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Chapter 2: The Fire
Explanation and Analysis—Great Grandfather :
One of the central ironies of Kindred is that Dana must serve as a sort of surrogate parent for her own ancestor. Rather than her ancestor serving as a source of wisdom and experience for Dana, then, Rufus is at first a young, ill-behaved child with a tendency to endanger himself. When Dana realizes, during her second trip to the past, that Rufus is her ancestor, she is struck by this situational irony:
Well, maybe, if I wasn’t completely out of my mind, if I wasn’t in the middle of the most perfect hallucination I’d ever heard of, if the child before me was real and was telling the truth, maybe he was one of my ancestors. Maybe he was my several times great grandfather, but still vaguely alive in the memory of my family because his daughter had bought a large Bible in an ornately carved, wooden chest and had begun keeping family records in it. My uncle still had it.
This young, White boy, Dana realizes, is her “several times great grandfather” despite being little more than a child. His name, she recalls, is documented in a family Bible maintained by Hagar, Rufus’s future daughter. Throughout the novel, Dana develops a maternal relationship to her own ancestor, reading to him as a child, teaching him how to read and write, and protecting him from various dangers that threaten his life and, therefore, Dana’s own.
Related Themes:
