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l fiction such as Margaret Walker's jubilee does, nor even to "raise the dead," as Morrison's Beloved does so compellingly, but to become the dead, to embody and enact the protagonists' families' personal histories and our national past. Kindred's Dana is "pulled" into the past by threats to the life of a white slaveholding relative, Rufus Weylin, who grows up in South Carolina during the 1810s to 1830s. Rufus is just four or five years old the first time Dana arrives and saves the child from drowning, and he is twenty-five when she kills the volatile, depressed young man whom she had been unable to dissuade from the ways of slaveowning. Whole years pass for Rufus and Dana's lookalike female progenitor, the slave Alice, when Dana returns to 1976; yet only minutes pass in the lives of Dana and her white husband, Kevin, who eventually travels to the past by holding onto Dana's body. In Stigmata, the past travels to Perry's protagonist, Lizzie. Willed a yellowing family diary and a story quilt, fourteen-yearold Lizzie begins to experience episodes from the lives of her great-great-grandmother Ayo-a Middle Passage survivor-and her grandmother Grace-who abandons her family because she is tortured by Ayo's memories. Both Grace and Ayo eventually reside with Lizzie in her body. Her proper middle-class parents are horrified when Lizzie begins to "blink out" into the past and to bleed mysteriously from her wrists and back. Interpreting these episodes as signs of mental illness, Lizzie's parents institutionalize her. Released from the hospital at the age of thirty-four, Lizzie works on a new story quilt in order to transmit the family history to her mother.
Like many texts that testify to the horrors of slavery, both novels contain conventional scenes of bodily revelation. Many years after Stigmata's Ayo is beaten she still `pulls back the sleeve of her dress and looks down at her arms for a long time. The marks are there, old but true. They goes with me when Igo to God she say" (109). Lizzie repeatedly reenacts this scene for disbelieving psychiatrists: "I push my sleeves up and thrust those telltale wrists under his nose" (212). Kindred's Dana, too, finds her scarred body a contemporary attestation to the realities of slavery. At the end of the novel she returns to 1976 and to the site of her ancestors' plantation, only to find no house, no legal records of slaves or slaveowners, no ancestors' grave-markers. Finally, though, she "touch[es] the scar Tom Weylin's boot had left on [her] face, touch[es] the empty left sleeve" missing her arm, which had been consumed by the supernatural jaws of time when she murdered Rufus and returned to the present (264). All of these women's bodies attest to the reality of slavery. However, in stigmatizing not only those who lived through slavery, but also those contemporary characters long removed from slave times with physical amputations, bleeding whip marks, and manacle wounds, Butler and Perry insist upon the tangible reality of slavery in twentieth-century lives.
One might read Butler and Perry as suggesting that all historical writing is a sort of science fiction, as they seek vainly to enter the minds and bodies of their historical subjects. Yet they embark on no fantastic voyages; rather, the novels dramatize the inherently violent nature of the pursuit of historical veracity. Such endeavors not only do violence to the past, but also pain those who submit themselves to historical events. Indeed,