Dana's Hope for Rufus

    When Dana first finds herself travelling back in time, it's made very clear what her goal was. From the moment she meets a young Rufus Weylin drowning in a river, she begins an exhausting mission that goes beyond just keeping him alive. Dana attempts to become Rufus's teacher, his moral compass, and his connection to a future where Black people are treated as human beings. She corrects his language and tries to plant seeds of empathy in soil poisoned by 19th century ideas. Additionally her existence depends on Rufus and Alice producing the ancestor who will eventually lead to Dana's birth. But it's also deeply personal. Dana cares about Rufus, and throughout the book, she attempts to mold him into someone different, someone better than the slaveholding society that surrounds him. Kindred systematically dismantles that hope.

When Dana first meets Rufus, he's frightened, vulnerable, and seemingly malleable. Rufus plays with Nigel and Alice, Black children on the plantation, suggesting that he hasn't yet fully absorbed the racial ideas of his society yet. Dana's first lesson is simple but radical: she teaches Rufus not to call her a slur. "I'm a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that's it" (Butler 25). The request confuses him, but he respects it. Even more promising, when Dana needs to escape the Weylin property to avoid being caught by Rufus's father, young Rufus helps her. He makes a choice that aligns with protecting Dana rather than with the racial order that would demand he turn her in. At this point in time, Dana believes that Rufus can be molded.

But Dana doesn't get to raise Rufus singlehandedly. She visits him in fragments, appearing during vulnerable moments, just to be sent back while months or years pass by for Rufus. When Dana returns after their second separation, the change in Rufus’s behavior is horrifying. She finds Rufus being beaten by Isaac, Alice's husband, and learns that Rufus tried to rape Alice. The boy who once played with Alice as an equal had turned into one that believed he owned her. Rufus tells Dana that his feelings for Alice are modeled on what he's observed between Dana and Kevin: "You want Kevin the way that I want Alice. And you had more luck than I did because no matter what happens now, for a while he wanted you too" (Butler 163). In Rufus's warped understanding, he loves Alice the way Dana loves Kevin, but poisoned by his society, he believes the only way to have Alice is through violence and coercion. And yet, Dana continues to hope. Throughout Kindred, she convinces herself that she can still fix Rufus—that one day he might free Alice and his children and he somehow break away from the pattern of violence his father established.

The moment that finally destroys Dana's hope comes when Rufus attempts to rape her, the line Dana never believed he would cross. When Rufus corners Dana and makes clear his intentions, Dana’s hopes for Rufus finally shatter. In that moment, she understands that despite everything they've been through together, as a black woman, Rufus sees her as his property. For the first time, Dana feels no hesitation about killing him, finally understanding that Rufus Weylin could never have been saved.