Forced sex with the master of the plantation apparently was within the boundary of slave relations for Clora's mother. Serving the sexual appetite of his young son was outside those boundaries. Her resistance was strong and severe. This fictional account of a slave owner's murder can be compared with the historical example in the publication Cultivation And Culture, Labor And The Shaping Of Slave Life In The Americas. The situation in Culture and Cultivation involved Samuel Martin, a slave owner on the island of Antigua who forced his slaves to work on their regular Christmas holiday. Martin and the slave owner in the novel Family failed to appreciate the limits of enslaved tolerance. .
.
Always, the central character in the novel, was sold to a new slaveholder, Doak Butler, and like her mother and grandmother, she was brutally raped by the him. However, she decided that she would break the chain of slave suicide in her family. As Clora, her mother and narrator, described, Always made a vow to "live". She would live to destroy "them" ,the slave owners. Always realized that suicide was the easy way out of the horrors of slavery. Taking the vow to claim not only her life as a human but the profits of her labor gave her inner strength and she gradually developed plans to live a productive life and obtain property. Using both active and subversive methods of resistance to slavery, Always illustrated how many slaves claimed their lives while living in bondage.
.
From the time she moved to the Butler farm, Always had a habit of looking over the land. She learned as much as she could about farming and generated strategies to make the Butler farm prosperous. As she conversed with the Indians who passed through, Always found out ways to make the land more productive. Her actions are reminiscent of how the African slaves introduced rice in the Carolina's, the crop which made the colony profitable.