Rufus and Dana's friendship evolution
In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana travels from the present to the past and meets her ancestor Rufus. They started to have a good friendship after Dana saved Rufus from drowning. After Tom Weylin died, Rufus took over the slave plantation and started to use his power more. That’s when Dana and Rufus’s friendship started to become rocky. At the beginning of the book, Dana was a sort of mother figure to Rufus, but towards the end of the book, Rufus started to manipulate Dana into doing things for him. When Dana first traveled to 1815, she saved Rufus from drowning. After that moment, they had a sort of a strong friendship. I feel like Dana only gets close to Rufus because she needs him for her to be born. Dana finds out that Rufus is the father of her ancestor Hagar, and she realizes that “He had to be the one. There had to be some kind of reason for the link he and I seemed to have” (Butler 29). This quote shows that Dana needs to get clo...