It is a plantation complete with slaves, owned by Rufus’s father, Tom Weylin. Through Rufus, Dana learns they are in Maryland in 1815. She and Rufus acknowledge that they’d seen each other a few years back Rufus admits that, before he began drowning, he had seen in his mind’s eye a scene of Dana and a man amongst piles of books. A boy, whom she realizes is Rufus but a few years older, is setting fire to the drapes. While she had been gone for what seemed like at least several minutes, Kevin said she had only been gone for a few seconds.ĭana is transported once again, this time to a room with old-fashioned furniture. Kevin saw her vanish and reappear on the other side of the room, while she clearly traveled elsewhere.

She becomes dizzy again and returns to her home.īoth Dana and Kevin are shaken and startled. His father arrives on the scene and aggressively points a rifle in Dana’s face.

Dana ignores her and the boy, Rufus, is revived. As she gives him mouth-to-mouth, his frantic mother screams that Dana is killing him. She plunges into the water and saves him. When she wakes, she is by a river in which a young boy is drowning. They began to date and married not long after, even though their families disapproved because Dana was black and Kevin was white.Īs they unpack their books in their home, Dana starts to feel dizzy and falls unconscious. They both worked there to support themselves while they wrote, but Kevin had just sold his first novel and was about to quit. They ware both writers and met at a temp agency. She and Kevin just moved to their new home. She begins to tell her story, leading up to what happened with her arm. The police think her husband Kevin is responsible for the damage to her arm, but she insists that he is not. The novel begins a prologue that finds her in a hospital room just after her arm was amputated. Dana is a twenty-six year old African American woman living in Altadena, CA.

Octavia butler kindred graphic novel