Changing a Mindset: Take No Disrespect

            Octavia E. Butler’s story, Kindred, tells the story of Dana, a modern black woman who unintentionally time travels back into the slave-era in America to save a white person named Rufus, who also happens to be her ancestor. She periodically time travels back to her actual home in California, but whenever she was thrown back to the days of slavery she had figured out that Rufus was always in need of help. Each time she went back, her stay would get longer and longer, in which she learned to adapt and play the role of that which was expected of her then, a slave. A momentous turn in the book, as well as the part that got me all riled up, was when Dana decided that she had enough of dealing with the crap that came with being a slave.

She was in a private conversation with basically her slave master, Rufus’s father, Tom Weylin, and Dana was thanking Weylin for doing “at least one decent thing for Kevin and me, no matter what he was” (200). However, all it took for Dana to snap, and essentially break through the restraining mold that was holding her down as a slave, was the brief response from Weylin regarding the ‘thank you’ of “I didn’t do it for you” (200). She immediately responds to Weylin surprising him with a rebuttal, attempting to use the modern day equal logic of being grateful, one human being to another, but we all know that Tom Weylin did not see all human beings as equal. Weylin goes on to threaten Dana, saying “You want a good whipping!” (200), but instead of Dana rearing back and letting another rebuttal loose, she stays silent. She “realized then, though, that if he ever hit me again, I would break his scrawny neck. I would not endure it again” (200). And that was her breakthrough.

She had reached the point in her life where she had been through so much with the time travel and becoming a slave, that she finally said ‘no’. When I say ‘no’ I mean that she was not having any more of being slave, whether it be getting whipped or treated as lesser than a human being. Of course, one can’t just do something like this on a dime, it takes time. Think of it more as taking the process step by step, a progression of some sorts, rather than an all-out change. For Dana, she had some sort of sense of when to be compliant and when to be disruptive to her owners, as she was with Weylin mentioned earlier in this paper. Yes, she was in a position where she had almost zero authority when dealing with the white people. Nevertheless, she was still regarded as a threat to Weylin, as a fellow slave Nigel said, “He’s [Weylin] as close to being scared of you [Dana] as he’s ever been of anything” (206). This is the kind of thing that happens when one emboldens oneself, though, there is a fine line that must be followed with this kind of thing because too much emboldening can lead to trouble, or in Dana’s case, most likely torture or even death.

This sort of change of mindset is universal in the sense that anyone can do it. Yes, sometimes it takes some serious experiences and hardships that can be necessary for some to choose to make a philosophical change like that, but what I’m saying is that these kinds of changes can have profound impacts on one’s life. All it takes is one little step, one little variation to one’s mindset that can ignite the fire of change, which will lead to a forest fire that is one’s renovated self.