Slavery In Kindred

Dana finds out the Alice killed herself because Rufus sent their kids to live with their aunt. Since Alice has been gone, Rufus has felt as lonely as ever. Since Dana is back, Rufus feels better and is starting to give the feelings he had for Alice to Dana, only Dana does not feel the same to Rufus. When Dana and Rufus get into a heated argument in the library about why Rufus sold Sam. Rufus grabs Dana’s arms and that when Rufus feeling of loneliness shoes. “You were one woman, you and her. One woman. Two halves of a whole.” Rufus tells Dana. Dana then runs up stairs and grabbed her knife from her bag opened it but put it back as soon as she hear Rufus coming up the stairs. “He opened the door, came in, looked around the bif hot empty room. He saw me at once, but still, he looked around-to see whether we were alone? We were.” Rufus kept inching closer to Dana. Rufus ends up on top of Dana with his left arm around her, his head on her shoulder, and her right arm still at her side as Rufus was holding it down. “ I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me, I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side. He screamed.”.….”I pulled the knife free of him somehow, raised it, and brought it down again into his back.” (249-260). Dana never wanted to hurt Rufus. She always was there for Rufus when he needed

As Dana soon discovers, the reality of slavery is even more disturbing than its portrayal in books, movies, and television programs. Before her journey into the past, Dana called the temp agency where she worked a "slave market," even though "the people who ran it couldn't have cared less whether or not you showed up to do the work they offered."

He wants to help his wife and partially understand what she is going through. Of course he will not understand everything since she is a female black slave working on a plantation and he is a white man, but Kevin goes back out of his love for Dana. He watches her go through so much that while he is back in slave time he tries his best to make her feel at home. He convinces Rufus and Tom Weylin to let Dana sleep in his corridors and pretends to be Dana’s owner so he can “control” what she does, instead of letting Rufus or Weylin control her. Kevin’s time in the 1800’s is unlike Dana’s. Dana goes back to her normal life whenever she feels her life is in danger, but Kevin has no way to get back without the help of Dana. The first time Kevin loses his chance of going back to the present day is in the end of “The Fall” when Dana begins getting whipped by Master Weylin. Kevin is stuck in the past for five years without Dana to learn about life on his own. In this certantain instant Dana holds more power over Kevin. While living in the past without Dana, Kevin begins to adapt to the way white men hold power and begins to forget what life in the present is normally

He feels that he has the authority to do as he wishes, despite how it affects those surrounding him. Throughout Rufus ' life, all he wants most is to get Alice. Alice however is a free and married black woman. She does not belong to Rufus, and lives off his plantation. Once Rufus finds out of her affairs with somebody else, he gets extremely jealous. Although Alice isn 't his property, he feels like she should be. Rufus tries to rape Alice - a free and married woman, and gets beat up by Alice 's dear husband, Isaac Jackson. Alice and Isaac are then forced to run away to avoid getting arrested and brought back to the plantation. "Isaac and Alice had four days of freedom together. On the fifth day, they were caught. On the seventh day, I found about it."(Butler, 143) "He was feeling better, looking better. That seemed to be enough for him."(Butler, 143) At last, Rufus gets what he wants - he gets Alice. After their capture, he buys Alice and brings her back to the plantation. She becomes his property. Rufus does not care in what mental and physical condition she comes back in. Alice is now his, and he gets what he wants. Furthermore, he rapes and beats Alice after he gets hold of her. To Rufus, having Alice 's life at his own discretion is what is important to him. He wants to have full control over her. However, he later realizes that there are some aspects of Alice that

Neer the very beginning of the novel Dana is experiencing her second return to the past and is greeting her relatives when the father of Alice, her great great… grandmother, is being dragged away because he is presumed to be a runaway slave of the slave master, Tom Weylin. After that mess with Alice’s father clears, the patroller questions Dana as to who she is. When she can’t answer, the patroller drags her out of the home, and she tries to escape with no success. “The man tackled me and brought me down hard. At first, I lay stunned, unable to move or defend myself even when he began hitting me, punching me with his fists. I had never been beaten that way before - would never have thought that I could absorb so much punishment without losing consciousness.” After she is brutally beaten for a while, she scrambles and musters up the strength to bring a limb down onto the man’s head and runs fast and far away from the unconscious man who almost killed her. Although Dana’s tenacity might have come as a surprise to the readers, Butler also does a fabulous job of revealing how Dana is even surprised by her capability and how she can survive through her power as well as her

Passions drive people, and the townspeople in “The Lottery” and Paul in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” are no different. Each of the members of the unnamed town has a strong passion for tradition. The original black box used for the lottery is described as being, “lost long ago, and the black box now resting on the stool had been put into use even before Old Man Warner, the oldest man in town, was born” (Jackson 251). This sentence gives the reader an understanding that the lottery is an ancient tradition that has become an integral part of the town’s lifestyle. Such a tradition can only be carried on for this length of time if the people are passionate about preserving the tradition. Paul had a passion to be wealthy as a way to prove to his mother that he was lucky. From a young age, he saw that his family always wanted more money to support a better lifestyle, yet

Have you ever been told that you and a friend are practically the same person? Something similar to this happens to Dana and Alice in Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred. In Butler’s novel, Dana is a young black woman living in 1976. Next thing she knows, she time travels back to the antebellum South. Dana is given the task of saving her several times great grandfather, Rufus Weylin, from multiple life threatening situations. Along the way she meets her several times great grandmother, Alice, who is a young free black woman. In her novel, Kindred, Octavia Butler compares and contrasts Dana and Alice to show the theme that people will do anything in order to survive. Both Dana and Alice have to become slaves on a plantation, run away for a life of freedom, and tolerate the treatment of Rufus.

