Kindred

“Maybe I’m just like the victim of robbery or rape or something—a victim who survives, but who doesn’t feel safe any more […] I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe any more.”

The first time she time travels, Dana tries to explain what happened in more realistic terms. Trauma like robbery and rape is real, and it points to the possibility of survival. Because Dana is a writer, she thinks linguistically. Thus, she laments that she cannot find the appropriate words because this makes the experience less real as well.

“As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it’s beginning to recede from me somehow. It’s becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got second hand.”

Here, Dana begins to juggle reality and fiction. She wants to let herself think of her experience as something distant that happened to someone else because her fear of it happening again is more real. This moment is also a meta-signal to the reader, as we are in fact reading Dana’s story secondhand.

“I looked over at the boy who would be Hagar’s father. There was nothing in him that reminded me of any of my relatives. Looking at him confused me. But he had to be the one. There had to be some kind of reason for the link he and I seemed to have. Not that I really thought a blood relationship could explain the way I had twice been drawn to him. It wouldn’t. But then, neither would anything else. What we had was something new, something that didn’t even have a name. Some matching strangeness in us that may or may not have come from our being related. Still, now I had special reason for being glad I had been able to save him. After all…after all, what would have happened to me, to my mother’s family, if I hadn’t saved him?”

As Dana reflects on the paradox of saving her ancestor’s life so she can be born, once again she struggles to find the word for what is happening to her. Labeling her connection to Rufus would make the experience more reasonable. She recognizes that it goes beyond blood relation, making their connection even deeper and more significant.

“I had seen people beaten on television and in the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed screams. But I hadn’t lain nearby and smelled their sweat or heard them pleading and praying, shamed before their families and themselves. I was probably less prepared for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping.”

Again, reality and fiction are being blurred for Dana. The brutality of slavery is tangible and nearby rather than diluted by a TV screen. This reduces her to a child not ready to face that reality. This scene also foreshadows the other whippings Dana witnesses, as well as the ones she suffers herself.

“As I hurried up the steps and into the house, I thought of Rufus and his father, of Rufus becoming his father. It would happen some day in at least one way. Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could. And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come.”

This is one of the first moments Dana decides to actively influence Rufus to be a better man than his father. She is aware of the way society views her as inferior, but she decides to assume Rufus’s responsibility of keeping the enslaved people safe and transfer it to herself. This illustrates the motherly relationship she begins to form with young Rufus that lays the foundation for their interactions.

“A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. Free speech and press hadn’t done too well in the ante bellum South. Kevin wouldn’t do too well wither. The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility.”

Just like she recognizes the effect she can have on Rufus to potentially improve him, she sees a similar environmental influence with Kevin. Because Kevin is white, survival in the antebellum South means he would have to compromise the good parts of himself that made Dana fall in love with him. This also foreshadows how Kevin does actually get stranded in the past for five years, and the reader is left to share Dana’s concern about his fate.

“I opened the book with some apprehension, wondering what archaic spelling and punctuation I would face. I found the expected f’s for s’s and a few other things that didn’t turn up as often, but I got used to them very quickly. And I began to get into Robinson Crusoe. As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.”

This moment is significant for its meta-reference to Robinson Crusoe, a novel about a slave trader who is stranded on a strange island and enslaves one of its inhabitants. The novel was first thought to be a nonfiction travel journal. Thus, Butler is once again alluding to the blurring of reality and fiction. This moment is also self-referential because the audience is reading a fictional story about Dana’s “trouble.”

“Sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants, or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery. Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive.”

Compared to the history books that she studied to prepare for another trip to the past, this immersion method of preparation is live and present. Here, language becomes even more important to Dana; it could literally be the key to blending in. Thus, the cookhouse becomes a school in many ways: It is where Dana teaches enslaved people to read and where she learns how to survive.

“And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into the time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot we were acting.”

