Kindred

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-4

Chapter 5-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Fall”

Content Warning: The Chapter 4 Summary of this section includes instances of sexual assault and coercion.

Dana recalls when she and Kevin first met while working at an auto body shop; both worked a minimum-wage job to support their writing career. He was 12 years older than she was and had just garnered a book deal.

Back in 1976, Dana time travels again, but this time Kevin comes along by holding onto her. They land in 1819 where a 12-year-old Rufus has just fallen out of a tree and broken his leg. The young, enslaved person with him, Nigel, sends for Rufus’s father while Kevin and Dana try explaining their arrival to Rufus. Rufus eventually believes their time travel story after they show him a coin from 1976.

Tom Weylin arrives with Nigel’s enslaved father, Luke, and is callously uncaring toward Rufus. They all head back to the plantation where Kevin claims to be Dana’s owner traveling through the South. After learning Dana can read, Tom Weylin lets them stay to both help Rufus practice reading while he recovers. We meet more enslaved people including Sarah, the plantation cook, and Carrie, her daughter who has a speech disorder and uses other means to communicate. Tom Weylin sold Sarah’s other children to appease his cruel wife, Margaret. Both Margaret and Mr. Tom Weylin torment Dana because she is an educated Black woman; they fear she will educate the other enslaved people.

Kevin and Dana agree to fit into the role of slaveowner and enslaved person who are sleeping together until they can go home. Dana hopes to influence Rufus into being kind and unlike his parents. As Dana struggles to acclimate, Nigel and Carrie ask her to teach them to read. After witnessing a brutal whipping, she knows the risk, but she agrees. Still, she is shocked when Tom Weylin catches her with a book and whips her savagely. Kevin races to her, but she loses consciousness and time travels before he can reach her.

Chapter 4 Summary: “The Fight”

In a flashback, we learn that Kevin and Dana eloped after four months of dating, without their families’ approval. In 1976, Dana wakes in pain and alone. She cleans her wounds and prepares another bag of supplies for travel. Eight days later, Rufus calls her again.

Five years have passed and Rufus is being beaten by Alice’s husband, Isaac, for raping Alice. She reveals that Kevin waited for Dana, but he eventually left North and only Rufus knows exactly where. Dana helps Alice and Isaac escape before Rufus regains consciousness. When he does, he justifies his assault, claiming that he loves Alice but she rejected him. Dana makes him promise not to implicate Isaac because that would lead to Isaac and Alice’s deaths.

Back at the plantation, Dana nurses Rufus back to health. Tom Weylin fears Dana’s mysterious role in Rufus’s life and is just as cruel as before. Nigel has married Carrie, who soon gives birth to their son, Jude. Luke has been sold for behaving too freely and replaced by white Jake Edwards, the new overseer. Margaret Weylin has gone to live with her sister in Baltimore after losing two children. Kevin wrote letters to Dana, and Dana replies to tell him she is back; Rufus promises to mail her letter. Rufus notices the history book Dana has brought from the future and makes her burn it.

Days later, Alice is brought back beaten to near-death after being purchased by Rufus; Isaac was sold somewhere South. As Dana nurses her, Alice reverts to a child-like state, forgetting everything Rufus has done. When she finally remembers, she resents Dana and rejects Rufus again. Rufus asks Dana to persuade Alice to sleep with him willingly to avoid being raped again; Alice reluctantly accepts and becomes more submissive. When Dana discovers that Rufus never mailed her letters, she runs away but is quickly caught and whipped. Dana feels hopeless, but when she recovers slightly, she discovers that Tom Weylin has sent for Kevin because he believes Rufus should have kept his word. Soon, Kevin arrives, looking haggard and older. He and Dana try to escape, but Rufus stops them. He aims a rifle at Dana, causing her and Kevin to travel home.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

In this section, we see various examples of the uncanny, a common theme of postmodern science fiction in which the familiar is defamiliarized or reinvented. The uncanny is often a source of fear or mystery, but Butler adopts it more as a tool for thoughtful juxtaposition. For example, Dana’s story reads like a first-person slave narrative because like real enslaved people who were brought to America from Africa against their will, Dana has no control over when or where she goes. However, Butler reinvents the genre by infusing it with time travel. Thus, we get caught in the clear juxtaposition between past slave narratives and present science fiction, much like Dana.

Similarly, science fiction and time travel tropes such as the “grandfather paradox” are also reinvented. These chapters more clearly show Dana trying to influence Rufus’s morality as well as secure her own birth by making sure Alice survives her beating. This is the essence of the grandfather paradox, in which traditionally a white, male character travels to the past to meet their grandfather and make sure their family line stays intact. However, the paradox in Kindred is uncanny because Dana is a Black woman. Additionally, her time travel is not willing or exploratory. She does not have a time machine as featured in traditional science fiction time travel stories, and she does not voluntarily go to the past to satisfy her curiosity. Therefore, Butler defamiliarizes these science fiction tropes to highlight Dana’s displacement and position of inferiority. She is not only an outsider in the story because she is Black in antebellum Maryland, but she is also an outsider as a science fiction protagonist.

This section also defamiliarizes the role of the white slaveowner. After Rufus betrays Dana by not mailing her letter to Kevin, Tom Weylin surprisingly becomes the hero responsible for Dana and Kevin’s reunion. As Dana notes, “[Tom Weylin] wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). Traditional depictions of white slaveowners paint them as one-dimensional racist, vicious men. Tom Weylin clearly embodies this description, but he also has a “code of honor” that forces him to do the right thing. Through Tom Weylin’s uncanny characterization, Butler demonstrates that racism is not always hyperbolic or divorced from historical context. It is real and must be understood as a part of a larger white supremacist society.