Kindred

The novel constantly brings up the question of whether we are so influenced by our environment that we have no choice in our behavior, or whether we have the freewill to control our behavior despite our environment. We see this both in the enslaved people and in the slaveowners. The enslaved people literally have no freewill in their actions, as they are whipped, killed, or sold if they disobey their owners. However, Dana realizes enslaved people can have freedom of thought. At first, she judges Sarah for succumbing to the “Mammy” role and becoming complacent with her enslavement: “She was the kind of woman who would be held in contempt during the militant nineteen sixties […] the female Uncle Tom—the frightened powerless woman who had already lost all she could stand to lose” (145). Dana does not yet understand that physical submission can coexist with mental defiance. Sarah secretly expresses hatred for the Weylins in the privacy of the cookhouse, while she is also forced to accept the predestination of the era: that being born Black means one is an enslaved person. We see this wearing down into outward acceptance in Alice: She is defiant and runs away until she has Rufus’s children, accepting her seemingly predestined role as Rufus’s lover. She ultimately exercises what is left of her freewill by killing herself at the thought of losing her children. For enslaved people, freewill means private defiance as survival, or death.

For the slaveowners, predestination and freewill look much different. They must fight against the predestination set in tradition and white supremacy. Rufus will literally inherit his father’s plantation, but Dana believes he does not have to inherit his racist, violent behaviors. She acknowledges the power that the environment can have on a person when she fears for Kevin’s sanity and morality if he spends too much time in the past. Unlike with slavery where acceptance of fate is a wearing down, acceptance of racism is a wearing of, like the wearing of an outfit. Rufus puts this on because his parents and society have predestined him to do so. This allows him to easily blame his actions on others instead of taking responsibility himself. Thus, for the slaveowners, freewill means a conscious undoing of racist ideology, a choice to help rather than harm. Although Rufus fails to exercise his freewill in the face of learned racism, Butler seems to believe that the way to do this is by keeping the past present.