Dana's Complicated Attachment to Rufus

The book Kindred is a complex story about the societal dynamics of antebellum slavery and the result of what would happen if someone from the more modern context of the 1970s were dropped into that time period. How would they fare? Would their ideals and values hold up or would they somehow be transformed by societal pressures? The answer to this question varies greatly based on how much time you were to spend in the past and one’s racial identity. In this case, Dana is a victim of this time travel phenomenon in which she is forcefully transported to the past. Being black, she is thrown into a context in which slavery is prevalent and racism has more obvious institutional power but even more so she is also placed in the heart of the confederate South despite presently living in California. This leads her to have complex interactions with both the white and black members of the mid-sized plantation which she is connected to, particularly with the son of the original plantation owner, Rufus. When Dana first meets Rufus, he is very young and she saves his life. Not only does this feel counterintuitive where someone who is enslaved makes the deeply confusing decision to save their captor, but it also creates a dynamic where despite being on a higher social status, due to race and class, Rufus feels indebted to Dana and owes her a sense of repayment for essentially being his guardian angel in times of need. In this blog post I want to analyze why Dana continues to make the complicated decision to save Rufus’ life and what implications this has on her own mental state and sense of justice as well as how it might disaffect those around her. Regardless, due to the fact that Rufus is technically her blood ancestor, Dana is placed in a morally tenuous situation where she feels compelled to relate to Rufus, perhaps for longer than she should have.

Although the book is full of contradicting and highly irregular relationships (such as the one between Nigel and Rufus), the first complicating factor that makes Rufus and Dana’s relationship into one of the most complex dynamics in the book is the fact that she knows about the future and grew up in a more present and modern time. The first most prominent issue that she brings up several times in the book is that her existence in the past has given her a “squeamishness that [she believes] belongs in another age” (Butler 42). Multiple times, this prevents her from dealing deadly blows to her oppressors and potentially gaining freedom, all for her lack of ability to act lethally on any given human being, a kind of do-or-die situation she had never been forced into in the world of the 1970s. Although she continues to be saved by good fortune, her courage to inflict pain on those who inflict pain on her only develops towards the very end of the book and towards the end of her time in the slavery-ridden world of the past when she is finally able to put an end to Rufus’ manipulation and terrorization by stabbing him with a knife. Her decision to hesitate and wait this long to commit this act can partly be attributed to her complex blood relation to him, but this also reveals how someone of the 1970s might not be as resistant to the racial oppression of the past as they might think, not only because of modern notions of passivity, but also as the book comes to show, a more deep influence from the powerful indoctrination and constant threat of physical harm that inhibits any notion of progressivity or resistance in a society reliant on slavery.

The second complicating factor which I shortly mentioned in the previous paragraphs is her blood relation to Rufus. Not only does this lead her to have an unbreakable bond with Rufus that prevents her from killing him too soon out of fear of a time paradox in which she ceases to exist, but she also feels compelled to stay long enough in the past to experience and ensure the birth of the next generation which would ensure her survival. What is strange about her desire to preserve her ancestors is that even this follows a trend of racial prejudice. Dana’s focus in the book is predominantly on Rufus as she, by contrast, almost entirely ignores the wellbeing of her other, equally relevant and essential relative, Alice, and her struggles over the course of her time in the past. This is shown clearly in the scene where Dana presents Alice with a number of pessimistic options to choose from, essentially delivering a message crafted directly by Rufus. In this moment she does not stick up for Alice nearly enough as Rufus tells her to deliver the message in which she presents the option of sexual assault by Rufus, a refusal followed by punishment, or taking the risk to run away again (Butler 166). Furthermore, Dana’s willingness to deliver the message on her own behalf, takes advantage of the trust Alice has in her and successfully allows Rufus’ manipulation to take place. Although Dana is also put in a difficult situation here, her handling of the interaction overwhelmingly seems to benefit Rufus. On the whole, her hyperfocus on Rufus as an ancestor as opposed to Alice can partly be attributed to the fact that she is continuously called to him, not her, giving Dana some sense of duty and destiny which subliminally is telling her that it is her job to save Rufus, not necessarily Alice. Despite this fact, this phenomenon and tendency to attach herself to Rufus is revealing and surprisingly symbolic of the racial priorities of the time and the tendency to value white lives over the lives of African Americans. Even Dana, someone from a progressive background in the present, subconsciously succumbs to these ideas in a way, thereby displaying the power of an existing system and its ability to deeply influence those involved.

Dana’s immersion into a more obviously racist system and tendency to defend Rufus as a character over the course of her time in the past is further unintentionally perpetuated by her attachment to Rufus as a young child. In a sense, she feels partially responsible for his development, including what he has become, despite only being a part of his life in key moments of survival. What this leads her to do is feel guilty and somewhat responsible for his continued egregious behavior and even somewhat bear an attachment to him because she knew him during a more innocent time where he was somewhat untouched by intense societal forces and pressure. Dana inadvertently starts to become a defender for the actions of Rufus and makes excuses for him even as he continues to escalate his erratic behavior and obvious violations of human rights and decency. For example, as Alice continues to directly blame Rufus for the death of Isaac, Dana tries to diffuse her anger and defend Rufus by saying he never told anyone Isaac beat him. In this way, she somewhat tries to paint Rufus as being forgiving, despite the fact that Rufus’ actions to begin with were what drove them to run away and later be caught (Butler 160). As such, his forgiveness only shows itself as small inactions that he is persuaded to take by Dana but which are still constrained to what he can do to help within the existing system. Additionally, Dana’s tendency to feel responsibility for his actions goes even further in that she blames herself for teaching Rufus about modern racial dynamics and serving as a physical example of a world in which white and black people can have a relationship. Prior to Dana’s arrival, the thought essentially never would have even crossed Rufus’ mind, but thanks to Dana, his childhood connection to Alice leads him to have a continued attraction to her which he forces into a relationship through his power as a white man and slaveowner of the time.

All in all, Dana is put in a very complex position by being inserted into the past to save her own white slaveholder ancestor. To start, this leads her down a strange path of prioritizing Rufus, her white ancestor over Alice, her black ancestor, something that wouldn’t make sense if it weren’t for the fact that many of Rufus’ actions over the course of his life had been nearly suicidal while Alice remained surprisingly stable until the end (at least on the surface). Her eventual suicide came as a result of the actions of Rufus and the fact that she had likely reached a mental limit after having had her kids taken away. Situations like these make Dana almost look like the bad guy, but we can’t forget that Dana is continuously put in difficult situations where, although one might think they would act differently in the moment, Dana continues to be written proof that what we think might not always end up being what we do. In this sense, Dana is almost a victim and test subject in a never-before conducted experiment that shows what would happen in a scenario where a progressive individual, who retrospectively thinks that they could resist the system of the past has their values challenged in a more difficult time. Dana’s hesitancy and her increasingly shaken sense of ideals as she is continually placed in the past puts into perspective why the various shifts towards racial equity in the United States took so long to transpire and the difficulty of oppressed groups trying to operate within a system designed to put them down, as well as the degree of courage needed to resist.