Kindred: Similes 5 key examples

During Dana’s second journey to the past, Butler employs two different similes for describing the nature of Dana’s time-traveling ability. On her first trip, she saved a young White boy named Rufus from drowning before returning to her own time. This time, she again encounters Rufus, who is now a few years older, and saves him from a fire that he is setting in his home, the Weylin Plantation. After rescuing Rufus, he asks her about her earlier return to her own time, witnessed by his mother, Margaret: 

“But … what’s it like? What did Mama see that she won’t tell me about?” 

“Probably the same thing my husband saw. He said when I came to you, I vanished. Just disappeared. And then reappeared later.” 

He thought about that. “Disappeared? You mean like smoke?” Fear crept into his expression. “Like a ghost?”

“Like smoke, maybe. But don’t go getting the idea that I’m a ghost. There are no ghosts.” 

“That’s what Daddy says.” “He’s right.” “But Mama says she saw one once.” 

I managed to hold back my opinion of that [...] Besides, I was probably her ghost.

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In Chapter 3, Dana unintentionally returns to 1976 without Kevin, who is left trapped in the past. In the time that she spends alone at home, unable to leave the house for fear of suddenly being transported to the past while driving or crossing the street, she reflects upon her first meeting with Kevin while she was serving as a temp worker in an auto-parts warehouse years earlier. In Dana’s recounting of this first meeting, Kevin uses a simile that compares her to a zombie: 

The first thing Kevin ever said to me was, “Why do you go around looking like a zombie all the time?” He was just one of several regular employees at an auto-parts warehouse where a group of us from the agency were doing an inventory. I was wandering around between shelves of nuts, bolts, hubcaps, chrome, and heaven knew what else checking other people’s work. I had a habit of showing up every day and of being able to count, so the supervisor decided that zombie or not, I should check the others.

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In a pathos-filled passage, Tess, an enslaved woman on the Weylin Plantation who serves, under coercion, as a “bed mate” for Tom Weylin, uses a simile that compares her position to that of “a[n] old dog”: 

Poor Tess. Weylin had tired of her as a bed mate and passed her casually to Edwards. She had been afraid Edwards would send her to the fields where he could keep an eye on her. With Alice and I in the house, she knew she could be spared. She had cried with the fear that she would be spared. “You do everything they tell you,” she wept, “and they still treat you like a old dog. Go here, open your legs; go there, bust your back. What they care! I ain’t s’pose to have no feelin’s!”

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When the Weylins are briefly away from the plantation, the cruel overseer Edwards is left in charge. Dana uses a simile that describes the whip he carries as being “like part of his arm” while describing the manner in which he threatens her: 

Edwards loomed over me. “You think you been whipped? You don’t know what a whippin’ is yet!” He carried his whip around with him. It was like part of his arm—long and black with its lead-weighted butt. He dropped the coil of it free. And I went out, God help me, and tried to do the wash. I couldn’t face another beating so soon. I just couldn’t. When Edwards was gone, Alice came out of Carrie’s cabin and began to help me. I felt sweat on my face mingling with silent tears of frustration and anger.

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Dana uses both logos and simile in her argument with Sam Jones, who notes to Dana that many other enslaved people on the Weylin Plantation distrust her both because of her seemingly close relationship to Rufus and because they falsely perceive her to be his mistress: 

“Some folks say …” 

“Hold on.” I was suddenly angry. “I don’t want to hear what ‘some folks’ say. ‘Some folks’ let Fowler drive them into the fields every day and work them like mules.” 

“Let him …?” 

“Let him! They do it to keep the skin on their backs and breath in their bodies. Well, they’re not the only ones who have to do things they don’t like to stay alive and whole. Now you tell me why that should be so hard for ‘some folks’ to understand?” 

He sighed. “That’s what I told them.”

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