What does it mean to be linked to and intimately shaped through the Western Hemisphere’s history of anti-blackness? We find an answer to this question in the pivotal chapter of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he describes being weighed down by the anti-black stereotypes of a white imaginary, most notably, in a way that escapes the theoretical boundaries of Merleau-Ponty’s body-schema. Another possible answer is given in Octavia Butler’s Kindred. The novel’s protagonist, Dana Franklin, lives through her linkage to this particular past of Western-hemispheric, colonial violence in unexplainable travels across time that are driven by entanglements with complex ancestral relationships on a plantation in antebellum Maryland. Using Octavia Butler’s Kindred as both ground and frame, this paper develops a notion of mangrove time as a way to think through how, against this historical context, openings of possibility might emerge for black life. In other words, from the notion of mangrove time I find a way to understand how the memory of a Western hemispheric anti-black violence might both continue to signify in the present and open onto a different kind of future (how a memory of black abjection can be for the sake of something other than black abjection and its reproduction).