Butler wrote Kindred specifically to respond to a young man involved in black consciousness raising. He felt ashamed of what he considered the subservience of older generations of African Americans, saying they were traitors and he wanted to kill them. Butler disagreed with this view. She believed that a historical context had to be given so that the lives of the older generations of African Americans could be understood as the silent, courageous resistance that it was, a means of survival.[19][21] She decided to create a contemporary character and send her (originally it was a him) back to slavery, to explore how difficult a modern person would find it to survive in such harsh conditions.[19] As Butler said in a 2004 interview with Allison Keyes, she "set out to make people feel history."[5]
Butler's field research in Maryland also influenced her writing of Kindred. She traveled to the Eastern Shore to Talbot County where she wandered a bit. She also conducted research at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the Maryland Historical Society. She toured Mount Vernon, the plantation home of America's first president, George Washington. At the time, guides referred to the slaves as "servants" and avoided referring to the estate as a former slave plantation.[8] Butler also spent time reading slave narratives, including the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, who escaped and became an abolitionist leader. She read many grim accounts, but decided she needed to moderate events in her book in order to attract enough readers.[16]
