A Summary and Analysis of Octavia Butler’s ‘Crossover’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Crossover’ is a 1971 short story by Octavia Butler (1947-2006), first published in the anthology Clarion before being included in Butler’s short-story collection Bloodchild and Other Stories. This very short story explores a number of themes including poverty, hopelessness, addiction, and the blurred line between reality and illusion, as the story’s protagonist, Jane, struggles with her dependence on alcohol.

Summary

Jane is a young woman working a dead-end factory job. She is exhausted and dependent on alcohol. When she gets a headache, she goes to the liquor store, telling herself that alcohol will help cure her headache. Her life is one of poverty, loneliness, and dissatisfaction.

While she is out getting alcohol, she is harassed by some youths outside the liquor store and propositioned by a wino. Then she is confronted by her partner, who has just been released from prison having served three months for getting into a fight. He is ugly with a scar on his face. She tells him to go and find someone else as she doesn’t care about him, but ends up taking him home with her for dinner and sex.

He asks her why she doesn’t find a good-looking man to rescue her from her life of hard graft in the factory. She replies that she doesn’t know what an attractive man would see in her. We learn that when he was sent to prison, she considered ending her life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills but decided she could live without him.

They argue, and she throws an ashtray at the wall, narrowly missing him. She tells him to leave and her neighbour knocks on the door to check she is all right. She walks out on her partner and goes back to the liquor store. The youths have gone, but the wino is still there, and when he offers her some of his drink, she gladly accepts it, accompanying the drunk man to a hotel and drinking until the man with a scar on his face, whom she can see behind her, disappears from view.

Analysis

‘Crossover’ is one of Butler’s earliest stories, written when she was in her early twenties and still finding her voice and learning her craft. As such, it has a certain raw quality to it which she smoothed and refined for her later and more mature work (it is perhaps significant that ‘Crossover’ is placed towards the end of the collection of stories in Bloodchild, as if being relegated to a ‘juvenilia’ section).

At the same time, it’s a story that lends itself to a certain roughness in the storytelling, focusing as it does on alcohol dependency, a dysfunctional relationship, and a woman whose circumstances lead her to struggle to tell the difference between reality and illusion.

And although Butler doesn’t make it explicit, there’s a strong suggestion in the story that some of the figures who appear in the story – all of whom, with the exception of the female neighbour who knocks on the door, are male – are hallucinations, demons summoned from Jane’s past or from her unconscious memory, and archetypes of certain types of person she has known.

For example, the ‘wino’ who appears near both the beginning and the end of the story may be a genuine person, but may equally be the ‘devil’ on Jane’s shoulder, enticing her to drink, decadence, and dissolution.

Tellingly, the third-person narrator informs us near the end of the story that Jane had been around drunks all her life, so her own alcoholism is a product of her upbringing (does the wino represent her drunken father, perhaps, or perhaps what Sigmund Freud would call the ‘id’ part of her own psyche?). The unnamed drunk functions like a figure in a dream whose true symbolism is what Freud would call a ‘condensation’ or condensing of several different but related elements.

But if the ‘wino’ character is possibly only a manifestation of Jane’s unconscious, then what about the unnamed man with the scarred face who is (or was) her romantic partner? It’s possible he also represents a part of her personality, but if so, he’s hardly the angel on her shoulder balancing out the devil (the drunk). He’s physically unattractive and prone to getting into fights, and (we assume) in and out of prison on a regular basis as a result.

Of course, this makes Jane’s capitulation to the bottle easier to understand. Her life is unremarkable but also physically and psychologically draining. She receives little in the way of reward, financial or otherwise, for her hard slog with the soldering iron. Her love life – whether the scarred man is real or a phantasm conjured by her drink-addled, wearied mind – is ugly and unsatisfying.

Butler later said in a 2003 roundtable discussion (published in Gregory Jerome Hampton’s Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires) that she wrote ‘Crossover’ because she wanted to write about a woman who is ‘alone and frightened and doesn’t know what to do’. At the end of the story, she has decided to accompany the drunken man to the hotel room and to give herself over to the bottle. But Butler’s language (‘She let the wino guide her toward the hotel’) suggests a passive woman being steered and controlled by outside forces, rather than someone in full control of her own life.