The obsession with time travel began with that first viewing of “Back to the Future” in my parents’ living room. The movie triggered an avalanche of questions, beginning with…
What were my parents like when they were young?
…followed by…
What was it really like in [insert distant year in the past]?
…proceeded by…
Can a person really shape and re-shape history by moving through it?
…and ending with…
Why can’t we recover that which we clamor to keep–time?
Time travel movies–entertaining as they are–don’t have the richness of time travel books, and it didn’t take me long to absorb Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife and begin a search for Gore Vidal’s Live from Golgotha.
I confess it took me entirely too long to find Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I also confess that before reading that book this week I figured time travel was for white people only. This has long been my unspoken issue with science fiction as well as that tired joke from tired stand-up comedians: Ever notice how there aren’t any black people on “The Jetsons”? There really weren’t, and minorities didn’t tend to show up in any of the other time travel narratives I’ve gobbled over the years.
Perhaps issues of race are too complicated and dangerous to drag from one century to the next, even in fiction. Perhaps part of the appeal of the time travel fantasy is the fact that debates over the n-word or hate crimes or affirmative action are less important for a person who finds herself in a different era. For the typical time traveler, observing and preserving history (as well as her place in it) is the point and purpose.
In Kindred, that history is too terrible to want to preserve. In the novel, the African-American narrator–residing in 1976–suddenly finds herself on a plantation in the early 19th century. Her skin, her education, her twentieth-century “weakness” all work against her in this era, and preserving history means preserving the rape and torture of her ancestors. This is a far cry from Marty McFly’s mission to make his future parents kiss at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, and the question becomes…
Why would anyone want to keep this part of history?
Time travel for Butler’s characters is not a quirky adventure or a race against the clock. For her narrator, there is little comfort in examining the past; it is safer for her to travel into the dark, unknown future… unless, of course, there really are no black people there after all.