I spent a lot of my childhood being ashamed of what she [her mother] did, and I think one of the reasons I wrote Kindred was to resolve my feelings, because, after all, I ate because of what she did . . . Kindred was kind of a reaction to some of the things going on during the sixties when people were feeling ashamed of, or more strongly, angry with their parents for not having improved things faster, and I wanted to take a person from today and send that person back to slavery.
