On her twenty-sixth birthday in 1976 California, Dana, a Black writer newly married to a white writer, is abruptly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early nineteenth century, where she saves a drowning white boy, Rufus Weylin. She is drawn back again and again, whenever Rufus's life is in danger, and gradually understands the terrible connection: Rufus will father her ancestor on Alice, a free Black woman he forces into enslavement. To preserve her own existence Dana must keep Rufus alive, even as keeping him alive means witnessing — and increasingly being subjected to — the daily violence, coercion, and moral corrosion of slavery. Her stays lengthen and grow more dangerous, her modern knowledge offers her little protection, and the cost of returning home becomes bodily and permanent.
Author: Octavia E. Butler · Original publisher: Doubleday & Company, Inc. (Garden City, New York), 1979