Kindred

The first chapter reveals the first time Dana time travels to Rufus in June 1976. Dana has just turned 26 years old and is moving into a new home with her husband Kevin, who is white. Both are writers, although Kevin acknowledges that he is suffering from writer’s block.

As Dana unpacks, she begins to feel dizzy, her vision becomes unfocused, and the present room fades away before Kevin can reach her. Suddenly, she is outside near a river where a young boy is drowning. Despite her confusion, Dana rushes in to save him, and when she pulls him to shore, she finds his mother hysterical. Dana learns the boy is named Rufus, and although she has no experience with CPR, she successfully resuscitates him. She is then startled by Rufus’s father aiming a rifle at her, but before he can shoot, she travels back to her home in 1976.

Kevin demands to know what happened because she has reappeared in a different place in the same room and her clothes are muddied. She tries to tell him what she experienced, but he does not believe her. Dana is terrified of traveling again, while Kevin tells her to put the experience behind her.

Later that day, Dana travels again, this time to Rufus’s bedroom where he has set fire to the drapes. She quickly puts the fire out and waits to go home immediately, but nothing happens.

Rufus tells her that when he was drowning, he somehow saw Dana unpacking in her home and when he set the fire, he heard Kevin and Dana talking. Dana tries to gain his trust so she can find a way home. He casually calls her the n-word and cannot understand why it upsets her; she asks him not to call her that.

He reveals that he set the fire as revenge on his abusive father. He immediately regretted it but could not stop it. Dana decides that his fear must have called her to him somehow. Rufus also reveals that they are on the Weylin plantation in 1815 Maryland; Rufus’s father is Tom Weylin. Suddenly, Dana recalls her family history and deduces that Rufus is her great-great-grandfather who fathered her grandmother, Hagar, with a Black woman named Alice Greenwood. Alice is Rufus’s friend; she was born free.

Rufus suggests Dana stay at Alice’s family’s house for the night to avoid Tom Weylin. En route there, Dana avoids getting caught by a group of white patrollers. She follows them to the Greenwood cabin and watches them whip Alice’s father and beat Alice’s mother. When they drag Alice’s father away, Dana helps Alice’s mother, who allows Dana to stay the night. However, a patroller returns, catches Dana, and beats her until she loses consciousness.

Dana wakes up back in 1976. Kevin claims she was only gone for three minutes. She tells him about 1815; he is still skeptical, but he humors her by tying a bag of clothes and supplies to her in case she disappears again. They figure out that her fear of imminent death is what sends her home.