The Butler Theatre

    Kindred is a book that may as well be a play for how much acting it contains. Butler uses all of the main characters to thoroughly explore this idea, along with its inherent fakeness as well as its failings in the context of the time-travel narrative she sets up. Rufus, for example, puts on a different, fake-strong persona as his father deteriorates and dies and he becomes the leader of the plantation, but it collapses whenever he's with Dana to reveal the scared and somewhat traumatized boy inside. Kevin is Dana's husband back in 1976, but is forced to become her "master" during their journey to the past, quickly accepting this role that seems incredibly cruel on paper, but is ultimately necessary to protect Dana. Yet when he's hidden by the branches of an oak tree behind the Weylin home, they have a conversation where Kevin thoroughly explains his disguise so their stories can match, letting it drop for a moment. Dana herself is very similar as well. She is forced to play the role of an enslaved woman if she wants to be able to survive in the place she keeps getting pulled back into. But unlike the others, she is never able to fully extricate herself from her role until she finally snaps and kills the man who binds her to it, even though she desperately tries all throughout the story. And even when she does, she is permanently and visibly scarred by her experience by the loss of her arm inside her living room wall, symbolizing the parts of herself that she was forced to leave behind in the past.

    The first image we see of Rufus is a somewhat hopeful one. When Dana finally realizes the connection between her time travel and her family history, she has already saved a young Rufus from both drowning and a fire (and continues to help in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the novel.) So with her growing understanding of her situation and influence, as well a fear of the person Rufus's father has become, she resolves to save Rufus in a much bigger way - to stop him from assuming the role of his outwardly cruel yet inwardly fair father, or worse yet, having his experiences playing that role impact his true self. She naïvely expresses to Kevin that she hopes she can "keep him from growing up into a red-haired version of his father" (81), and tries desperately to do so, but she is ultimately unable to change him as slavery and, by extension, White men hold far too much power at the time. During her extended absences that prevent her from interacting with Rufus for years at a time, the power he gains as the leader of the plantation quickly shifts from something he only uses to further his "role" (as his father did) to something that influences even the most private situations where his "disguise" would normally come off. By the end of the book, he is beyond saving. Even towards the person he "loves" most, Dana, he is short-tempered, angry, and often violent, abusing the power that has been allowed to creep into every aspect of his being to exert a suffocating level of control over his love interest and repeatedly betray her before finally descending to attempting a rape that proves to be his demise.

    As a White man in the 1800s, Kevin's role and the path it followed should by all accounts have been similar to Rufus's, but his unique situation progressive ideas about race that he brought with him from from 1976 ultimately stave off a transformation into an entirely irredeemable, power-hungry white supremacist like adult Rufus. Still, Dana holds a deep-seated fear all throughout her travels to the past, especially when Kevin is forced to live alone there for 5 years, that the power he could theoretically wield while acting as a White slave owner would irreversibly corrupt or scar him like it did Rufus. Even in their time, the power imbalance between Dana and Kevin is still apparent: in his steely, often intimidating gaze; his ability to dismiss incidents of racism as "not much of a problem"; and the way he often pointedly nags Dana to get what he wants. This even goes all the way back to the way they met, with a somewhat well-off Kevin buying lunch for a struggling Dana that couldn't afford it. The way the couple are forced to disguise themselves (as "master" and "slave," not husband and wife) should by all accounts have further reinforced this imbalance. But Kevin's situation, and how living for years in the middle of slavery affected him, could not have been more different. The key factor keeping Kevin from being destroyed by his powerful role the same way Rufus was seems to be the sense of separation from the past that he is able to cling to all throughout his experiences. His situation and the role he plays give him room to step back and remind him that the place he finds himself in is likely not entirely "real" in the most specific sense of the word, and that he will return home eventually. And despite his flaws, he still holds beliefs about race that are very progressive even for the 1970s unlike Rufus, who only sees slavery and White power everywhere he looks. Because of his differences, he is able to come back from his journey to the 1800s mostly unharmed, still acting as a "home" for Dana after all they've been through.

"I don't know. As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it's beginning to recede from me somehow. It's becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got second hand."

    Ultimately, though, the end of Kindred reveals the futility of many of these instances of acting; Dana's attempt to save Rufus from his ruinous role as a plantation owner was sabotaged so completely by his surroundings that she had to kill him for her own safety, but losing her arm in the process. And by that time, Rufus had completely shut himself off from any possibility of change, instead opting to allow the power this role as a plantation owner granted him to irreversibly corrupt his real personality. Kevin was the only one who was truly able to escape, enabled by his ability to separate himself from not only the situation between Dana and Rufus, but also the world he finds himself in as a whole. Slavery and White supremacy were so firmly entrenched in American society in the time of Kindred that almost everyone, regardless of what they truly thought about it, had to act as if they supported it. Even the children in the story are trapped in this system that constantly forces them into the roles they will inhabit later in life: a young Rufus repeatedly calls Dana the N-word and becomes an even more evil master than his father, and we witness an appalling game where slave children pretend to sell off their friends, training them for what their lives likely become later. Even Dana was being trained to accept slavery — the more time she spends at the Weylin plantation, the more she thinks of it as "home" and the less she remembers that she ever had a real life outside of the role of a slave she's forced to play. With everything about 1800s society in the South serving to normalize slavery in the minds of all who are subjected to it, the way Kindred ends is truly no surprise, just as Butler likely intended.