Pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still. It forced reality on me and kept me sane.

- Kindred, Octavia Butler

I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject--even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of happy darkies in tender loving bondage was more than I could stand.

Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books--a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred. 

Kindred, Octavia Butler