Kindred

“So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.”- Harriet Ann Jacobs

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Kindred is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. First published in 1979, it is still widely popular. It has been frequently chosen as a text for community-wide reading programs and book organizations, as well as being a common choice for high school and college courses. Here is the audio version of the text.

Context

Kindred is the first-person account of a young African-Americanwriter, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and an ante-bellum Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a proud Black freewoman and a white planter who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. As Dana's stays in the past become longer, she becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community. She makes hard choices to survive slavery and to ensure her return to her own time.

Butler often said she was inspired to write it when she heard young black people minimize the severity of slavery, and strongly assert what they would or would not have tolerated if they were enslaved. She wanted them to not only know the facts of slavery, but how slavery felt. She wanted to make those militant young people see that even surviving such an institution made their ancestors heroic.

Analysis: America is a disabled body

"I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort and security I had not valued until it was gone"

Kindred, page 1.

In Kindred, Butler reveals how slavery has disabled America. The reader sees Dana, the protagonist, go back and forth from the present day to a pre-civil war plantation in Maryland. While going back to the past, we see Dana trying to save her white ancestor, Rufus, who is a dangerous slave master, even though she is putting her own life in danger as a black woman during the time of slavery. Dana faces violence and is shown the brutality and horror of slavery. Butler uses Dana and Rufus' relationship to portray the connection that black and white people have. This connection portrays just how much our lives affect each other. We see Dana going back in time to help her ancestors which further helps her in her present time. These two completely different people from different backgrounds affect each other's lives. 

What Rufus does directly affects Dana, we are shown that our histories connect. Dana is continuously being thrown into danger to save Rufus so that he could meet Alice and have her ancestors, while Rufus depends on Dana because she is constantly saving him from the danger that he himself causes. This dependency sheds light on the relationship white people and black people have in America. America was a country founded by white people but thrived off of the labor of black people. Without black people, America would not be the powerful country it is today. In a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley, Baldwin states

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country–until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it.

Baldwin further pushes the idea that African American people have white ancestry as well and that a lot of black people have ancestors in the white people who “created” America. He states that in the denial of black people, America will never be able to grow. The white and black experience is so different, but our history is one and it affects all of us. Butler chooses to make Rufus and Dana related because it exposes that we are all connected, we all come from the same source so how could one community be praised and the other disregarded when we are one unit working together like the human body, all parts are affected.

"I tried. I showered, washed away the mud and the brackish water, put on clean clothes, combed my hair. . . “That’s a lot better,” said Kevin when he saw me. But it wasn’t."

Kindred, page 18.

When one community is silenced and disabled, the entire humanity is disabled, if one community can not function that directly affects other communities.

The novel gets the reader thinking about who exactly makes up America. If we look at American media, the most privileged and represented are white people. The media chooses to portray white people as the face of America. As consumers, we see it in our politics, sports, and media. Butler offers a different representation of who America actually is. The reality is that America was built on the oppression of black people, America is built off of slavery. Kindred expresses this idea in multiple ways, one being the realistic portrayal of slavery and all of the trauma  African American people actually had to face at the hands of their white oppressors. Dana being a well-educated person, she knows all of the hardships slaves went through, but when she is actually experiencing slavery, she expresses how much worse it actually is:

I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. “I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping.

This quote leads us to believe that slavery was much worse than what America portrays. The inhumanity and shame is hidden by America creating an inaccurate portrayal of slavery. Langston Hughes, an African American poet and social activist that was most known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance, hints at this shame that America now carries regarding the topic of slavery. In his poem "I, too," Hughes states “Tomorrow I'll be at the table when company comes/ Nobody'll dare say to me “ eat in the kitchen” then besides, they'll see how beautiful I am and be ashamed- I too am America” (8-17). In this poem, Hughes speaks about the day America realizes just how much black people have sacrificed for this nation and how important they are/ were to our survival as a nation.

In American history, there have been plenty of times when we the people as a nation were left disabled. The first occurrence was the creation of slavery. America was built because England wanted more control over the colonies. Our nation was created in the fight for freedom and justice. We have to question how the fight for freedom led to the many years and continuation of the oppression black people face. Again, poet Langston Hughes, touches on this idea in his poem “Let America Be America Again”, Hughes states,

O, let America be America again
The land that never has been yet
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again (60-68).

