Review: Kindred

Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Beacon Press 2004)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60931.Kindred?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=SNnGMIV7Kn&rank=2

Dana has lost her left arm in an ‘accident’ the police are trying to blame on her husband Kevin.
She remembers the first time. She feels dizzy; she saves a red-haired white boy from drowning. The second time happens after dinner. She is with the boy, who is now older, in a burning room. He tells her the year is 1815. His name is Rufus Weylin.
She follows eight white men, a ‘patrol’, to a slave cabin in the woods and witnesses the sort of atrocities the slaves are used to.
The next time it happens, she is armed with a switchblade and a map, and brings Kevin with her. Rufus has broken his leg.
It takes a while before the modern couple understand the social rules in this culture—the impossible distances between white and black, slave and free, man and woman, adult and child. The experience is quite different for Kevin—a white man—than for Dana. He can be a time-travelling observer; she gets ‘drawn all the way in’.
The social dangers are accompanied by physical dangers. She and Kevin need to survive, together, in order to get back.
We never understand the mechanism by which she time-transports, but the reason is remarkable. She and Rufus are boun, by a bond that transcends time and place. This helps us to understand her conflicted feelings toward the evil slavemaster.
This extraordinary device gives us the emotion and detail of a first-hand account at the same time as a 21st century sensibility. This is especially useful in revealing how the oppressors used the slaves to enable their own oppression—by threatening their loved ones with being whipped, sold or killed. Alice tells her, ‘you ain’t no field nigger, but you a nigger just the same’.
More historical fiction than sci-fi, innovative and genre-bending.