48 pages • 1 hour read
Octavia E. ButlerBloodchild and Other Stories
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Speech Sounds”-“The Book of Martha”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Speech Sounds”
Valerie Rye, a woman in a post-apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, has lost her husband and children. Rye is on a bus, heading to Pasadena, to see if her brother and his children are still alive. She witnesses a fight break out between two teenaged male passengers. The conflict escalates and several smaller fights break out, until the frustrated bus driver stops the bus and Rye gets off, though, as she remarks, buses were rare in those days and if one were lucky enough to get on a bus, one stayed on it. As she gets off and makes for the safety of a tree, a car pulls up; cars are even more rare than buses, as able mechanics and fuel are in short supply. A bearded man gets out and begins gesturing towards her with his left hand.
Rye remarks that“Left-handed people tended to be less impaired, more reasonable and comprehending, less driven by frustration, confusion, and anger” (148). This explains the two fighting youths seeming frustrated and attempting to speak by mock hand gestures and grunts. Three years prior, an unknown event hit the world and rendered people unable to speak, write, or otherwise communicate, save for a few errant gestures: “Language was always lost or severely impaired. It was never regained. Often there was also paralysis, intellectual impairment, death” (155). As a result, people have also become less thoughtful, quicker to anger, and less capable of long-term planning and complex reasoning. Thus, jobs like being a mechanic, which requires fine motor skills and patience, have largely become impossible. This, combined with the resulting shortage of luxuries many people had come to rely on, and the increasing amount of confusion and anger, have made the world an extremely lonely and dangerous place.
The man shows Rye a police badge, which she marvels at, as all police and other major organizations have been dissolved. He throws tear gas into the bus and the remaining passengers scramble off. The gas makes people unable to control their tempers and impulses, to varying degrees, but the policeman flashes his weapon “and in this world where the only likely common language was body language, being armed was often enough” (152).
After almost fighting with the frustrated, angry bus driver, the man beckons Rye to get in his car, and she contemplates the dangers of getting into a strange car in this chaotic, violent world. Unfortunately, this interaction has drawn the attention of some of the bus passengers, including the group of youths that had been fighting. One of the youths makes a series of violent, obscene gestures toward Rye, and she waits to see if she will be forced to shoot him, as she does not expect the onlookers to help her if she is attacked. Ultimately, the group gives up.
As she heads towards the man’s car, the group returns to intimating that her and the bearded man are a couple, which makes Rye remember her neighbor, who had wanted Rye to join him and his other two female companions. In this world, people couple in various configurations for survival.
Rye directs the man with wordless hand gestures, and they exchange objects which have become symbols of their names in this new world: a black rock from the man, which leads her to think of him as Obsidian, and a golden piece of wheat for her. The man pulls out a map and indicates that she should show him the way, which greatly saddens Rye. Loss of communication makes the loneliness even more acute, as Rye used to be a history professor and freelance author, but now her house is full of books she can no longer read and the illness has impaired her ability to recall most of what she once knew.
Rye realizes, with indignant contempt, that the bearded man can still read, and describes the intense jealousy and violence this realization provokes in her. Obsidian notices her ambivalence and takes her hand. She fights the urge to kill him and recalls that she had actually been motivated to go on this journey because she nearly killed herself out of desperation and loneliness and perhaps this is what had led her to disregard the usual caution and get into a car with a stranger.
Non-verbally, Obsidian asks whether Rye can speak. She reveals she can, while he is unable to speak or understand spoken language.
Obsidian gestures that he wants to have sex with her and Rye thinks about her lack of intimacy and physical contact since her husband and family died. Though she yearns for intimacy, she does not want to risk bringing a child into this world and declines the offer, but Obsidian pulls a condom from his glove compartment. Rye, giggling happily, agrees, and the two have sex in the back seat. Afterward, Rye and Obsidian bond over each having lost children. Rye asks Obsidian to have sex with her again, and then to come home with her, but he declines politely, which she interprets as him having a wife at home and enjoying using his badge and car as a way to pick up women: “The illness had been harder on men than on women—had killed more men, had left male survivors more severely” (164). Rye again attempts to get Obsidian to come home with her and this time he accepts, once she’s made it clear that she is fine with his continuing to patrol the streets as a former police officer. Obsidian’s presence offers her both protection and comfort. Moreover, this prevents her from having to go to Pasadena to seek out companionship, which keeps the fantasy of her brother and his children being alive going. The two turn around and head back toward her home in LA.
