Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

And what’s a patroller? All I could think of was the Highway Patrol.” I thought back to my reading. “A patroller is … was a white man, usually young, often poor, sometimes drunk. He was a member of a group of such men organized to keep the blacks in line.” “What?” “Patrollers made sure the slaves were where they were supposed to be at night, and they punished those who weren’t. They chased down runaways—for a fee. And sometimes they just raised hell, had a little fun terrorizing people who weren’t allowed to fight back.”

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.