Why Octavia E. Butler Uses Time Travel in Kindred

The first time Dana travels back to antebellum Maryland in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, she pulls a drowning boy out of a river. Moments later, his father points a gun at her. Dana scarcely has time to understand where she is before she learns what saving a white child can cost a Black woman in a society built on slavery. Then Butler sends her back to save him again.

That boy, Rufus Weylin, is Dana’s ancestor. Every return to Maryland puts her in danger, and his survival is bound up with her own existence. Butler uses time travel to make that family connection a series of decisions Dana has to live through. What should she do when keeping Rufus alive gives him more time to hurt the people around him?

This discussion mentions plot details, including an injury disclosed in the prologue.

Knowing the future gives Dana little power

Dana leaves California in 1976 with knowledge of how American slavery worked and how it ended. On the Weylin plantation, she needs a more immediate kind of knowledge. She has to learn who can overhear her, what she can say in front of a white person and when offering help could put someone else in danger.

Her ability to read is one example. Helping an enslaved child learn to read can offer him a measure of independence. On the plantation, the same act exposes Dana to punishment. Butler makes the risk specific enough that we can see how slavery maintains itself through ordinary encounters. The plantation’s owners exert control over who reads, who moves freely and who can speak with any expectation of being heard.

Why Dana keeps saving Rufus

Dana knows that Rufus and Alice Greenwood will have a daughter, Hagar, who is part of her family line. Until Hagar is born, Dana has reason to keep Rufus alive even when she has good reason to fear him. As Rufus grows older, protecting him means contending with his growing power over both women.

Dana first meets Rufus as a frightened child, which makes it easy to see why she keeps hoping she can influence the man he’ll become. As an adult, he uses Dana’s relationship with Alice to pressure Alice on his behalf. Dana may be able to talk Rufus down in one moment and find him using that closeness against her in the next.

The family record gives Dana the names she needs to trace her ancestry. Living through that history shows her what the record leaves out. Hagar’s name can survive on a page while the coercion Alice endured, and the choices Dana had to make, go unrecorded.

Why the injury comes before the first journey

Butler opens the novel with Dana back in California, already missing her left arm. The prologue gives away the injury before readers know how she gets it. That choice changes the suspense. Each time Dana gets home, readers already know that one of those returns will leave her permanently injured.

Dana’s husband, Kevin, also travels to Maryland. As a white man, he can move through the plantation in ways she cannot, though he spends years stranded in the past. Their marriage gives Butler a way to put two people from the same household in the same period and show how differently each can live there. Coming home brings them back to the same place, with different experiences of what happened.

What to watch for on a reread

Follow how Dana speaks to Rufus across the novel. When he’s a boy, she can sometimes talk to him with the directness of an adult correcting a child. As he grows up, the same directness becomes more dangerous. Dana tells the story in the first person after the journeys, so we can hear what she thought at the time alongside what she can say about it once she is home. Pay attention to the distance between those two moments, especially when she explains a choice she had very little room to make.

That distance is part of what makes the prologue so unsettling on a reread. Dana can finally tell the whole story from her own time. The first thing she tells us is what it cost her to get back.

For more novels that use journeys into the past in very different ways, see our guide to the best time-travel books.

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