Kindred
1979
- fiction
- slaves
- african american women
- slaveholders
- slavery
- time travel
- literature
- open_syllabus_project
- historical
- science fiction
The story
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.
What it’s like
Lean, unadorned prose that moves quickly and stays close to the body: the narrator's voice is wry, clipped and matter-of-fact even when the world around her is brutal, so the reading experience is one of sharp contrast between a modern, self-possessed mind and the heat, dirt, hunger and fear of a Maryland plantation in the 1810s. Scenes are rendered through small physical detail (the weight of a borrowed dress, the smell of a kitchen, the ache of a cut hand) rather than lush description, and the pages feel humid and close, with long stretches of tension and short, jolting shifts in time that land like a slap. Its vibe is taut and unsentimental, with a current of dread running under even quiet domestic moments. Intensity is high and unflinching: whippings, beatings, sexual coercion and the everyday cruelties of enslavement are depicted directly, with real weight rather than gore for its own sake. It suits a focused, undistracted evening rather than background reading or a light escape. Best for readers who want a historically grounded, morally serious story of power, survival and complicity, and who can sit with difficult material.
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