![]() As Dana approaches the cabin, white men ride by and begin to terrorize the black family living there. Rufus gives her directions, saying that Alice is a “free black” and a friend of his. To avoid meeting Rufus’s cruel father again, Dana sneaks out of Rufus’s house and heads for Alice’s family cabin in the woods. Dana realizes that she must travel through time and save Rufus each time his life is in danger in order to ensure the survival of her own family line. Dana vaguely remembers an old family Bible that listed the names Rufus Weylin and Alice Greenwood Weylin as the parents of Dana’s great-great-grandmother Hagar Weylin. Dana realizes that she must be traveling through space and time, but she doesn’t understand how this is happening. According to Rufus, the date is 1815 and they are in Maryland, close to the town of Easton on the Weylin plantation. When Rufus repeatedly calls Dana, a black woman, a “nigger,” Dana starts to believe that she is in the pre-Civil War South. The boy’s name is Rufus, and he remembers almost drowning and then being saved by Dana when he was five. Dana throws the curtains out the window, then tries to talk to the boy to find out what is happening. A boy-who looks like an older version of the boy that Dana saved from the river-is staring at his curtains burning in the corner of the room. Kevin isn’t sure if he believes Dana about where she went, but knows that something very strange is happening.ĭana tries to put the incident behind her, but a few hours later she again feels dizzy and finds herself transported to a bedroom in a wooden house. ![]() Kevin crouches over Dana, explaining that she was only gone a few seconds, though Dana is sure she spent minutes saving the boy. ![]() The boy’s father comes and points a rifle at Dana, but Dana is transported back to her home before the man can shoot. Dana saves the child and gives him CPR, despite the protests of the boy’s mother. Dana feels dizzy and blacks out, then finds herself at a river where a young boy is drowning. The trouble began on June 9th, 1976 as Dana and Kevin are moving to a new house in Los Angeles, California. Her husband, Kevin, comes in, and the couple hopes that the police won’t investigate the incident any further. GradeSaver, 12 June 2016 Web.Dana (Edana) wakes in the hospital with her left arm amputated. Next Section Kindred Summary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Osborne-Bartucca, Kristen. It is often assigned in college classes and is a favorite in book clubs. To date, over 450,000 copies are in print. It was republished in 1988 as part of the Beacon Black Women Writers series and again in 2004 for its 25th anniversary. The book garnered positive critical attention as well as popularity amongst the general reading public. She read slave narratives for research as well, but admitted having to “clean up” some of the extensive violence and depravity of slavery for her own novel to make sure it could attract an audience.īutler initially had difficulty finding a publisher, for the novel’s amalgamation of science fiction and an antebellum historical context crisscrossed too many genres. Vernon, which was the only plantation she could access. ![]() She conducted research for the book in Maryland, and visited Mt. She also stated that she wanted to show that women like her mother, who did domestic work for white families in Pasadena, were not timid or cowardly but rather heroes in their own way. In Kindred Butler endeavors to show what slavery was like and what sort of resistance was possible. The well-known anecdote behind the book’s origins is that Butler, who was active in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, began working on the book in college as a response to a young black man in the movement who criticized his ancestors for having a “slave mentality” through their “humility” and not doing enough to push for their freedom. It is famed for its insights into slavery, gender roles, trauma, American history, and more. It has been referred to as a work of speculative fiction or a neo-slave narrative as well. A genre-bending novel, it includes explorations time travel, antebellum slavery, and feminism, told in gripping and immediate prose. Kindred is science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s most famous work.
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