Traveling Back in Time to 1819 and Slavery
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*****
I had never heard of this book or author, but the book is my grandson’s summer reading assignment, so I decided to read it too. BTW: He was struggling with it, while I was loving it!
Simply put, this story involves time travel for a black woman named Dana who is living with her white husband in California in 1976. As they are unpacking boxes in their new home, an episode of dizziness overcomes her and somehow transports her to Maryland in 1819. Her first action there is to see a child drowning, and to save him. The child is a white boy named Rufus. He is the son of Tom Weylin, a plantation owner and the owner of many slaves.
Within the first fifteen pages of the book, more time travel occurs taking Dana back to California and then back to Maryland where she saves Rufus once again. This time he’s a handful of years older and he has caused a fire that put his life in danger.
Clearly, there is some reason Dana needs to repeatedly rescue Rufus. Most readers – except maybe teenage boys assigned the book as summer reading – will want to figure this out as quickly as possible! Lucky for them, this book is a page-turner.
*****
My apologies for not knowing of this author. She was born in 1947 and died in 2006. She was the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work.
Her website tells us her themes of Black injustice, global warming, women’s rights, and political disparity were not in commercial demand during her lifetime. But after her death, sale of her books has increased greatly as her topics have become more relevant.
Kindred is her most celebrated and critically acclaimed work. It was turned into a graphic novel in 2017 by Damian Duffy and John Jennings. In 2022, it was loosely adapted into an FX series on Hulu, with Mallori Johnson starring as Dana and David Alexander Kaplan as Rufus.
The format of the most recent edition of Kindred is impressive in itself. The novel is blanketed between a foreword at the front and a critical analysis at the end, both written by highly credentialed folks.
Janelle Monae wrote the foreword. She is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, actress, and author. Her work is compared to Octavia Butler’s in that both work in a genre called Afrofuturism. She tells us there is “much to be learned from the lives of those who survived for us.”
As for the Critical Essay at the end of the book, it was written by Robert Crossley, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. His review of Octavia Butler’s work fills a full 10% the current edition’s pages.
I loved reading all this information about the author as much as I loved reading this book. I recommend it to all high school students, their grandmothers, and the rest of the reading public.
Five stars!
*****
Click here to learn more about Kindred on Amazon.
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