I’m starting to feel like I’m doing the same thing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. As much as the whole episode was real, as much as I know it was real, it’s kind of starting to drift away. It becomes like something I saw on TV or read somewhere, like something I was told about.”
“Or like … a dream?”
“Or like … a dream?
I looked at him.
“You mean hallucination.”
“Okay, hallucination.”
“No! I know what’s going on, I can see it clearly. I distance myself from what happened because it scares me. But it was real.”
But it was real.
“So let yourself distance yourself.” He stood up and took the muddy towel from my shoulders. “That’s probably the best you can do, whether it was real or not. Let it go.”
