Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler (1979)

I chose this novel to fit a prompt in The 52 Book Club’s 2023 Reading Challenge (Prompt #48: A book by Octavia E. Butler). Previously, I’d come across the author’s name a few times as a science fiction author, but hadn’t read any of her books.

I was very pleasantly surprised. This is science fiction, in that it involves time travel, but felt more like historical fiction in the way that it described her repeated visits to a plantation in early 19th-century Maryland. The story is told in first-person narrative by a young African-American writer, Dana Franklin, who is pulled back from her life in 1976 in Los Angeles with her white husband, Kevin, whenever her ancestor, Rufus Weylin, is in danger. Rufus is the son of the plantation owner and, during her frequent visits to the past, she is treated as a slave.

The story depicts the harsh realities of slavery through the eyes of a modern black woman.

“To survive, my ancestors had to put up with more than I ever could.”

“Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse . . . Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands.”

It also explores the means that slaves had to adapt to in order to survive.

“She had done the safe thing – had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid.”

“She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.”

“My back had already begun to ache dully, and I felt dully ashamed. Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

Once I started the book, I found it difficult to put down, needing to find out how Dana would survive and whether she would make it back to her own lifetime.