She doesn't fit in with the slaves or with the white master. The other slaves look down on her, hate her, for what happens to her. What a horrific choice to make - to put aside your feelings as a fellow human being, as a woman, as a black person, and play a part in the destruction of another person. Basically she has to not only step aside but actively encourage the repeated rape of Alice in order for Dana's ancestor to be conceived.
Dana faces such a difficult moral dilemma with Alice & Rufus. I think Butler did a great job portraying all the different layers in Rufus & Alice's "relationship". In real life, that sort of relationship would be nigh impossible based on the roles both people have been born into and on how they have been conditioned to think.
That both modern Dana & the modern reader would first think that is telling of the difference between now and then. Haha, what an idiot I was to predict that. Like Dana, I at first thought the relationship between Alice & Rufus would be of some sort of forbidden love story - children growing up together & falling in love but unable to be together openly because of society. Never knowing what a person's response will be keeps you on edge.The reason behind the time travel - that Dana must keep her white ancestor alive long enough to father the child Dana descends from - brings up so many dilemmas. He acts friendly & even loving at some points, only to turn on a dime and become a vicious monster. But with Dana's ancestor Rufus, it's not so cut & dry. If someone is 100% horrible, like the overseers, it is simple to hate them and fear them. What makes Dana's situation in Kindred so spooky and upsetting is how the white people in the story are so unpredictable in their behavior, and how enmeshed their lives are with the slaves they own. However, the analogy to a Jew in Hitler's Germany isn't quite apt since in that situation it's much easier to see the Nazis as pure evil, only out to hurt Jewish people. The thought of a modern day black person being transported back to the Antebellum South is scary, similar to a modern Jewish person being transported back to Germany in the 1930's. Add into that mix a book dealing with the roles of race and gender and you've got Kindred. I'm a sucker for time travel books and also for historical fiction. Loved both the unique premise of the book and how the author developed the story.
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