Fledgling
“You must not give the people who have decided to be your enemies any advantage. You must seem more Ina than they”
I took my mom to go see Sinners in iMax in April, we also finished watching the second season of Interview With The Vampire while she was in Chicago. Vampire movies often fit a very specific niche of entertainment that my mom loves, spooky but not scary. As such, my April was filled with specifically Black vampires! So I completed my Black vampire trifecta with Fledgeling. Out of a movie, tv show and book, of course it is the book that is my favorite. But this isn’t just any book, it is the last novel written before the death of the genius (literally, she is a MacArthur Fellow) Octavia Butler (published post-humously). Between Kindred, the Earthseed duology and now Fledgling, the author continues to blow my mind with her story-telling.
So What Had Happened Was…
She wakes up starving, burned and blind with no knowledge of where she is let alone who she is. She gets lucky and kills an “animal” to find some strength. With time and more food she builds enough fortitude to leave the cave she finds herself in. Upon leaving this cave she finds a burned down town and continues on to a road. There a man stops to pick up this small Black child that he sees walking. She knows nothing other than that she is not as young as the man thinks she is. It is then that she bites Wright for the first time and hears the term vampire for the first time in her memory. The bite leads to a euphoric feeling for Wright and mind control for who we would come to know as Shori. However, Wright alone cannot produce enough blood to satiate Shori. Thus she goes and finds more people to feed on, notably a lonely spinster named Theodora.
Shori returns to the burned village she found upon waking up to armed guards. After a skirmish, she interrogates them and discovers that there is another being like her who is controlling the actions of the guards. Shori waits for that being, which turns out to actually be her father, Iosif. Shori goes with Iosif to his compound where she finds out that she is not what humans think of as vampires, but actually a 56 year-old of a different race of being called Ina. It is unclear where Ina come from, some believe space while others believe a mother goddess. However, it is clear that Ina have evolved alongside humans for millennia. Unlike vampires, Ina do not turn humans into Ina, but rather live in a symbiotic relationship where the human and their Ina cannot live without each other. The humans who have accepted this life are called symbionts. Male Ina and female Ina cannot live together because of the male weakness to female pheromones. The burned town that Shori discovered is the village of her mothers. She is the last surviving woman of her family.
Shori discovers that she is actually a genetic experiment, which is why she is still alive. Her mothers successfully mixed Ina and human DNA to create Shori who is more resistant to sun light due to her melanin, can stay awake through the day time, and walk in the day light. Upon finding this out, she briefly takes a trip with Wright to process all of the information she received. In that time her father’s compound is attacked. She is now the last surviving member of both sides of her family. Shori converts a symbiont of her father’s and one of her brother’s to her be her own symbiont. Shori is able to use the information of these symbionts to find another Ina family, the Gordons.
Shori warns the Gordons that she is being attacked, that both of her families have been wiped out, and that she believes that it is Ina who are behind it. The Gordan’s do not believe that it is an Ina behind the crimes, but they take precautions to ensure safety. They are attacked. With Shori awake and the symbionts warned, they are able to quell another attempt. Shori interrogates the attackers and discovers that they are humans who are being controlled by an Ina family, the Silks.
The Gordons use ancient Ina law to call together a trial to indict the Silks. After days of trial it becomes clear that the Silks and their cohorts hate Shori because she is a genetic experiment and because she is Black. One of the council, Katherine Dahlman, tries to sway the trial by killing Theodora. And although the evidence for both are clear, the council refuses to invoke the death sentence on either parties. The Silk family is broken up and scattered. Katherine refuses to accept her punishment (to have her legs cut off, which would ultimately grow back) and instead attacks Shori. Shori gets the best of Katherine, but she is too small to kill her. It is only then that the council evokes the death penalty. Shori decides to carry on her family’s legacy and name by creating a new family and spending years with other Ina families to gain knowledge of her history.
Aiight so boom…
There is so much to talk about in this book. First, we have to discuss some of the sexual implications of the book including consent which can be seen as dubious with intoxication, addiction and mind control implicit in the Ina and human relationship. The greater question is one of pedophilia as Shori looks like a 10 year old child, but has multiple sexual encounters in this book. There is a question of what the relationship to sex and the monster is. The best vampire narrative I saw in the past year (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu) explicitly deals with this question. However, the question of romance, consent and monsters is a little outside of my depth (I don’t watch/read romance let alone monster romance). One of my favorite youtubers Princess Weakes has 2 great video essays on the topic.
Nosferatu- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAmSspxYfaE&t=2590s
Monsters and Romance- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LE3YoX69zw&t=2623s
This read started with my want to read a Black vampire narrative and the Blackness of this vampire is central to the narrative. There is a clear Henrietta Lacks allusion with the genetic experiments, but what I find more interesting is the racism of the Ina. One of the things that I love about horror is that it is often an allegory for the real terrors of our lives. You can see vampires used as racial trauma allegories in all 3 of the Black vampire works I viewed this year. While the first two have something to say in the meta-narrative as part of the allegory, Ms. Butler makes her racism explicit. In Interview With The Vampire, we see a multi-cultural group of ancient vampires in the Paris of our imagination, one where there are no racial issues (ask Francophone Africa about the reality of their colonizers capital), host a sham of a trial. The “trial” is actually a play, written and directed with no actual decisions to be made, conducted against two Black vampires leading to the execution of one and the near death of another. A clear allusion to the relationship of Black people and the “justice” system. In Sinners, we see an ancient Irish vampire, anti-KKK, pre-dating the concept of whiteness (which as an Irish immigrant in the early 1900’s, he would have been outside of anyway) and sharing anti-colonialist sentiment. However, Remmick still tries to steal the music and culture of a young Black man because of its power. Another pretty clear allusion to the relationship of Black people, music, and America. In Flegeling, we see several ancient vampires call Shori racial epithets.
This difference is striking as it takes the vampire character out of racial allegory and into racial reality. Octavia could have simply kept the racism in the allegory, where the Ina did not like Shori because of the DNA experimentation which ruined the “purity” of the Ina blood. That allegory would have been sufficient, however the Ina are explicitly racist to Shori. It makes me wonder why I have never seen other straight up racist vampires. I partially believe it is because the myth of an ancient vampire usually comes with the gothic archetype of a genteel monster. However, antebellum plantation owners were also an aristocratic part of the southern gothic culture. And clearly thoroughly racist. Maybe it is the thought that vampires are immortal and an immortal being could not be racist. However, Butler points out that Ina are still temporal. The Ina bring up whether the fruit of chattel slavery and a currently oppressed bloodline is appropriate in the Ina genetics. The present time affects even a 500 year old mind. As such, the treatment of vampires as monsters who happen to do something racist for allegorical purposes seems untruthful to me and cheapens the allegory. It is pulling punches. It is defanging the monster. I find it interesting that the book where the vampire isn’t actually a monster, but rather a different species, allows their vampire, the Ina, to be truly monstruous.