Kindred

Kindred is a 1979 novel by the American writer Octavia E. Butler. It incorporates time travel and is modelled on the slave narrative form, and it has frequently been chosen for community reading programmes and for school and college courses. Its narrator is a young African American writer who is pulled out of her own era and into the nineteenth century again and again.

Dana is a Black writer in Los Angeles in 1976, married to a white man older than she is, moving into a new house. Then she is somewhere else: a riverbank in antebellum Maryland, where a small boy is drowning and she has been pulled across two centuries to save him. It happens again and again, and every trip costs her more time and leaves her less able to control when she returns.

The boy grows up into a man who owns people, and Dana has to keep him alive long enough for him to become her ancestor. She can be summoned without warning, cannot return until her own life is in danger, and never knows how long she will be gone. Some of her ancestors are on the plantation she is pulled into, including a free Black woman named Alice and the white planter, Rufus, who forces her into slavery.

Butler wrote the novel so that the past is not a lesson but a place the narrator has to survive, and Dana's choices are governed by what will keep her alive. As the trips lengthen, she becomes more enmeshed in the plantation community. It is a standalone novel, and the book's own chapters are headed with dates that mark how much time has passed.