As much as she tries to immerse herself in her new reality to survive, Dana is still aware that she does not truly belong. This is both good and bad. Unlike other enslaved people, she has the option of escaping slavery every time she goes home. Although she has no control over when she leaves, she at least knows that she can. However, being an outsider with both slaveowners and enslaved people makes it more difficult to survive while she is there.

“The time passed and I did more unpacking, stopping often, taking too many aspirins. I began to bring some order to my own office. Once I sat down at my typewriter and tried to write about what had happened, made about six attempts before I gave up and threw them all away. Someday when this was over, if it was ever over, maybe I would be able to write about it.”

This scene shows Dana’s reliance on writing. Just like she needs the medicine and a decluttered office to heal, she needs to express herself linguistically and record her experience. It also gives her something to look forward to, pushing her to survive so she can have something to write about.

“If it was possible, if Rufus was in any way still the boy I had known, I would try to keep him from going after Isaac at all. He looked about eighteen or nineteen now. I would be able to bluff and bully him a little. It shouldn’t take him long to realize that he and I needed each other. We would be taking turns helping each other now. Neither of us would want the other to hesitate. We would have to learn to co-operate with each other—to make compromises.”

Here, Dana is still hopeful that she can influence Rufus to be a good man. This is where she also starts viewing their relationship as symbiotic: They each need the other to survive. Like an older sister, she believes she can “bully” him into cooperating. Coercion becomes a key aspect of Dana and Rufus’s relationship.

“Rufe, if you don’t start being more careful, you’ll never live to be an old man. Now that you’re grown up, I might not be able to help you out much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you.”

In this moment, Dana starts to realize that Rufus is becoming a man more responsible for his own actions. She needs him to live, but there is a chance that the “old man” he could become is identical to Tom Weylin. This moment also clearly foreshadows the violent ending of the novel. In that context, Dana’s words here sound more like a threat.

“And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn’t happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton […] I had said I couldn’t do anything to change history. Yet if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.”

Just like she wants to change Rufus, Dana is aware that history might be changed and rewritten for the worst. This highlights the theme of predestination and freewill: If things can be changed by one single action, maybe they were not predestined to begin with. Dana, therefore, becomes responsible for more than just her family lineage.

“I felt sweat on my face mingling with silent tears of frustration and anger. My back had already begun to ache dully, and I felt dully ashamed. Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.”

This moment foreshadows Dana’s later gradual submission to Rufus’s demands and the demands of slavery. She becomes desensitized to the brutality of the past, much like enslaved people did at the time. Pain is so constant that it recedes to the background as a survival mechanism, making it harder to fight back. The “dulling” process has begun in Dana.

“I could recall walking along the narrow dirt road that ran past the Weylin house and seeing the house, shadowy in twilight, boxy and familiar, yellow light showing from some of the windows—Weylin was surprisingly extravagant with his candles and oil. I had heard that other people were not. I could recall feeling relief at seeing the house, feeling that I had come home. And having to stop and correct myself, remind myself that I was in an alien, dangerous place. I could recall being surprised that I would come to think of such a place as home.”

Dana is in 1976 in this scene but can still vividly recall her time in the past. She almost romanticizes the old Maryland setting and its artistic beauty, revealing her growing attachment to her invented life there. The notion of “home” is constantly being rewritten as Dana goes back and forth from past to present. She must grapple with the guilt that comes with feeling nostalgic for a place filled with trauma.

“My thoughts went back to Kevin. Did he blame me for the five years he had lost, I wondered. Or if he didn’t now, would he when he tried to write again? He would try. Writing was his profession. I wondered whether he had been able to write during the five years, or rather, whether he had been able to publish. I was sure he had been writing. I couldn’t imagine either of us going for five years without writing. Maybe he’d kept a journal or something. He had changed—in five years he couldn’t help changing. But the markets he wrote for hadn’t changed. He might have a frustrating time for a while. And he might blame me.”

