Kindred

This was my first foray into the writing of Octavia E. Butler; I understand now why she is a legend.

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This book - which was written in the mid-70s - combines racial injustice, gender relations, and time travel! It's a gripping story that I had a hard time putting down.

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So many times, I wondered why the character didn’t just act like her 1970s self when dealing with the 1819 people; saying the thing straight and carrying herself as the person she is. But she couldn’t!

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‘Weylin was warning me that it was dangerous to keep a slave like you – educated, maybe kidnapped from a free state – as far north as this. He said I ought to sell you to some trader heading for Georgia or Louisiana before you ran away and I lost my investment. That gave me the idea to tell him I planned to sell you in Louisiana because that was where my journey ended – and I’d heard I could make a nice profit on you down there.        

Where was the next meal going to come from, or how could she spend nights outside when roaming bands of drunk young men routinely searched for runaways? She had to submit to the rules of the place and time she found herself in or be subjected to heinous torture, perhaps even killed.

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I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse . . .

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Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.

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And if I felt that way after spending only short periods in the past, what must Kevin be feeling after five years. His white skin had saved him from much of the trouble I had faced, but still, he couldn’t have had an easy time.        

The book is a historical novel too. We’re given glimpses of how life was back then in America: most people couldn’t read or write, and that includes the people who enslaved other people; most of the people who enslaved other people bought, sold and procreated with those people without regard to their familial connections and love bonds; most people who enslaved other people didn’t even consider whether the laws they took advantage of were moral.

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The chops I had put out to defrost over two months ago were still icy. How long had we been away, then? What day was it? Somehow, neither of us had bothered to find out. I turned on the radio and found a news station – tuned in right in the middle of a story about the war in Lebanon. The war there was worse. The President was ordering an evacuation of nonofficial Americans.

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That sounded like what he had been ordering on the day Rufus called me. A moment later, the announcer mentioned the day, confirming what I had thought. I had been away for only a few hours. Kevin had been away for eight days.

Ms. Butler delivers the ending the reader hopes for and she does it with the right amount of pacing and tension. A very satisfying read.

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