She recalled: “One of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narratives—I think I had gotten to one by a man who was explaining how he had been sold to a doctor who used him for medical experiments—was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near as it was. I was going to have to do a somewhat cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it.”43 That the “somewhat cleaned-up version” of slavery that Octavia pens in Kindred remains terrifying is a testament to both the enduring horrors of slavery and Octavia’s uncanny ability to convey the core truths of
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