The problem of the “yes,” of affirming an historical identity that is potentially harmful to oneself, troubles some of the imaginative leaps necessary to how readers desire to identify with texts. With that in mind, this article reads Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred as a story about memory, history, and embodiment as written both on and through bodies. By articulating both “history” and Black women’s bodies as sites of reading and writing, this article broadens conceptualizations of historical trauma.