Kindred (novel)

Kindred is a novel by the American writer Octavia E. Butler, published in June 1979 and generally regarded as her best-selling and best-known work. It follows Dana Franklin, a twenty-six-year-old Black writer living in 1976 Los Angeles with her white husband Kevin, who finds herself repeatedly and involuntarily pulled back in time to a plantation in antebellum Maryland in the early nineteenth century, each time summoned whenever the life of a young white boy named Rufus Weylin, an ancestor of hers, is in danger. As Dana is drawn back again and again across a period stretching from Rufus's childhood into adulthood, she is forced to live for increasing lengths of time as an enslaved woman on his family's plantation, coming to know both Rufus himself, whose need for her protection deepens alongside his own developing cruelty, and Alice Greenwood, a free Black woman with whom Rufus becomes obsessed and whose descendants Dana comes to realize include herself. Blending science fiction time travel with the tradition of the neo-slave narrative, Butler herself described the book as a kind of grim fantasy, and it has become a widely taught work exploring how the trauma, power dynamics, and moral compromises of American slavery persist into and shape a late-twentieth-century Black woman's understanding of her own history.