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Kindred By Octavia Butler : Writing And Inquiry

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Dylan Reinsant
Professor Fennell
FYW 101-J3 Writing and Inquiry
October 20, 2015

Kindred

In Kindred by Octavia Butler, the main character, Dana, travels back in time from nineteen seventy-six in California to Maryland in the eighteen-hundreds. She travels to the Weylin plantation where she realizes that they were her ancestors. Dana experienced first hand the brutality and suffrage that they faced. She too must learn how to survive in a time where blacks are believed to be below white men and considered sub-human. This novel goes into detail and the brutality of what it is like to be a black woman in the antebellum south and have all of her rights taken away. Once Rufus tells Dana that it is eighteen-fifteen, Dana is not at all surprised. She had already accepted the fact that something paranormal was happening to her, so time travel didn 't seem out of the question. It explained why Rufus thought it was okay to refer to black people as “Niggers” (Butler, 25). Dana needed to learn basic skills of that time in order to survive, like cooking on an open stove, sewing, having no medication, not to mention the strength needed to survive as a slave, where black people are physically brutalized on a daily basis and it raises question as to if a modern black woman, could handle the brutality and savageness of living in the south during slavery.

Dana realizes pretty quickly that the handwork, rape and brutal punishments that slaves face are far worse than anything she could
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