Shades of Gray

I think that life would be so much easier if there were no shades of gray. It is easy to classify objects and events as either black or white, right or wrong, this or that, and put them into neat, little categories. For example, it is easy to establish a stereotype of a slave-owner in the antebellum south. Before reading Kindred, I regarded those slave-owners as cruel and heartless, without any redeeming qualities. However, while reading Kindred, I couldn’t help but notice the character of Rufus evolving with a complicated mixture of good and bad. As I followed the growth of Rufus into a full-fledged slave-owner, I am presented with the concept that the stereotype of a slave-owner is not as simple as it appears. As much as I want life to be simple, I am faced with yet another ambiguous shade of gray.

When Dana first talks to Rufus, she meets an innocent and caring child who sees past the barriers of race. While Rufus talks to Dana using racial slurs, he clearly does not understand the significance of the insults. At this point, Rufus is just a harmless kid with innate goodness, who is being influenced by his culture. As Rufus grows, his antebellum south culture increasingly shapes his personality and perspective of life. Because Dana observes Rufus growing up in spurts, she sees the striking differences in him each time she reappears in antebellum south. As Rufus ages, he becomes more and more similar to his father, the seemingly stereotypical slave-owner. However, both Rufus and his father, as slave-owners, show compassion and sympathy to their slaves at various points in the story. Yes, they are cruel human beings for subjecting other people to such torturous lives, but they (more Rufus than Tom) sometimes struggle to maintain this cold identity. This internal conflict reveals itself in Rufus’s raping of Alice, a slave with whom he is in love. In this situation, Rufus clearly cannot distinguish his real identity with his identity as a slave-owner, yet they are visibly separate to me, as a reader. I think Rufus acts heartless because, sadly, that is all he has ever seen from his father about slave-owning, just like the black children “play” at being sold; being a commodity is the only life they have ever known.

I used to think of slave-owners as purely cruel, using slaves as tools for work and entertainment. I did not realize, however, that slave-owners may have had conflicting feelings about slavery too, and felt they had no choice but to take on their harsh roles. When Dana is debating whether to let Rufus die in the future, Carrie points out that Rufus’s role as slave-owner is necessary to prevent all the slaves from being sold at the terrible slave market. In that sense, Rufus had to undertake the role of slave-owner in order to prevent worse fates for the slaves. Similar to the slaves being constrained, Rufus was also restricted by the demands of his culture.

Kindred was a difficult story for me to get through because it portrayed slave-owners as more than one dimensional, which interferes with the normal conception I had of slave-owners in the antebellum south. However, it opened my eyes to my superficial classification of an issue that clearly contains great depth.