What passages helped you understand the author's message?

helps
the reader learn about the past and present (as of its 1976 setting) effects of slavery on
American people by telling the story of Dana, an African American woman, and her husband, Kevin,
a white American man. Butler uses the device of time travel to the pre€“Civil War era to situate
Dana in the bondage in which her ancestors and their families and friends were caught. She faces
several moral dilemmas as she tries to stop the abuses of the slavery system but at the same
time to not affect history too drastically, as a radically changed outcome might actually
prevent her birth. For Kevin, as a white person, the nineteenth century is far less perilous,
and his twentieth-century relationship with his wife is severely affected by his experience in
the past. Further, Dana interacts with a white slaveowner, Rufus, whom she learns is her
ancestor, at several points in his life; these experiences help her understand the entitlement
that bred cruelty in slaveowners.

In the section called The Fall, while
transported into the past, Dana learns about the destruction of black families in slavery
through her conversations with Sarah, an African American cook in the house of Rufuss family (he
is still a child). Sarah is bitterly resigned to her childrens fate, as they have been sold
away. While Dana must serve as a slave in the familys house, Kevin is hired as a tutor to Rufus.
For Dana, it would be dangerous to even acknowledge that she is literate.

In
the section "The Storm," Rufus has grown to adulthood, and when Dana arrives, he is
ill with a fever. Although she nurses him back to health, he grown angry toward her and punishes
her by making her work as a fieldhand. In this section as well, she both witnesses his
callousness in selling slaves and manages to persuade him not to sell her ancestor, the slave
Alice, with whom he has several illegitimate children. In this way, she protects her future
great-great-grandmother Hagar.