In the novel Kindred, by Octavia Butler, the main character Dana is exposed to the brutality and exhausting existence inflicted on slaves in the 1800’s. Through intentionally suppressive measures, slave owners used a series of methods to control and manipulate an entire race of people into submission. Dana describes this process as dulling and her experiences haunt her as she is slowly broken down. “See how easily slave are made?” (Butler 177) her thoughts say; this is Butler attempting to illustrate how it was nearly impossible for the enslaved people to change their situation and fight for freedom. Contemporary people didn’t understand why the slaves didn’t rise up and revolt against the whites, so Butler puts Dana through conditions that eventually show her and the audience it wasn’t that easy. The slaves were too tired to revolt, too broken to fight back, and too connected to each other to leave; thus giving the repulsive entitled whites the ability to continue their disgraceful contempt for human decency. By means of labor and sensational punishment, family ties, surveillance that included slave hierarchy; dreams of revolutions and freedom were overpowered and even Dana becomes complacent accepting the role of slave.

This also illustrates how Dana believes she can have a lasting effect on Rufus, to steer him away from the ways of his father. However, she only has a limited period of time to shed her 20th century mentality on him. And, Rufus’ change is not gradual relative to Dana, because every time she returns, she finds Rufus years older, and acting that much more like his father.

The only people slaves could turn to were each other. In essence, they formed a community of sorts in which each one tried to watch out for one another while maintaining their own survival at the same time. This is evident when Sarah welcomes Dana into the cookhouse to help. She gives her work, despite the fact that Dana has few skills in household chores. Also, we see camaraderie when Alice’s mother welcomes Dana into her home. “I saw her glance over at her daughter, then touch her own face and wipe away blood from the corner of her mouth. “Wasn’t going to turn you ‘way,” she said softly” (38). The welcoming of Alice’s mother stretches beyond kindness because she is putting her whole family at risk. Furthermore, she is taking in a woman who she doesn’t even know. As a result, we can concur simply that slaves did all they could to help fellow slaves.

Correspondingly, this became a problem for everyone in Rufus’s life as in Douglass’s life as a former slave as well. Rufus’s actions were the main cause of hardships that even people he cared about had been hurt or dead. Dana had tried to prevent this from happening, but Rufus had failed to conform given being raised in his time period. Equally important, it is genially accepted that race and slavery changed history which has lead to a divided nation that remains affected today.

He had some friends that were slaves on the plantation like Nigel and Alice who also had treated him with respect. In this scene, Dana and her husband Kevin both journey back to the past to see a young boy curled into a ball on the ground from falling out of a tree. The married couple run over to the boy who is Rufus and by him is a young black child around twelve years old. Dana asks the black child,whose name was Nigel, what had happened to Rufus. He didn’t answer her right away, but instead he demands who she is and starts to get protective of Rufus. Rufus tells Nigel, “She’s alright and she’s the one who helped me put out the fire the one time”. After that little conversation Dana asks Nigel if he knew where Rufus live. He replies with a “yes”, and that he lived there too. She figures that he is probably a slave on Rufus’s father’s plantation (59-60). Finding out that Nigel is a slave and that he got protective of Rufus when he falls shows that there is a different type of bond between them; almost like brothers or best friends. This demonstrates that Rufus doesn't care about the color of his pal Nigel and that he wouldn't let anything exacerbate the situation even more. This scene reveals that skin color does not matter to young Rufus because he does not want to be like his

It was dangerous for Dana because she spoke as the educated women that she was, so when talking with someone new they would comment on her educated speech. “It was dangerous to educate slaves, they warned. Education made blacks dissatisfied with slavery. It spoiled them for field work. The Methodist minister said it made them disobedient, made them want more than the Lord intended them to have. “(Butler, 236). With the lack of education given to the slaves it is hard to know and understand just how bad things truly got. When Dana time- travels she is treated as one of the slaves because she doesn’t have papers saying that she is freewomen, considering she is living in the 1900s. Throughout the novel Dana protects Rufus from many things because she sees it as crucial for her to help because if he were to die then her life could be altered drastically. Those who helped free the slaves as Kevin did when he got taken back in time are also seemingly forgotten. With the risk of getting caught, whether it was teaching the slaves or assisting them to run away. Those whether black or white put their lives on the line to help those who couldn’t help

The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based

. .(The woman screamed) Gone! All gone! Why don’t God kill me?" Linda explains that things like this happen daily, even hourly. This is only a small piece of the torture it was to be a woman in slavery. Linda’s master often made perverted comments to her in which she expressed as to filthy to tell. He began to fill her mind with awful thoughts and words. He often slapped Linda and kicked her around. He was constantly threatening her and her life explaining that he would never sell her and that she would be in their damily as long as he had an heir. When Linda became pregnant with the son of a white man, he became very angry and he constantly reminded her that her baby was to be his property, like a piece of land to be bought. When she had the boy she named Benjamin, he was premature and she became very ill. She refused to let anyone send for a doctor, because the only doctor that could treat her was Dr. Flint. Finally when they thought she would die they sent for her master. He treated her and she refused him as much as possible, but she lived and so did her little Benny, although sometimes she wished he would’ve died. Almost three years later she had a daughter who she called Ellen which angered him even more and when Benny began to run to cling to his mother when he was striking her, Dr. Flint knocked the child all the way across the room nearly killing him.