Kindred

Dana is in a Los Angeles hospital. She has lost her left arm. She cannot explain how. The police are skeptical. The novel opens after the final trip, then steps back to the beginning.

June 9, 1976: Dana is pulled to antebellum Maryland for the first time. She saves a drowning red-headed boy named Rufus from the Patuxent River, meets his terrified mother, and is threatened by his father with a rifle before snapping back to her own time.

Dana is pulled back to save Rufus from a fire he set deliberately. She meets Alice Greenwood's mother, a free Black woman, and Alice as a child. She learns about the plantation's hierarchy and meets the other enslaved people. Kevin accompanies her accidentally on her return trip and is stranded in the past.

Dana is pulled back to save Rufus from a broken leg. Rufus is now a young man. He has enslaved Alice and her mother. Dana navigates the plantation as a house slave, teaches Rufus to write letters, and witnesses the full machinery of the institution — the sales, the whippings, the sexual violence.

Dana is pulled back after a long absence. Kevin has been in the past for five years. Alice has had Rufus's children. Dana witnesses the full degradation of Alice's enslavement and attempts to help her plan escape. Tom Weylin discovers Dana can read and beats her savagely.

Rufus sells the children of the enslaved to punish them for planning escape. Alice, destroyed by this, hangs herself. Rufus blames Dana and attempts to rape her. Dana kills Rufus and is pulled back to 1976.

Dana and Kevin try to research the historical record. The records are incomplete. Slavery was good at erasing the people it used. The arm is gone. The past is gone. What remains is what the past made.