Langston Hughes speaks of America never being a country built on freedom, and expresses the blood and sweat his people have put into building America. Wikipedia states,

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during early colonial days, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.

These people were viciously preyed on and captured. They were separated from their families and brought to a land they had never seen. In Kindred, Butler sheds light on this common reality with the character Sarah. Sarah is a slave on the plantation whose family has been sold and her husband is dead. Dana states, “The expression in her eyes had gone from sadness—she seemed almost ready to cry—to anger. Quiet, almost frightening anger. Her husband died, three children sold, the fourth defective, and she had to thank God for the defect. She had reason for more than anger. How amazing that Weylin had sold her children and still kept her to cook his meals. How amazing that he was still alive.”

The reader closely follows another slave named Alice who is Dana’s ancestor, that looks exactly like her. We see her struggle with the toll Rufus takes on her, ultimately leading to her taking her own life. Butler portrays Sarah and Alice as a symbol of the lifelong effects trauma causes on the black psyche. Slavery might have been a while ago but it directly affects America. In an article about the long-term effects of slavery written by Nathan Nunn, Nunn  states,

Although research understanding the long-term impacts of Africa’s slave trades is still in progress, the evidence accumulated up to this point suggests that this historic event played an important part in the shaping of the continent, in terms of not only economic outcomes, but cultural and social outcomes as well. The evidence suggests that it has affected a wide range of important outcomes, including economic prosperity, ethnic diversity, institutional quality, the prevalence of conflict, the prevalence of HIV, trust levels, female labour force participation rates, and the practice of polygyny. Thus, the slave trades appear to have played an important role in shaping the fabric of African society today.

The ancestors of the black community never actually experienced life, they experienced trauma and the art of survival. The people who survived slavery then went on to have families and create generations of people. As humans, we learn first from our families especially how to raise families. These generations of black American people have taken on the generational trauma of their ancestors. Not only that, but they are forced to live under the societal constructs that slavery created. These social constructs further oppress black people and are still present in America today. This oppression might not be as bad as slavery, but it still silences and pushes back the black community. Things like being passed over for a job opportunity, or housing opportunity, being hated, crimed, or even harassed because of their race, creates a world where black people can not live up to their full potential. These societal constructs that slavery has created, and america has fulfilled, creates the same experience that slavery was for there acestoes, survival no actual living. In creating these social constructs, and further oppressing black people, white people have stunned their own growth as a community. If black and white people were given the same opportunities, they would be able to work together to further advance our country. Butler expresses this in Kindred with the protagonist Dana. Dana, like her white husband, is a great writer, Dana is as talented as her white counterpart. We see that in having the tools Dana was able to be as successful as a white man. Alice, who looks exactly like Dana, is used to portray the lost potential slavery caused. We are shown how much slavery actually oppressed the black people. Not only physically, but the owners would make sure to keep their slaves illiterate and used all of their power to keep the slaves in line.  Alice could be as successful as Dana, many of the slaves are talented in their own ways, but are not allowed to even try to explore said talents.

"I touched the scar Tom Weylin’s boot had left on my face, touched my empty left sleeve. “I know,” I repeated. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.”

Kindred, page 264.

The ADA defines a person with a disability as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. If we look at America as the body, slavery has limited major life activities. With the oppression of slavery, America as a whole has not been able to experience the full potential of African American people.Slavery forever traumatized an entire group of people and even today we see the life long effect it has had on us. We see the prejudgment of black people in politics, media, school, and even the workforce. Butler represents America’s disability through the scars and, in the case of Dana, loss of a limb,  at the end of the novel. They both understand that their life will never be the same and they will forever have to live with what they experienced, that is slavery. These injuries represent the life long effect experiencing slavery left on black people and the scar its left on America.

Critical thinking questions

• In Kindred, Butler depicts the community within the slaves and how they come together to help Dana. Without the isolating experience of slavery, do you think the slaves would have still had a sense of community and risk their own lives to help her?
• If you were born during the time of slavery would you take the risk of escaping?
• What long-term effects do you think slavery caused on African American people?

Further reading

The linked articles and videos below show the struggle and fight for justice that not only African American people experience but minorities as a whole.

• James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley
• Ta-Nehisi Coates take on Reparations
• Mendez vs. Westminister
• The long term effects of the African slave trade
• Asian Americans