Kindred

This isn't my favorite Octavia Butler book, probably because it's true historical fantasy instead of one of her amazing science fiction epics. That said, it is still a very powerful book, and one that I'm glad I read. The story follows a black woman in 1976 through a bizarre series of time travels to repeatedly save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor. Each time, she her journey is fraught with peril from all directions, and she is repeatedly forced into the life of a slave on her ancestor's plantation.

Butler makes slavery viscerally real in a lot of ways, from her no-sugar coating descriptions of the beatings slaves received (and the horrors of the relatively mild beatings Dana receives) to her fully-fledged, multi-faceted portraits of the black characters living under the Weylin estate. Dana is an easy character to see through, as she has witnessed all of the slave stereotypes modern media has furnished and also the complicated lives of African-Americans in what is still relatively early on in the Civil Rights Movement. Dana, a writer in her own time, chronicles the people she meets not as Mammies or Uncle Toms or noble martyrs, but as flawed humans struggling to survive however they can, sacrificing whatever levels of pride and dignity they can individually bear.

Dana's relationships with the white characters are just as complicated. From Rufus, the man she is called again and again to save for whom she feels something despite is reprehensible treatment of her and those she cares for, to Kevin, her progressive, white husband who seems to, if not belong in 1819, at least manage to justify and fit in even as he forms his own stop on the Underground Railroad. The ties we forge for ourselves, the ways we let coventions and society make slaves of us, make us believe things have to be certain ways, these are themes Butler's works bring up again and again. Here, though, they are not cloaked in alien metaphor, but very real and remarkably present.

Butler's work is as relevant (maybe more relevant?) than when it was written, and while I don't claim this book to be an easy read, I think it's an important one.