This scene reveals Dana’s need to empathize with Kevin. Although she can never know what he experienced in the five years he was stranded, she wants to and she blames herself for not protecting him. She also acknowledges that writing is a constant way of life for both of them, not merely a fleeting hobby. Unlike Kevin, their passion for writing has not changed and neither has her concern for him.

“‘You do your job,’ he said stubbornly, ‘and he’ll live. You’re something different. I don’t know what—witch, devil, I don’t care. Whatever you are, you just about brought a girl back to life when you came here last, and she wasn’t even the one you came to help. You come out of nowhere and go back into nowhere. Years ago, I would have sworn there couldn’t even be anybody like you. You’re not natural! But you can feel pain—and you can die. Remember that and do your job. Take care of your master.’”

Tom Weylin lashes out at Dana because he is afraid of her. He needs to be in control, especially of his enslaved people. Dana’s relationship with Rufus, her education, and her whereabouts are out of his control, so he feels like she has the upper hand. To regain his sense of superiority, he dehumanizes and threatens her.

“I went down the hall and toward the stairs slowly, wondering why I hadn’t tried to defend myself—at least tried. Was I getting so used to being submissive? […] Once—God knows how long ago—I had worried that I was keeping too much distance between myself and this alien time. Now, there was no distance at all. When had I stopped acting? Why had I stopped?”

This is the first moment Dana is aware of her own “dulling” to slavery. Before, she probably would have defended herself against the enslaved people who thought her too friendly with the Weylins. She was aware that she was simply pretending to fit in. Now, the longer she spends in the past, the more she is influenced by its customs until she is no longer sure she is pretending.

“The time passed slowly, uneventfully, as I waited for the birth of the child I hoped would be Hagar. I went on helping Rufus and his mother. I kept a journal in shorthand. (‘What the devil are these chicken marks?’ Rufus asked me when he looked over my shoulder one day.) It was such a relief to be able to say what I felt, even in writing, without worrying that I might get myself or someone else into trouble. One of my secretarial classes had finally come in handy.”

To cope with her new routine as she grows accustomed to the past, she develops her own secret “language.” For Dana, writing is just as important to her survival as humoring Rufus is. This is significant because it becomes a piece of her life in the past that is not connected to Rufus; he cannot poison what she writes down.

“Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships.”

Here, Dana learns that her feelings for Rufus are no different than those of the other enslaved people. This is more proof that as much as Dana had hoped to distance herself from the past, she is fitting in more than she would like. This also shows that Dana and Rufus’s relationship has shifted toward that of master and enslaved person when it had only begun as mother/son and sister/brother.

“‘It’s real now, isn’t it,’ I said softly. ‘We talked about it before—God knows how long ago—but somehow, it was abstract then. Now…Kevin, if you can’t even say it, how can you expect me to do it?’”

Again, Dana equates language with reality and power. For Dana, if one cannot find the words for something, it likely cannot be real. Here, she is struggling with the idea of killing Rufus, something she does not want to be real.

“I’m not property, Kevin. I’m not a horse or a sack of wheat. If I have to seem to be property, if I have to accept limits on my freedom for Rufus’s sake, then he also has to accept limits—on his behavior toward me. He has to leave me enough control of my own life to make living look better to me than killing and dying.”

Dana understands her role in the past with Rufus as a compromise: She must pretend to be an enslaved person at his mercy, and he must not push her too far. However, as we see later, Rufus does not see their relationship the same way. For him, his desires outweigh Dana’s desire for freedom, effectively making her his enslaved person.

“I never know how to treat you. You confuse everybody. You sound too white to the field hands—like some kind of traitor, I guess […] Daddy always thought you were dangerous because you knew too many white ways, but you were black. Too black, he said. The kind of black who watches and thinks and makes trouble.”

Just like Dana is caught between past and present, she is caught between white and Black, between inside the house and outside on the fields. She belongs completely with neither group, which is also why Tom Weylin is afraid of her. This is also how Dana’s family views her in the present: as a traitor to her race for marrying Kevin. Thus, Dana is familiar with the feeling of being in-between.