#Kindred by octavia e butler pdf how to
#Kindred by octavia e butler pdf free

Rufus tries to justify his attempt to rape Alice, but Dana admonishes him.ĭana writes Kevin two letters, hoping he will return for her. It has been five years since she was last there.īack at the Weylin house, which Dana grudgingly admits feels like home, Rufus begins to recover, and Weylin has Dana tend to him. Before they leave, Alice tells her that Kevin had waited around for her for a while, but then went North. Rufus blacks out and Dana urges the two to run away. Dana intervenes, seeing that Rufus is being beaten for attempting to rape a young woman standing nearby, her clothes torn. When Dana returns, a black man is beating Rufus, now a young man himself. She takes a book on slavery and a knife with her. In the present, Dana tends to her wounds and prepares to be sent back.

#Kindred by octavia e butler pdf how to

Dana is given the responsibility of teaching Rufus when Weylin decides she can do a better job than Kevin can.ĭana is transported back to the present when Weylin catches her teaching other slave children how to read and whips her harshly. He seems to know that she is from another era. Dana learns to cook from Sarah and spends time with Rufus, who clearly likes her.

Rufus’s mother, Margaret Weylin, hates Dana, and is both scared and jealous of her. Kevin accepts he and Dana stay there until they are called back to their own time.īoth Kevin and Dana begin to get used to the rhythms of life on the plantation. Weylin offers Kevin a job teaching Rufus how to read, mocking his son’s halting abilities. There, Dana meets Sarah, the slave woman in charge of the cookhouse, and a mute young slave girl named Carrie. He invites Kevin and Dana back to the house. Weylin arrives, stern and annoyed with his son. Kevin and Dana agree to pretend like Kevin owns Dana, and they concoct a story to this effect. This time, Rufus is suffering from a broken leg, a black boy named Nigel (the same age as Rufus) at his side. When the dizziness starts again, Kevin grabs onto her and is transported with her. They prepare a bag for her with some necessities for when she no doubt has to return. This threat causes her to vanish again.īack in the present, she tells Kevin about what happened. The man tries to rape her but she fights back. When Dana goes outside to fetch a blanket, she sees a white man who has returned. After they leave and drag the man away, Dana tends to Alice’s mother, who was also struck. She watches them approach the cabin and beat up a man who was visiting Alice’s mother. Dana sets out for the cabin but hides when she hears white men.

#Kindred by octavia e butler pdf free

Dana realizes that Rufus is an ancestor of hers through recognition of the name ‘Weylin’: a family book mentioned a Rufus married an Alice and had a daughter named Hagar, who was Dana’s grandmother.ĭana is not sure where to go in the time before she vanishes again, so Rufus tells her to seek out his friend Alice and her mother, a free woman, at their cabin in the woods. It is a plantation complete with slaves, owned by Rufus’s father, Tom Weylin. Through Rufus, Dana learns they are in Maryland in 1815. She and Rufus acknowledge that they’d seen each other a few years back Rufus admits that, before he began drowning, he had seen in his mind’s eye a scene of Dana and a man amongst piles of books. A boy, whom she realizes is Rufus but a few years older, is setting fire to the drapes. While she had been gone for what seemed like at least several minutes, Kevin said she had only been gone for a few seconds.ĭana is transported once again, this time to a room with old-fashioned furniture. Kevin saw her vanish and reappear on the other side of the room, while she clearly traveled elsewhere. She becomes dizzy again and returns to her home.īoth Dana and Kevin are shaken and startled. His father arrives on the scene and aggressively points a rifle in Dana’s face. Dana ignores her and the boy, Rufus, is revived. As she gives him mouth-to-mouth, his frantic mother screams that Dana is killing him. She plunges into the water and saves him. When she wakes, she is by a river in which a young boy is drowning. They began to date and married not long after, even though their families disapproved because Dana was black and Kevin was white.Īs they unpack their books in their home, Dana starts to feel dizzy and falls unconscious. They both worked there to support themselves while they wrote, but Kevin had just sold his first novel and was about to quit. They ware both writers and met at a temp agency.

She and Kevin just moved to their new home. She begins to tell her story, leading up to what happened with her arm. The police think her husband Kevin is responsible for the damage to her arm, but she insists that he is not. The novel begins a prologue that finds her in a hospital room just after her arm was amputated. Dana is a twenty-six year old African American woman living in Altadena, CA.