A very crucial scene in Octavia Butler’s Kindred is when Dana has been drawn back into Rufus’s time and has a map of Maryland with her. Rufus wants Dana to burn the map and says that she would be in great trouble if his father saw her with the map. When she doesn’t want to burn it, he blackmails her by saying that he won’t mail the letter to Kevin until she burns the map. The paragraphs following are particularly key.
I did not fully see how important the scene is and how much this couple of paragraphs foreshadows until after I had finished the book.
“He waited, watching me. I wanted to ask him what he would do with my letter if I didn’t burn the map. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to bear an answer that might send me out to face another patrol or earn another whipping. I wanted to do things the easy way if I could.”
After dropping the map into the fire, Dana says
“’I can manage without it you know,’ I said quietly. ‘No need for you to,’ said Rufus. ‘You’ll be all right here. You’re home.’” (143).
When I first read this scene, Rufus and Dana were kind of scaring me because I felt like their relationship could turn ugly with this new element of blackmailing each other. Now after finishing the book, other elements pop out at me. Dana says that she wants to do things the easy way. Which makes sense of course since she wants to avoid a whipping. However, it also shows a major sign of Dana breaking with the system. Later in Kindred, Alice asks Dana if she would go to Rufus and she says no. I think that Dana really does mean what she says and is acting honestly in the moment, but based on what we have seen, it makes us wonder if push came to the shove, would Dana go to him to avoid all of the physical pain.
Thus near the end when Dana is in such a situation, she thinks about how easy it would be to let Rufus rape her and although this is very disturbing, it makes more sense that she would have those thoughts.
The ambiguous first line of the prologue was also brought up during class, “I lost an arm on my last trip home” (9). In the beginning, we assume that “home” is the present day. However, in light of Rufus’s later comment that she is home on the plantation with him, the ambiguity of the line shines forth. I think that this first line is quite intentionally ambiguous and so much so that the reader isn’t supposed to know which “home” it is referring to. It seems as though the point is that at this point, Dana has spent so much time and become so assimilated and attached in the past that even she does not know what to consider “home” anymore.
Excellent points. And the deep ambivalence of this particular idea of "home" is emphasized in the controversy surrounding the map. Rufus's implication is that she doesn't *need* to know where anything else is, as she's already where she needs to be. He seems to mean this in the kind of endearing, affectionate, controlling way we see from him throughout the novel, but it's also the same logic that makes maps and literacy itself illegal for slaves to possess--her *place* is on this plantation, and she should confine herself to this circumscribed world. Rufus is basically saying that he doesn't want her to *escape*, and Dana's voyages back to the future are repeatedly framed as a form of escape from slavery (and when she slits her own wrists in order to "travel", she prefigures Alice's extreme and self-annihilating "escape" near the end of the novel).
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