Dana's Character In Kindred By Octavia Butler

While disrupting the image of Sarah as the doting mammy figure, Butler places Dana into that role by making her be responsible for Rufus. This further allows Butler to examine what it meant to be a caretaker for white children during this time period. Dana’s travels allow her to catch glimpses of Rufus’s development into a young man. While she initially has hopes that she can be a positive influence on him and curtail the influences from his mother and father, she inevitably fails. Though Dana saves Rufus from many near death experiences and nurses him back to health many times, Rufus still grows into a replica of his father and becomes a man of his time. Dana’s inability to nurture Rufus into a more socially enlightened man cause her to question

I could get that angry with him, even though I knew the consequences of killing him. He could drive me to a kind of unthinking fury. Somehow, I couldn’t take from him the kind of abuse I took from others. If he ever raped me, it wasn’t likely that either of us would survive.

Maybe that was why we didn’t hate each other. We could hurt each other too badly, kill each other too quickly in hatred.

This passage foreshadows the ending of the novel where Dana does kill Rufus for trying to rape her. Dana’s musing indicate that rather than holding a familial affection for Rufus like she did when he was a young child, she begins to tolerate Rufus’s behavior as a means for survival. As someone who helped raise Rufus, she hoped that eventually he would be able to see black people as human beings and treat them better than his father and other racist white men during this time period, but society’s influence on his life overshadowed Sarah’s and Dana’s influences. Once Dana realizes that Rufus is a man of his time, affection becomes replaced with weary acceptance of who he is, and she begins to anticipate the day when should would no longer be able to forgive Rufus’s trespasses. Here, Butler is able to highlight the futile position of the mammy figure in the lives of the white family member. Though she takes care of them and attempts to subversively create a more humane generation, the institution of slavery and American culture