Obsidian suddenly breaks away from her and the two watch as a woman runs across the street, pursued by a man with a knife. The woman grabs a piece of glass to defend herself. Obsidian shouts at them but not before the attacker has stabbed and killed the woman. Obsidian is tending to the man, who has been severely wounded by the glass, when suddenly the man reaches for Obsidian’s gun and shoots Obsidian dead before Rye is able to kill him. Two young children run out of the house toward the woman, who was their mother, and begin to wordlessly shake her.
This scene is too much for Rye, who vomits before deciding that she will take the two toddlers home with her, along with the bodies, which she will bury. As she attempts to move the body of the woman, one of the kids shouts at her to go away, while the other tells his sister not to talk in front of the stranger. Rye is stunned and amazed that the children can speak. She reasons that perhaps young children are immune to the disease, or the illness has run its course. In this world, speaking, reading or writing can provoke intense rage and jealousy in those who are left unable to communicate, and this grief over losing those powers can drive people to violence and murder. Rye muses that this might have happened to the man who had stabbed the woman, and that he was likely these children’s father.
Rye decides she must protect and teach the children. Here, it is revealed that Rye can not only speak, but that she has also retained fluent speech, as she urges the children to come with her and assures them that it’s all right if they speak to each other. The story ends with the children getting in the car with her and she tells them her name, speaking it aloud for the first time in three years: Valerie Rye.
In the Afterward, Butler remarks that she was inspired to write this story as she watched a close personal friend succumb to cancer over a period of several years. As Butler took the bus to visit this friend every weekend and read to her from the novel she was working on at the time, she witnessed a fight break out on the bus, much like the fight at the beginning of the story. This story was born out of Butler’s lament about human communication and how people too often resort to violence to make their point.
Story Summary: “Crossover”
Jane is a strong but not particularly attractive woman working a blue-collar factory job. Resented by her coworkers and boss for being either too quick or too slow, she lives and works in a poor, urban neighborhood frequented by drunks and prostitutes. Jane suffers from regular headaches, though she remarks that she hasn’t had one in a long time. As she finishes her workday, a splintering headache begins, and she’s compelled to go to the liquor store for relief.
Jane is apparently a regular drinker who grew up around alcoholics and drinks to detach from the world and numb herself to her loneliness and anxiety. As she walks by the liquor store, she is harassed by a few drunk young men but ignores them. She runs into her former lover on the street, an imposing, haggard man with a scar running down the length of his face who has apparently just gotten off a three-month prison stint for a bar fight. Though she initially appears to loathe the man, the two go home together and have sex. They talk, and it’s revealed that Jane had contemplated suicide several times in the past but couldn’t go through with it. Her lover taunts her about her fears of dying and being alone. Jane becomes frustrated and throws an ashtray at him, which prompts her neighbor to check in on her and invite her over to talk. Though Jane is tempted by the idea of company, she ultimately rejects the offer.
Jane struggles with wanting to get rid of her boyfriend, but “it was just another of the things she didn’t have the courage to do. Like accepting the loneliness or dying […]” (189). Instead, she decides to go back to the liquor store, where she runs into a wino who offers her alcohol in exchange for sex: “She had lived around drunks most of her life. She knew that if she could get enough down, nothing would matter” (189). She chugs from the bottle, waiting for the world to fade away.
This story was inspired by Butler’s own life of working in factories before her success as an author. She describes feeling depressed and hopeless, and comments that she saw a lot of lonely, desperate people around that time, particularly those who suffered from chronic alcoholism. This story, and particularly its protagonist, is an expression of her own fear of becoming one of them.
Story Summary: “Amnesty”
Amnesty follows Noah Cannon, a female, African-American “translator” selected to train others and act as a liaison for arrived alien creatures called stranger-Communities. Noah works in the Mojave Bubble, a Community enclave, and has separated her human life from her work with the aliens. She rarely wears much clothing, as the Communities prefer as much tactile access to bare skin as possible. When she is among them, in their environment, she compartmentalizes her humanity: “She suspected that she could have at least the furniture now, if she asked her employer for it, but she had not asked, would not ask. Human things were for human places” (236). Noah works for a particular community, who comes to tell her that she has gotten the new job she requested, which involves being subcontracted to a different Community, one whose rudimentary knowledge of humans is sure to end with Noah being hurt one way or another.
