Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Dana’s torture starts when, on the day of her 26th birthday in 1976, she mysteriously disappears from California and is pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland in order to save Rufus, the son of a slaveowner’s farm. She quickly understands the reason for being sent back in time: to safeguard Rufus from his attack on her Black ancestor so that she can one day be born. Dana struggles to maintain her independence and return to the present as she experiences the pains of enslavement and the soul-crushing normality of brutality.
Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and gives it enduring depth and intensity, paving the way for neo-slavery stories like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer. Dana not only feels the brutality of slavery in her skin, but she also sadly comes to accept it as a necessary part of her current existence.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
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She wrote Kindred with a specific audience in mind, and it is one of the two entrances to her work that the majority of readers encounter. The protagonist of Kindred is Dana, an African-American woman from the 1970s who identifies as “black” and is pulled back in time to protect the life of one of her ancestors who was white and a slave owner in the South. And over the course of several encounters with him, he develops and becomes more hazardous to her; as a result, she eventually emerges from the situation physically injured and cognitively altered. She marries a white man in the 1970s—again, writing about this was incredibly groundbreaking at the time—and takes him along on one of these trips through time.
Kindred depicts slavery in the American South during the antebellum period through the eyes of Dana, a young Black woman who was born in 1950 and is 26 at the start of the action. When the novel opens, Dana is married to Kevin Franklin, a white man, and she resides in Los Angeles.
How does slavery affect Dana? When she suddenly becomes dizzy on her 26th birthday and tumbles to the ground, she wakes up in Maryland in 1819, though she doesn’t realize it at the time. She is then driven back to her Los Angeles home shortly after that. She and Kevin are regularly transported in this erratic manner to a Maryland plantation, where they spend months or years, over the span of the following few weeks in LA.
Dana is treated like a slave there because she is Black and doesn’t have any papers proving her freedom.
This novel did not appeal to me. While I won’t say it’s impossible, it’s difficult for me to see how anyone might find delight in reading it. Let me reassure you that slavery is not a joyous fun time in case you had any doubts on the topic. Dana and the other characters regularly encounter cruelty and degradation that is degrading.
The fact that nobody escapes Dana’s sympathy is what most surprised me. There are good people and terrible people in the world, such as the slaves who support one another despite severe hardship, the white masters, and the slaves who snitch on or assist in the degradation of their fellow slaves. None of them is straightforward, and none of them is beyond Dana’s capacity for compassion. This doesn’t necessarily imply that she condones their actions, but rather that she makes an effort to comprehend. It is not a kind or straightforward way to approach slavery.
