Thoughts on Kevin

While reading Kindred, I kept finding myself thinking about the character of Kevin. To some degree that probably represents some of my own biases as a white male, but I think there's also just something innately interesting about the "other" character in a novel like this -- the one who isn't the direct nexus of whatever weird cosmic energy or magic familial connection or whatever it is that draws Dana back in time, but who is still affected by her disappearances, even before he goes back himself. If we accept the metaphor that Dana is meant to represent Octavia Butler, then Kevin seems clearly designed to mirror the reader's reactions in some way. On the big sliding scale of disconnection from the realities of slavery, he's about as far ahead of the reader as Dana is of the author. (The big sliding scale looks a bit like this: actual slaves>Dana>
Kevin>Rufus>Butler>reader.) On one hand, he does have first-hand knowledge that no one who hasn't been on a slave plantation could ever have -- he is clearly more personally affected by the institution of slavery than (presumably) any readers ever could be. On the other hand, it seems like most readers think his response to slavery is still inadequate, especially when we compare it to Dana's. He's still not quite "there," at least when we see him before he gets lost for five years, and even to the extent he connects to the time he sees it from a perspective that's closer to Rufus', as a free white man, and even a (fake) slaveholder.

The issue with Kevin almost accidentally becoming a slaveholder is especially illustrative. Just by virtue of being a white man in the antebellum South, he "deserves" to own other people. Even if he comes into the experience as someone who intellectually knows a lot about slavery and has strong views against it, the default position he falls into when he joins that society changes how people treat him, and that necessarily influences how he treats them. The slaves never talk to him, and everything he hears about them comes from the Weylins. As a result, he never learns to view them as real people the way Dana does fairly quickly. He is more progressive than Rufus or Tom, in that he at least thinks the slaves deserve to be free, but he doesn't quite think that they deserve to be free because they possess individual consciousnesses and desires. They're more just cardboard cutouts that fall into the "people" category in his abstract brain, and even if he's able to hold out against the influence of the Weylins, who want to put them in the "animal" category, he's never able to really intellectualize their existence as individuals. They seem like static historical images, like something taken out of a book or a movie, and his views on them come entirely from those kinds of sources.

Granted, Kevin doesn't keep up this attitude for the whole book. By the time he comes back to LA, after five years in the past, he's been thoroughly disabused of any ideas he had about slavery being "not that bad." It seems pretty clear that he's a different man, and that in a lot of ways he lived up to the moral tests of the time: after all, he helped multiple slaves escape. In a lot of ways you could argue that he did more good than Dana ever did in the past. And yet, he seems eager to escape his memories of the time. Even though he saw some terrible things, they were still just things he viewed from a distance. Not to minimize the trauma seeing a pregnant woman whipped to death, or being forced to run from your life from a pro-slavery mob would cause someone, but his position is still ultimately the same in Maryland as it is in California: that of a free man. He isn't forced to play by a totally different set of rules the way Dana is; for him his time in the past is just a slightly dirtier and more miserable version of his own life, akin to living in another (fairly awful) country for five years. As a result he's only affected by his experience as something he interacts with and observes, not as something that actually picks at his sense of self. As a result he is able to fairly quickly adjust to normal life after coming back, hanging out with his old friends as though he had been on a long vacation. When he goes back to Maryland in 1976 to look at the historical record about the Weylin plantation, he does so because he wants a sense of closure to a bad period in his life, whereas Dana wants a sense of continuity, to know what happened to the individual people she came to know after she left them. 

Ultimately, that's the biggest difference between Kevin and Dana: for Kevin, the past is the past. What happened then is inevitable, it's static, it belongs in a textbook. He sees time very clearly as a line: what happened to him in Maryland was definitively before. By contrast, Dana is not just dragged back in time; her ancestral past is dragged slowly parallel to her own life. In her mind she exists side by side with the Weylin plantation; it's more like another place than another time. The people in it are people, not actors or exhibits, and as far as she's concerned they're still living with her, the way old friends in a city you've moved away from still exists, and you could still bump into them someday. She'll probably live her whole life with that place and those people in her mind, aware of it not as an unmoving place in history, but as a living, breathing place that in some way still is -- because who knows, she might still get drawn back.

In a lot of ways this whole idea of a living place in the past reminds me of Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim's Dresden probably appears a bit more alive than Dana's Maryland, because he keeps going back so frequently and throughout his entire life, but it's a similar concept. There is place in both of their lives that so affected them that they keep it with them at all times. The people in it seem, in a lot of ways, more real than the ones in their "real lives," and events there are still going on even as the characters have physically moved away. As I write this I realize that this is one possible description of the kind of situation that brings on PTSD -- as a moment in time that's kept alive and parallel to one's own, in a way that no normal memory or intellectual footnote is ever going to be able to be. Not to diagnose Dana with something she shows no signs of -- I don't really even like diagnosing Billy with it -- but there's some degree there where you could say it would make sense.