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

Symbols & Motifs

Literacy

The ability to read and write is a powerful symbol of both freedom and danger. As Dana notes, “one of the reasons it was against the law in some states to teach slaves to read and write was that they might escape by writing themselves passes. Some did escape that way” (49). Indeed, Nigel asks Dana to teach him to read because he wants to run away. Alice wants Joe and Hagar to learn to read because it means they will have a chance at freedom that Rufus initially refuses to grant them. Literacy and education are a vehicle for freedom that white slaveowners cannot control or take away. Even if enslaved people do not use their writing ability to write themselves passes, their mental escape in being able to read and feel superior to their owners is powerful. We see this escapism in Dana as she copes with her trauma by reading and writing. Therefore, literacy allows for mental and physical freedom from the clutches of slavery.

Slaveowners know this, and it is one of the reasons Tom Weylin is so afraid of Dana. She is an educated, Black enslaved person who speaks more eloquently than he does. She is literate in both basic medicine and progressive ideas, and he fears that an educated enslaved person like Dana will influence the other enslaved people to forget their role of inferiority. Many slaveowners of the time believed as Tom Weylin does, that educated enslaved people led to uprisings and defiance. This is why Rufus forces Dana to burn the history book she brings from the future because if she is caught with it, it would represent an attempt at an educated escape. Dana proves these white fears true when she teaches Nigel and Carrie to read and Tom Weylin catches her. As punishment, Tom Weylin whips Dana until she loses consciousness and time travels, saving her from possible death. Thus, literacy is dangerous to both slaveowners and enslaved people: If enslaved people are caught daring to defy their master by learning to read and write, they are beaten severely or even killed.

Dana’s Arm

Although we only witness the loss of Dana’s arm at the very beginning and end of the novel, it plays an important role in communicating the novel’s theme of past colliding with present. Dana’s arms and hands have been put to work throughout the entire novel. She uses them to save Rufus’s life multiple times, first through CPR and putting out the fire, then by doctoring him back to life after his injuries and fever. She helps Sarah in the cookhouse, preparing dinner for the Weylins. She also doctors herself and Alice after they are each beaten for running away. Later, after she spends a day out cutting corn in the fields—where the enslaved people are called “field hands,” a clear metonymy—she takes up sewing with Margaret Weylin. As a writer, Dana relies on her hands to tell her stories and vent her frustrations. Therefore, it is all the more traumatic when she loses her arm during her last trip home: “Something harder and stronger than Rufus’s hand clamped down on my arm, squeezing it, stiffening it, pressing into it—painlessly, at first—melting into it, meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something. Something cold and nonliving” (260-61). Rufus’s dead hand clutching her arm is replaced by the wall in her present home, and her arm from the elbow down must be amputated.

This moment of loss represents the psychological wounds that Dana is left with after her experience in the past. She is no longer whole because Rufus has taken so much from her: her freedom, independence, time with Kevin, potentially her life if Hagar had not been born, and ultimately her hand, which has been so instrumental to her survival in the past. Even in death, Rufus cannot help hurting Dana as much as he hurt her in life. Even when she returns home finally, she is not safe: “But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—or growing into it” (261). The “nonliving” wall that she is still attached to represents the collision of past and present, of old injuries and new pain so blurred that she cannot tell in which direction they grow. Her emotional scarring has invaded her physical body in the present and foreseeable future.

Rope

Like literacy, the rope has double meaning as a symbol of both connection and punishment. Dana uses a rope to tie a bag of supplies to her so she is prepared for time travel at any moment. The rope literally connects her to items from the future and of her home in 1976: items like soap, medicine, and a knife to help her survive. The rope also metaphorically connects her to the past because she would not need to tie a bag of survival equipment to herself if she were not so entwined with Rufus’s life. Kevin resents this connection: “You know, someday, you’re going to have to stop dragging that thing around with you and come back to life” (244). The rope and bag have become a symbol of her ties to the past, as she cannot let them go. Kevin’s word choice signals his belief that carrying around the bag in preparation for her trips to Rufus is killing Dana, and to survive in 1976, she must cut off her connection to Rufus and let him go.

The rope is also a symbol for the punishment inflicted on disobedient enslaved people. Alice’s father is tied to a tree and whipped by patrollers, and then tied to a horse and dragged for not keeping up. Dana, too, is beaten by Tom Weylin after she runs away unsuccessfully. She is strung up in the barn and whipped brutally until she wants to die. Later, Alice dies by suicide by hanging herself in the same barn with rope. When Dana finds her, she cuts the rope down to lay her to rest. This moment is particularly significant because Alice uses the same rope used against enslaved people to instead escape to freedom through death. The punishment using rope in this scene is ultimately for Rufus because he is so distraught with guilt after she dies. Therefore, while rope can be a way for literal and metaphorical connection, it can also be a way to commit violence. This duality is itself symbolic of the dual nature of Rufus’s relationship with Dana: It is both bonding and harmful.