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l doesn’t intend to, can’t.
W&B: Is that one of the reasons you kept her in modern dress throughout the book?
Butler: That, and the reality that nobody would be giving her new clothes. They might find something for her, but what she was wearing worked, and there were slaves who were close to naked. The dressing of slaves was not high on anybody’s agenda.
W&B: I’ve read that you did quite a bit of research into slave narratives for this book.
Butler: It was the first time I ever specifically took off and went somewhere, went to Maryland to do research. As a result, later, I was less intimidated when I had to go to South America to the Peruvian Amazon to research another trilogy of novels. The whole thing was a learning experience for me. I didn’t know how to research such a novel and everything I did was kind of learning on the job.
W&B: Would you do anything differently today, now that you have more experience?
Butler: Going the way I did… I don’t think I would have done that again. I think I would have been able to get more information before I went. The library in Los Angeles, which is where I lived then, was pretty good. It’s just that Maryland is such a small state, I really felt that I had better go there and use their libraries as I would be more likely to find information that I could use.
W&B: Does the book as a whole have a different meaning for you now that you look at it over the quarter of a century since you wrote it?
Butler: It still means pretty much what I wanted it to. If you mean do I feel any different for having written it, no. Like most of my books, I say what I have to say and then I move on. I’m doing something else right now. I’m pretty happy with the way Kindred turned out.
W&B: Some people have commented on Dana having a white husband and having to deal with a white master and the interracial slave children of the time. I assume this was a deliberate device to show how some attitudes have changed over the years.
Butler: Certainly… in this country there is a great deal more kindred than we have always chosen to recognize. When I wrote Kindred, interracial marriage was less prevalent than it is now. Now it’s a shrug; then it was a bit more unusual. I think I had one set of friends—actually, they were triplets—in school who had a white father and a black mother. That’s going all the way from K through 12.
W&B: Could you say a bit more about how there were so many children born to slaves by their masters and the fact that so many blacks today do have white ancestry as their heritage.
Butler: It works the other way too, you know. That quite a few whites are surprised to find that they have black ancestry. Because it was very inconvenient to be black and if you could pass, well, there was a time when that was a good idea.
W&B: Until this century, I’m sure.
Butler: As a matter of fact, when I was traveling with [my novel] Parable of the Sower, one person I kept running into was the woman who wrote The Sweeter the Juice [The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip]. It’s about her family and the fact that one day the lighter-skinned portion of her family just disappeared. They left the area and went off to Michigan, I believe, and became white. Her mother was the darkest member of that branch of the family so her mother got left behind.
When she was researching the book, she found some members of her family