Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, describes the impossible life of Dana Franklin. Dana and her husband, Kevin, go through a series of events that include time travelling and ensuring her birth by helping her ancestors, Rufus Weylin and Alice Greenwood. Throughout the novel, the reader is introduced to slavery through a progressive black female’s perspective. Dana is forced into slavery again and again, ultimately and unfortunately learning the ways of the South in the pre-Civil War era. She acts the part of slave for the sake of survival and adjusts quickly while trying to alter the thinking of Rufus with little success. Although slaves had similar jobs and enslaved women worked mostly in the domestic sphere, black women tolerated harsher labor …show more content…
Black women took care of the household by cleaning, cooking, and washing clothes (Butler 93). They handled tasks such as dusting, prepping meals, and caring for the children of other slaves or nursing their mistress’s babies. The mistress would take all of the credit for their work and receive compliments from their guests (Butler 115). When a person enters someone else’s place of residence, the results of well-kept home are assumed to be the work of the owner’s wife and not the product of an enslaved women’s exertion. Slaves were ignored by house guests completely, never to be thanked for their rigorous labors. The mistress would observe the work of the house servants and give them more tasks if they felt like they needed more work (Butler 93). As second in command of a plantation, it was the duty of the wife to ensure the home was kept clean and proper. They were responsible for the management of house servants, seeing fit to bombard them with an endless amount of chores throughout the day. In the novel, Margaret was the mistress of Tom Weylin and had very little work to do herself-- “Margaret, in her boredom, simply rushed around and made a nuisance of herself” (94). Since every person knew what to do, there was little use for Margaret to give them tasks that were already on their list of things to do. While both genders of the enslaved worked in the