Blood Will Tell

By June Pulliam

01/28/2006

Butler, Octavia. Fledgling. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005. 317 p.

Fans of horror have doubtless noticed that the genre is primarily by and about white people, though for the past few decades, readers have seen the emergence of writers and characters of color. Of these authors, most notable are Jemiah Jefferson, Brandon Massey and Tananarive Due. Still, while these authors write about people of color, they do not deal with racism per se. Jefferson’s vampires inhabit a universe where the demographics of the undead simply approximate the racial diversity of the living, while Due’s vampires all originate from a black African clan. And when Due does tackle the issue of racism in novels such as The Between and The Good House, she does so subtly. Her black characters certainly experience bigotry, but the supernatural events that transform their lives are caused by a complex combination of variables regarding class and sex as much as race. In Fledgling, however, Octavia Butler confronts racism in a way that critiques the conventions of the vampire narrative.

Butler employs unique rules in her supernatural universe. We see the story through the eyes of her protagonist, fledgling vampire Shori Matthews, who has survived a horrific attack where her would-be assassins burned down her house and left her for dead. We later learn that Shori’s female relatives and “symbionts,” human companions who supply her kind with blood, perished in the blaze, but she herself managed to crawl to the safety of a cave to heal from being severely burned and shot. While Shori’s body knits itself back together in a manner of a few days, her memory of her former life is gone. And so the novel is as much about her struggle to learn what it is to be Ina (Butler's term for her vampires ) as it is to find out why someone wants her dead and bring that somebody to justice.

Shori’s dark skin makes her stand out among the Ina. The product of genetic experimentation by her mothers, Shori’s dark skin allows her to walk in the daylight, something no other Ina can do. The crossbreeding has also made Shori remarkably strong, even for an Ina. At the tender age of 52, she has the reasoning ability and strength of someone nearly 200 (Ina live between 500-800 years), and she’s hasn’t even gone into puberty.

Soon Shori learns that her people have an ancient civilization and a complex family structure. The Ina’s first written record of their civilization dates back 10,000 years. Ina children have both male and female families, each living in different households, and when an Ina child matures and mates, she and her sisters will be mated to a group of brothers, and the resulting children have several fathers and mothers. To extend the family even further, each Ina has approximately eight symbionts to ensure a steady supply of blood. The use of symbionts also means that Ina don’t have to take victims for nourishment. The bite of the Ina contains a powerful narcotic venom which gives extreme pleasure to the recipient. It also transforms the chemical structure of the symbiont’s body, making him love his Ina and subject him or herself to her will. And while the relationship between some Ina and their symbionts is similar to the relationship between a human and cattle, for others it is more similar to the human bond with pets. The symbiont comes to live with his Ina and her other symbionts in a group household, entering part of a sexual ménage among all members, sometimes even marrying other symbionts and having children.   

But not everyone appreciates Shori’s unique genetic qualities, properties that could help the Ina better survive. Some see what her mothers did as at best misguided weird science, and at worst, an abomination—creating a sub-Ina race who must be destroyed at all costs.

And here it can be seen how Butler’s story is a critique of the traditional vampire narrative. So many vampire mythologies present an exclusively white and patrician undead elite, replicating the idea of the bloodsucking aristocracy or industrialist class. Films such as Blade and Blacula compare the vampire/victim connection to the master/slave relationship through showing white vampires who view the human race as cattle, and through presenting the condition of vampirism itself as a sort of slavery to blood lust. Butler’s mythology and the story of Shori’s unique heritage goes beyond the context of slavery. Those who oppose Shori’s existence are as reminiscent of the Third Reich as they are of the antebellum south.