The Communities do not use spoken language; instead, they talk amongst themselves using electrical signals. Noah describes her employer and the subcontractor as they arrive to meet with her: “It looked, Noah thought, a little like a great, black, mossenshrouded bush with such a canopy of irregularly-shaped leaves, shaggy mosses, and twisted vines that no light showed through it” (223). Their communication with humans is largely tactile; by enveloping the human within their cilia-like, tentacled bodies, they are able to communicate by applying differing levels of pressure on the skin, and occasionally administer painful electric shocks. Noah is enveloped by the subcontractor and “after a few moments, she felt weightless. She had lost all sense of direction, yet she felt totally secure, clasped by entities that had nothing resembling human limbs” (226). Humans can sign from within a Community, or, when not in physical contact with a Community, by using their bodies to make signs that are observed by the Communities from outside.
The subcontractor tells Noah that her job will be to train a group of six other humans to serve as translators for Communities. The subcontractor tells her the new recruits are afraid and urges her to change them into calm, amiable workers:
“The Communities could change one another just by exchanging a few of their individual entities—as long as both exchanging communities were willing” (229). In a testament to how strange both species are to each other, the subcontractor assumes that humans have a similar mechanism that they are simply not utilizing. When Noah is unable to assure compliance, the subcontractor immobilizes her and delivers a painful shock, which causes her to scream and convulse.
It also becomes apparent that the aliens have been on Earth for some time—long enough to have held human captives, of which Noah had been one herself. These human captives were subjected to painful and sometimes deadly experiments. Because of the radically different nature of human and Community communication, it took some time for the aliens to recognize the humans as sentient beings. Since then, laws have been established that are supposed to protect both species, but Communities are still known to harm people from time to time.
The subcontractor leaves and Noah’s boss enfolds her and urges her to relax and rest before she leaves to train the six new recruits. The Communities can provide a soothing, relaxing and even pleasurable touch that is a pleasant experience for both human and alien. Noah has known her primary employer since age twelve, and the two have grown close. The alien is concerned for Noah’s safety with the new subcontractor, but Noah dismisses this as part of the job.
The scene changes to a warehouse, stocked with fresh food, where Noah meets the six human candidates for the first time. Noah is attempting to increase peace and understanding between the humans and the Communities, though it seems that many humans distrust the alien visitors and are looking for ways to destroy them. Initially, the six recruits see her as a traitor to humanity. They show their dislike by physically distancing themselves from her, sitting with four chairs between her and them, save for two of the recruits: Michelle Ota and Sorrel Trent.
Though the recruits do not trust the Communities, they are desperate for work, as the world is in an economic depression since the arrival of the Communities. There is also a lack of basic resources like food and water. The Communities have been on Earth for over twenty years at this point. As she explains to the recruits, Noah was kidnapped by the Communities at age eleven, as part of their early attempts to understand humans. She was subjected to painful experiments, and before the Communities learned about human physiology, they had accidentally killed some of their captives. Humans who distrust and hate the Communities call them “weeds,” referring to an invasive and unwelcome species that takes resources from the native environment.
Noah explains to the recruits that she was actually subjected to more painful experiments by other humans after she returned from being captive, compared to those exacted by the Communities. The Communities were only trying to learn, while the humans acted out of fear: “human beings ought to be able to behave better than a bunch of rats” (253).
The recruits ask Noah questions about her captivity and about the Communities. They have trouble understanding why Noah doesn’t hate the Communities, even though she was imprisoned by them, experimented on, raped, and suffered two miscarriages. For Noah, the Communities are simply a fact of life. Their ship cannot make a return journey to their home planet, so humans must learn to get along with them. The Communities are also more technologically-advanced, so translators around the world have been training to communicate with them for the safety of both species. Noah wants to prevent a destructive war.
Noah recounts a time when the governments of the world were trying to destroy and sabotage the Communities. Noah left the Mojave Bubble at age twenty-three, after requesting to be freed by the Communities there. She was immediately snatched by the government, who believed she had valuable intel, and was tortured for information:
It mattered more than I know how to tell you that this time my tormentors were my own people. They were human. They spoke my language. They knew all that I knew about pain and humiliation and fear and despair. They knew what they were doing to me, and yet it never occurred to them not to do it (261).
