Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

That’s history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there’s nothing I can do about it.”

She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid. She was the kind of woman who might have been called “mammy” in some other household. She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties. The house-nigger, the handkerchief-head, the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose, and who knew as little about the freedom of the North as she knew about the hereafter.

Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.

I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships.