Kindred

In the novel Kindred by Octavia Butler, Dana, the main character, goes back in time to protect a young white boy named Rufus. It is discovered that Rufus is her great-great-great grandfather, who is a slaveholder’s son. Dana is sent back in time to protect her grandfather, who whenever is in danger or is afraid, Dana goes back to the eighteen hundreds to save him from trouble, vanishing right before her husband’s eyes and eventually bringing him with her to the year eighteen nineteen. The novel shows the contrast of the different eras’ social norms and the conditions that slaves were put through during the eighteen hundreds. During her time stuck in the era, she conforms to the role of the slave to stay protected, but does she conform too well? And if she does conform to the role of a slave, what does that have to say of the African American culture in the 1970s?

            It is mentioned in “The Fall” when Kevin and Dana transport back to eighteen nineteen to save Rufus who had just fallen out of a tree and broken his leg, that Dana believes it is in their best interest to conform because it would be too hard for other people to understand that they had time traveled. In the scene, she explains the idea that they are from the future and they are there to protect Rufus and that she is called whenever he is in immediate danger. Her statement, “[w]e’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have to play the roles you gave us”(65). To keep themselves safe, they pushed forward and changed their roles to match the society that they were in at the time, Kevin was Dana’s owner now. The change that they had to make could refer to the social changes that many African American people have to make in order to “fit in” in the seventies, just after the civil rights movement. Many white people did not consider African Americans equal citizens at the time, which better supports the suggestion that Butler is using the novel to compare the social norms of the slave era to the civil rights era.

At the time that they appeared, the marriage that her and Kevin have was illegal, and although they had been legally married in nineteen seventy-five, their relationship when they first met was mocked by Dana’s coworker, Buz. These comments made by Buz and the mention that the marriage was illegal by Rufus could very well have been a social commentary made by Butler on the idea that although the marriage between an interracial couple was legal at the time, but did not mean much when it came to the societal pressure that interracial couples faced was much different from that of a white couple. Not seen as being fit, the ability for a white man to marry a black woman was unheard of in the time of pre-Civil War. That makes the fact that Kevin is a white man in the story so much more important to the plot. The idea that Dana’s life is a “picture of progress” for African Americans is important because it also allows for the proof that they still faced major roadblocks and deserved equal rights as well, but as comparing the two lifestyles, Dana’s life was exponentially better than the slaves.