Kindred

By Octavia Butler

I read the book Kindred, which is a fictional book about a black woman named Dana who lives in nineteen-sixty seven in California. She is celebrating her birthday when she experiences sudden dizziness and nausea and finds herself on a riverbank, where a red-headed boy is drowning.

Kindred is about a black woman who travels back in time on six different occasions. She travels back in time to a plantation in the ante-bellum South, where slavery is rampant. She must save the future owner of the plantation, Rufus Weylin, from dying on many occasions, because he is actually her great-grandfather.

I think that this fictional story portrays the real-life effects and emotions caused by slavery. For instance, the Rufus character is  first seen as a young boy, who seems nothing like his father, who is a cruel slave owner. Kindred shows that as young children, people do not fully understand certain aspects of life, such as how Rufus had many black friends in his childhood, but as he grows  older, and eventually owns the plantation, he begins to sell slaves, beat slaves, and treat them much like his father did.

Rufus calls the slaves (and free blacks) “niggers” and does not understand what is wrong with it. When he is young, he does not mean to sound insulting, but calls them this anyway. It was how his parents addressed them, and he did not know any differently. He has a flaring temper, which, like many real-life plantation owners, was specifically targeted to blacks and slaves.

Another behavior that real-life plantation owners had, that Rufus had, and that Rufus’ father had was that they were always looking for an angle to make more money. An example of this appears on page 91, with Tom Weylin speaking: “I could buy you. Then you’d live here instead of traveling around the country without enough to eat or a place to sleep.” Tom Weylin is trying to add another slave to his collection by offering to buy Dana so that She could teach Rufus, as there were not many educated slaves in the country.

In the story, slave children were playing a game in their spare time. This excerpt from page 99 will show what it was that they were doing: “Now here’s a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestured toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty of money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?”

These games that they played were an unfortunate reality. They saw their parents get sold, and remembered getting sold themselves, so they copied those events to use as a game.

Many slaves had been treated as if they were inferior for so long, they began to believe it. They saw that whites owned land, had money, and lived life freely.

I think that even though Kindred is a fiction novel, it is a very realistic portrayal of slavery in the United States, and makes you think about how strong whites’ prejudice toward blacks was.