There is no shortage of literature about the various legacies of slavery left in the U.S., especially antebellum-era (approximately 1815–1861) slavery in the American South. Today, let’s take a quick look at two very different stories about this legacy: Kindred, a science fiction story by Octavia Butler about a Black woman, and Appropriate, a play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins about a white family whose ancestors owned a plantation.

Both Kindred and Appropriate are by Black writers, but their approaches to the material were very different. In a 2015 interview with LA Times, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins said about Appropriate that, “Part of it was thinking through how invisible can I make something like blackness and still have it charge the room…”

When asked about the character of Dana losing an arm in Kindred, Octavia Butler stated in a 2004 radio interview with KCRW’s Bookworm that: “…she [Dana] couldn’t really come back from that experience whole, unmarked, and say, 'Boy, glad that’s over,' and get on with her life. That experience marked her as slavery marked Black people in this country. And that was what I was thinking about.”

^{The first edition cover of Kindred, designed by Larry Schwinger} 

In Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate, the large, contemporary Lafayette family gathers in their ancestral home—a former plantation in Arkansas—after their father’s death. Each member of the family is focused on what the possibilities of their inheritance might be: the legacy of objects and/or money.

In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the story begins very differently.  The main character, Dana, is a Black woman in a relationship with a white man, and lives in 1976-era Los Angeles. Dana is repeatedly transported back in time to the antebellum South, where she saves the life, and takes care of a white boy named Rufus. Rufus is obsessed with a Black girl named Alice, and when they both grow up, he enslaves Alice (now a free Black woman) and forces her to become his “mistress” and bear his children—including the daughter that becomes Dana’s ancestor.

These two stories show very different experiences for the characters, illustrated by how the legacies of slavery affect them differently, depending on their identities.

In Dana’s case, she is forced to confront the realities of slavery firsthand, the violence, power inequalities, and lack of control, being jerked back in time and space at random, while she is trying to live her day-to-day life in the 1970s. At one point, Dana loses a limb as her white ancestor attempts to hold her in the past while she is phasing back to her present time. Her inheritance from slavery is her life, born of the forced relationship between Rufus and Alice, but also literal physical loss, and mental anguish at the witness she is forced to bear to the pain of antebellum slavery.

On the other hand, the Lafayette family is largely removed from real consequences. While going through the family home, they find objects from their father’s past that point to his own complicity in racism, as well as how they benefitted financially from the ancestral ownership of the plantation. These objects lead to bitter arguments amongst one another, but while their worlds may rock a bit from some delayed realizations, do they actually lose anything?

^{Cast members Jonas Winburn, Billy Finn, and Jen Taylor in rehearsals for Appropriate (2026) at Seattle Rep. Photo by Sayed Alamy.}

Unlike Dana, as a white family, the Lafayettes can choose whether to truly “see” these objects and gain new understandings of their own family’s past, or refuse to acknowledge the role that their ancestors, including their father, played in perpetuating racism.

Will the Lafayettes hold on to the objects? Throw them away? Dig deeper? Attempt to excuse them? Their identity assures that they have many choices in how to address their birthright.

Both pieces of literature—one written in the 1970s by a queer Black woman, and one written in the 21st century by a queer Black man—deal with our nation’s history of racial violence, but while Jacobs-Jenkins’ illustrates the choice that white Americans have when they are faced with evidence of this history in objects or words, Butler’s work shows us how much of that past is still present for Black Americans within themselves.

Curious about more literature with ties to Appropriate? Check out SPL's show-inspired reading and resource list!

See Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' Appropriate for yourself, playing at Seattle Rep from April 9–May 10, 2026

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^{Header: Octavia Butler photo by UC Riverside; Branden Jacobs-Jenkins photo by John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.}