Kindred

Kindred is a very thought-provoking read. Dana is a modern black woman (well, a woman of the 1970s) in a marriage with a white man. She finds herself sent to the 1800s South on multiple occasions – sometimes with her husband – and the common theme is the same boy (and, eventually, man) is in danger and needs saving.

She quickly determines the person she is saving is her great, great grandfather. She is surprised, because she doesn't know the Rufus in the family Bible is white.

Being a black woman in the antebellum South, she is treated like a slave, and for all intents and purposes, becomes a slave, with all the danger and abuse inherent to the institution. Her husband when he is with her tries to protect her, of course, but cannot experience what she is experiencing. She is automatically treated as lesser because of skin color, he is automatically treated as better, and even to the extent he wants to help her he is up against systemic racism.

Dana believes that if she can survive long enough, and help Rufus survive long enough to sire her next ancestor, that she will no longer be needed – that her freedom will be obtained by returning to modern times. She has to explore that she will allow, what she will do, what she will encourage others to do, and how she will change as a result of her captivity.

Her relationship with Rufus is complex, at least on her side. He is her kin(dred), but he is also someone who benefits from slavery, who thinks of black people as inferior, and who becomes a slave owner. She meets him as a little boy, and likes him while seeing he's troubled, and can't help but wonder if her influence will change him for the better. Will knowing her – an educated black woman who saves his life again and again – improve the lives of the black people he owns by making him question his beliefs? Will it even persuade him to free his slaves? Or will the system win out, corrupting Rufus beyond redemption? And at what point does the bad in a person outweigh the good?

I believe the reader will not find Dana a perfect person, and I don't believe she was meant to be. She was thrust into a world where she had to make difficult decisions, and decisions only become difficult when they're based on complex situations and when no answer is completely without drawbacks. I imagine most people will struggle with what she asks of another character. She asks her great great grandmother to willingly submit to repeated rapes. She feels that submitting is better than fighting, and inevitably losing the fight. There's certainly a pragmatism at work since these rapes are what will lead to her ancestor being born, and this is a battle this woman is unlikely to win. Dana might not be wrong, but it just doesn't feel like her decision to make, even knowing what she does. How a woman handles a situation like that, even if she wants to fight it to the death, is her decision. But... Impossible situation. But the interesting result of this is the reader sees Dana, while talking quite frankly to Rufus, and caring about the slaves, over time and without realizing it slipping into choosing her own path of least resistance. I've read the author did want people to think about how history has judged the enslaved men and women who took a path of pleasing the enslavers in order to improve their lives to the extent they could.

Since I finished this a day or two ago, Kindred has been in my thoughts quite a bit. I found myself saddened that I would never meet Octavia Butler outside of her books. I feel I lost something in not discovering her earlier.