My selection this week for Forgotten Books is KINDRED by the late Octavia E. Butler. She was one of the earliest black science fiction writers(Samuel Delaney may have been the first) and possibly the first woman. I read it many years back and it’s stuck with me ever since. It’s technically science fiction, but it’s so much more, the story of a modern black woman who keeps getting drawn back into the past and facing the horrors that her people went through in a shameful period of this country.Dana lives in 1976 and is married to a white man. Life in this time is as idyllic as it can be under the circumstances. All of a sudden, she is transported to the past, though she doesn’t realize it at first, and there she rescues a young white boy from drowning. She seems stuck in time. learning it’s 1815. Only when her life is threatened does she return to her life in the future.
She’s not there long before back she goes to the past. It’s now a few years later and the boy’s life is in danger again.
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