Eventually, after a failed suicide attempt, her human captors released Noah and she went home to her extended family, before eventually becoming the first human captive to return to the Communities and begin to work for them.
Noah explains the relationship between humans and communities as a pleasant narcotic for the Communities. She also explains the duties and environment the recruits will be living in, which includes very little technology or contact with other humans. Before the final test, during which the recruits will be enfolded for the first time, Noah lets them in on a historical secret about the humans’ relationship with the Communities: when the Communities first landed, the human nations of the world attempted coordinated nuclear strikes on their bubbles. However, to their shock and horror, nothing happened. Sometime later, half of the missiles were returned, undetonated, while the Communities kept the other half. At this revelation, it becomes clear to the recruits that there is no way to win an armed conflict against the invaders.
Story Summary: “The Book of Martha”
In reference both to the New Testament format of naming books or sections after apostles and other important religious figures, and to the profession of the story’s namesake, this story is a conversation between the writer, Martha Bes, and God. Before the story began, Martha had been writing in her home, when suddenly she is transported to an unknown place, where God tells her that he has work for her to do. Martha sees God as a giant, white-bearded man amidst a shapeless gray landscape, where her desires and thoughts simply come true. God tells her that everything she sees and does is up to her.
As Martha converses with God, He asks her to remember Noah, Jonah and Job, each of whom was tasked, in their own way, with changing the world. This is what Martha is supposed to do: help humanity find a way to be more sustainable and less destructive. God will lend Martha some of His power so she can change people to her liking, and when she is finished, He tells her she must go live among the bottom rung of society in the newly-changed world, in order to experience it. Martha, a self-described poor, black woman, laughs bitterly at this, incredulous that God doesn’t seem to realize she is already on the bottom rung.
God tells Martha she has absolute freedom to change human nature as she likes. Martha is afraid and protests that she might make mistakes that will hurt or kill people. God does not seem concerned with this. Martha toys with putting a limit on how many children people can have, as a solution to what she sees as overpopulation, but God quickly points out all the ways this can go wrong:
“If you limit their fertility, you will probably destroy them. If you limit their competitiveness or their inventiveness, you might destroy their ability to survive the many disasters and challenges that they must face” (204).God subsequently dismisses Martha’s other ideas in the same fashion.
The story revolves around a central dilemma: how much of human nature can you change in the name of creating a utopian society, without fundamentally changing people so they are no longer recognizable as humans? Martha decides to give people unavoidable, hyper-realistic dreams: “‘I want them to have the only possible utopia,’ Martha thought for a moment” (311). She sees this as the only way for everybody to have their own utopia without infringing on another person’s. Martha believes this will also bring a level of satisfaction that will quell destructive impulses in the waking world by burning off some of each person’s energy.
Martha is transported back to her house, to ponder her decision. When she summons God again, she sees him first as a black man and then as a black woman, which leads her to ruminate on how long it took her to move away from conventional notions of power and privilege. Martha asks God, “‘Can the dreams teach—or at least promote—more thoughtfulness when people are awake, promote more concern for real consequences?’” (323). God answers that He thinks they can.
In the end, Martha urges God to make the dreams come to pass, though she knows that her own career as a fiction writer will suffer, since people will now have their own private and much more vivid fantasies each night. She asks to forget this encounter and the story ends with Martha back home, alone.
In the Afterward, Butler explains that she was trying to think of a way to write a utopia for everybody and realizes this is only possible in everybody’s private dreams.
Analysis: “Speech Sounds”-“The Book of Martha”
Three of these stories feature a female, African-American protagonist trying to rebuild the world, despite their own personal doubts, fears and traumas.
“Crossover” is the outlier of the group. This short piece, which follows a lonely, alcoholic, manual laborer named Jane, was intensely personal for Butler, who also worked in factories and did other menial labor when she started out as a writer. Butler describes the fear of succumbing to alcoholism and depression like the character of Jane, who is harassed by drunks, prostitutes and young lascivious men while on the way to the liquor store. Eventually, her former boyfriend, who just got out of prison after being charged with assault, returns and drags up the memories of Jane’s attempted suicide. Her boyfriend’s face is deeply scarred from the fight that got him jailed, and the scar is a literal manifestation of Jane’s toxic relationship with him, as his return reopens an old wound that has not healed cleanly. It reminds her of the intense loneliness she feels, but also shows the reader that her isolation is partially self-imposed, since she rejects her kindly neighbor’s offer of tea and company. Jane believes she is as scarred and ugly as her boyfriend, and thus she does not deserve to pursue happiness and thus falls into the same pattern of depression and alcoholism as the rest of her neighborhood.
