Charles Chestnutt: Slavery is a "weed [that] has been cut down, but its roots remained, deeply imbedded in the soil, to spring up and trouble a new generation" (Rushdy 94).
The neo-slave narrative is a contemporary novel, concerned with contemporary problems as much as the problems of the past.
Dana marries Kevin. She is moving in with him, against their families' wishes. Dana has to understand her past to move forward with her present.
"Memory is how the past is recalled; memory is also how we heal from that past" (Rushdy 103).
"I remembered it for him in detail as I had the first time" (Butler 46).
Dana and Kevin learn and grow together; they discover that for their relationship to work--for Dana to survive--she cannot alter the past. She can only accept it and move on.
"It was so hard to watch him hurting her--to know that he had to go on hurting her if my family was to exist at all" (Butler 180).
"And it is by sharing those stories and that history with their readers that the neo-slave narrative authors perhaps hope to heal a nation that in many ways still denies its original wound" (Rushdy 103).