Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) chronicles the story of Shori Matthews, a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl. Shori awakens with amnesia and physical scarring as a result of an attack from unknown assailants. While healing, she is hunted by clandestine factions of white-skinned vampires called the Ina. Shori later discovers that she is a product of amalgamated Ina and human blood. This chapter argues that Shori is a tragic mulatto figure in the vein of characters in novels like Iola Leroy, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Our Nig, and Clotelle but written in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. The novel seems especially concerned with effects of familial and cultural devastation, trauma, miscegenation and xenophobia. While these are primary concerns of the slave narrative, these elements are also reflective of oppressive forces in modern societies that continue to play out master-slave relationships, often in concealed ways.
