Traveling Through History In Kindred By Octavia E. Butler

Traveling through history

In Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, the author tells the story of a twenty-six-year-old African American woman named Dana. Dana is a writer who lived in Southern California during the 1970’s.
She is married to a white man named Kevin who is a writer along with Dana. She gets taken away from her home in Southern California and via time travel magically transported to 19th-century Maryland. Throughout the book, Dana time-travels back to the early 1800’s and the slavery days of the southern United States where she discovers the truths about her family history and the harsh reality of being an African American woman at that time.
Dana’s first time being transported back to this time period was on her 26th birthday. She and

Dana comes to realize that if he hadn’t raped her grandmother, Dana would not have been born. Hagar, one of Alice’s children created family records that were kept with a large bible in a wooden chest. These records are how Dana learned some of the important aspects of her family history. Throughout the book Dana and Alice’s relationship gets much better, when Alice was terribly wounded and sick, Dana nursed her back to health. Rufus and Alice had several children, but only a few survived due to the horrible conditions for black children at the time. Along with that, birthing a child at that time was unhygienic let alone safe, which posed a major risk to both the child and the mother.
Dana got treated horribly, not only by Weylin, Rufus’s dad but also by other enslaved people. They would say that she acts and gets treated as though she was white. Along with that nobody was ever friendly towards her, except Rufus, Nigel, and Alice occasionally. This horrible treatment didn’t only go as far as attitude, she was also beaten for trying to run away. Though her beating was awful, she was told that the others had had way worse than she

Two of Alice’s children, Hagar and Joseph, were sent to Baltimore by Rufus. Alice believed that Rufus had sold them, even though he swore he would not, ultimately this caused her to hang herself out of sadness. Dana was furious with Rufus. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong, even though Dana had told him time and time again. Ultimately Rufus gets Dana alone and tells her he feels horrible and that he never meant any harm. He progresses by caressing Dana, she slid her hand into her bag and got hold of her knife. Rufus started to get more and more touchy and ruff. He attempts to rape her, so out of self-defense, Dana stabbed him. Rufus was still holding her wrist, Dana’s vision started to get fuzzy, and she blacked out. Then she’s in her house again but this time her arm is in the wall, representing Rufus’s grasp. She ripped her arm out of the wall but ended up having to get it