Paperback: 324 pages
Published: The Women's Press (13 October 1988, first published 1979)
ISBN-10: 070434162X
ISBN-13: 978-0704341623
Reviewer: Cara
Copy: Bought secondhand
From the back of the book:
When Dana answers a young boy’s cry for help, she finds herself transported back to a past more dangerous than she had ever imagined. A world of slavery from which she cannot escape.
A white plantation owner’s son, Rufus, is indebted to her for his life. But as a black woman, Dana herself is now a slave. Their relationship affords her the smallest of opportunities to make a difference. But how far should she compromise in order to safeguard her life and the lives of those around her? As an innocent young boy grows into someone beyond her reach, Dana soon finds herself confronted by impossible choices that threaten everything she holds most dear…
Kindred is a very powerful book, one that will stay with me for a long time. The day-to-day reality of life as a slave on a Maryland plantation between the years of 1815 and 1831 is the core of the story, and how Dana, a black woman from 1976 California, copes with travelling back into the time of her ancestors is vividly portrayed.
The story opens with a prologue, where Dana is in hospital recovering from the loss of her left arm, it having been amputated above the elbow. With her is Kevin, her husband. How she comes to have her arm embedded in the wall of her home is only revealed at the very end of the book. The intervening account of Dana’s experience reveals how she is somehow tied to Rufus Weylin, the son of a plantation owner at the beginning of the book, throughout his life. She is pulled back through time at significant, life-threatening events in Rufus’s life and although the mechanism for the time travel is never explained, Dana is there for a reason. She soon finds out that he is her ancestor, the father of her several times great-grandmother Hagar. Is she pulled back to pre-Civil War Maryland to ensure that Hagar is born?
Dana is first pulled back in time when Rufus, as a very young boy, is drowning in a river. She saves him but is returned to her own time when Rufus’s father tries to shoot her. Seconds later she returns to Maryland when Rufus has set fire to some curtains and again his life is in danger. This time she stays longer and discovers that the year is 1815 and realises she is now in the presence of her ancestor, her lineage having been documented in a family Bible in her own world. Again she only spends a short time, several hours, in Maryland, but only minutes have passed when she returns to California. Her white husband, Kevin, witnesses her disappearance and accepts Dana’s account of what happened. The next time she is pulled back, he grabs her arm and travels back in time with her. Kevin is horrified at the treatment of slaves, it being alien to his own life experience, yet, as a white man, receives courtesy and respect from the Weylins, who accept that Dana is his property. The fact that Dana is literate, and educated, with the accent of a modern Californian threatens all who encounter her. The slaves are mistrustful of her, seeing her as a ‘mammy’ or collaborator, someone who believes herself to be better than them. The Weylins, especially Tom the father, fear her and her confident demeanour, being concerned that she will ‘infect’ their slaves, making them more difficult to control and giving them ideas of freedom. Over the course of the book, Dana is beaten down and realises she has no rights whatsoever in this world, yet some of her independent spirit remains, leading to a dramatic conclusion.
There is no doubt in my mind that slavery is a shameful episode in US history, one which continues to have an impact on American society today, particularly in the southern states. The Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King and others was less than 50 years ago, something worth bearing in mind, given that Kindred was written around 30 years ago, at a time when a black US President was still unthinkable. Octavia Butler shows us, through Dana’s eyes, the harsh reality of slavery, where black people were considered sub-human, the property of their owners who were free to do what they wanted with their slaves. Punishments were brutal, indeed Dana is whipped for teaching slave children to read. Children were sold away from their mothers on a whim, runaways were tracked down by dogs, women were routinely raped as owners considered it their right to use them sexually if the mood took them. Dana sees this daily mistreatment and experiences the loss of her basic human rights during the period she lives as a black slave. Yet, ironically, the Weylins are considered better plantation owners than many of their peers.
Kindred is a book that everyone should read, if only to try to understand the dehumanising process of life as a slave with no rights. I wouldn’t say that I ‘enjoyed’ the book, but I couldn’t put it down, wanting to know how Dana survives. The characterisation was excellent: Dana was a strong woman, a survivor, yet despite knowing that she would probably return to her own time at some stage, was almost broken by her experience of life as a slave. Rufus was a man of his time… his almost obsessional love for Alice and his petulant, selfish actions especially when it came to his property, the slaves themselves, showed him to be a weak and cruel man with few redeemable features. Supporting characters, Alice, Sarah, Carrie, Nigel and the other slaves were sympathetically portrayed and gave me considerable insight into what people have to do to survive in a world where they have no rights and are considered less than human. White people do not come across well in the main, and neither should they, given the power they had over other people’s lives and their casual acceptance of their position in this society. Kevin, as a modern man thrust into this world, finds it difficult to cope with such an alien culture, and when he is left behind after Dana returns to 1976 without him, moves north, away from the slavery he finds so abhorrent.
I would recommend Kindred to anyone who is interested in the harsh realities of slavery. The time travel plot device is a clever method of showing us what life as a slave was like, through the character of Dana, a modern black woman. Certainly I believe it should be required reading for all schoolchildren, particularly in the USA, in the hope that this book can begin to change the deep-rooted racist attitudes that sadly continue to blight our culture.
Plot: 8
Characters: 9
Style: 9
Rating: 9/10
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