Butler uses “Crossover” to explore her own fear of loneliness and the uncertainty of making it as an author. Conversely, it is also about the unwillingness to give up, which shows up in Jane’s fear of dying— the ultimate form of giving up— though she has attempted suicide several times. Jane eventually gives in to the life of her depressed neighborhood, while Butler herself went on to be a successful author, winning a Macarthur fellowship and a Nebula Award for her science fiction writing.
“The Book of Martha” can be read as the antithesis to “Crossover,” demonstrating the other side of Butler’s experience, through the power of writing and the imagination, to dispel loneliness and despair by exploring alternative futures. Unlike Jane, who is ultimately resigned to her fate as the descendant of alcoholics, Martha is a writer whose life also seems solitary, yet Martha uses her writing to connect to other people. She is chosen by God, alongside the likes of Noah, Job and Jonah, because she is particularly incisive about human nature and also possesses the creativity necessary to reinvent the world. Martha struggles with balancing her identity as a writer with her task to change humankind in order to assure a better future. She overcomes the loneliness of giving up her profession, which was her entire identity, by embracing the creative power that God offers her to shape humanity. We can see this overcoming of estrangement in the different manifestations of God, who first shows up as a gigantic white man with a beard, then, later, as a black man, and finally as a mirror image of Martha herself, as Martha rejects traditional notions of white patriarchal power and shapes her perceptions of the world accordingly. Martha and Jane are two diametrically-opposed visions of the individual’s agency to channel their energy into self-destruction or creation.
“Amnesty” and “Speech Sounds” are also about overcoming loneliness. These stories use the more traditional science fiction premises of alien invasion and devastating disease to look at two isolated characters, Rye and Noah, who are each tasked in their own way with rebuilding their respective worlds.
Rye lives in a world where the ability to reason and communicate has been destroyed by a mysterious disease, while Noah’s world has been invaded by strange aliens who communicate through touch and gesture. In both stories, the lack of spoken language forces the protagonists to think of new ways to communicate. Though Noah was held captive by the aliens for years, and subject to painful experiments, she returns to their desert strongholds and becomes the first translator of the human-Community tactile language. Because of her close relationship with the aliens, Noah is distrusted by most other humans. Instead, she finds intense comfort in the Communities’ embrace, which literally engulfs her. This embrace is its own form of cross-species communication; however, instead of transferring information, it conveys a sense of kinship and bonding, as each alien is comprised of “individuals” and is its own mini-community. Noah feels closer to the aliens than to other humans, stating that it was humans who cruelly tortured her despite knowing how much suffering they were inflicting. Noah’s experience is a testament to the cruelty humans have inflicted on each other.
Valerie Rye is also no stranger to the cruelty of the human race. Because of the breakdown in spoken language and reading that has plunged the world into economic depression and social chaos, people’s worst behaviors have emerged, as they fight to survive. Like “Bloodchild” and “Amnesty,” Rye’s world looks at what people are willing to do to survive. In the former two stories, survival and desperation allow human characters to forge interspecies alliances and even genuine, loving relationships with other creatures. In “Speech Sounds,” Rye is attracted to Obsidian, the former police officer who still seems to be interested in helping others in a world where altruism and heroism are dangerous and nearly extinct. Both Obsidian and Rye retain some measure of lost forms of communication: Obsidian can still read and write, and the end of the story reveals that Rye can speak as well but has not had anybody to speak to. The ability to communicate is thus synonymous with a measure of humanity that has largely been lost in this world. Speaking to others and being able to listen to them is indicative of empathy, and it is why Rye feels compelled to take in the two orphaned children at the end, despite that they are not her blood relatives. Rye not only feels a maternal connection to them, having lost her own children and husband to disease, but their ability to speak and understand verbal speech mirrors Rye’s own abilities. Like the Communities’ embrace in “Amnesty,” communication functions as a means of creating new relationships based on shared interests and mutual empathy that go beyond the simple boundaries of familial or even species affinity.
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By Octavia E. Butler
