Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler
In short, the main character is a modern black woman (California, 1976) who has just moved into a new apartment with her new husband Kevin when she is inexplicably transported to the antebellum South (Maryland, 1815). There she rescues a drowning boy and finds a strange connection with him, returning to her own time just in time to save her life. For Kevin, only seconds have passed, but she reappears wet and muddy and on the other side of the room. In the course of what is a month in California, she is called repeatedly back to the past to safeguard the boy who is growing by leaps and bounds into the shoes of his plantation-owning, slave-holding father. Forced to live for longer stretches in the complex and brutal realities of that former time, it becomes less certain that she will eventually escape back at all, or that either she or her husband can live with how they both have changed.
"It is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery, and racial dilemmas, then and now."—Sam Frank, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
Yes, quite. Only they forgot gender relations as well. Honestly, in the introduction, this book is compared to Kafka's Metamorphosis. What more need be said? It needs to be read.
My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give- and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them. (p. 109)
I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus's time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse... Rufus's time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch. (p. 191)
