• (and perhaps romantically) attracted to Alice, while he relies on Dana to take care of him and to stimulate and support him intellectually.
• Alice and Dana are both women who were once free who are now unwillingly controlled by Rufus. Alice, who was born free, was later bought by Rufus so that he could keep her and "love" her in his own morally confused way. Dana remarks that "I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman—to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black woman, but there could be shame in loving one" (124). Alice is forced to submit herself to Rufus sexually and bear his children multiple times, even though she is not interested in him that way and in fact very truly fears him. Dana, on the other hand, came of age in the time after the Civil Rights Movement and yet is repeatedly summoned back in time (against her will) to save Rufus from deadly situations. In this past, she cannot be seen as the free black woman of the 1970s that she is; she is forced to masquerade as a slave (first Kevin's, then Rufus's) in order to get by, and she gets beaten, demeaned, and nearly raped as a result. After Alice's baby Hagar is born (the one who would continue Dana's bloodline), Dana expresses her feelings this way: "I felt almost free, half-free if such a thing was possible, half-way home" (234).

Here are some differences between Alice and Dana:

• The two women come from completely different social, racial, and historical contexts. Alice, even growing up as a free black person, knew that her place in society was tenuous and dependent entirely upon the unpredictable whims of the white people around her. As a child, Alice watched her father be brutally beaten and her mother knocked unconscious by a patrol group of white men outside her home. In contrast, Dana, who is coming from the 1970s and is married to a white man, has a very different context of race relations and no direct experience with the brutality of slavery. Because of this difference, Alice holds a good deal of contempt for Dana. After realizing that her husband, Isaac, was mutilated and sold away, she yells at Dana, "Docter-n***** . . . Think you know so much. Reading-n*****. White-n*****! Why didn't you know enough to let me die?" (160) The two women's starkly different pasts keep them from ever fully understanding vital aspects of each other, especially their differing views on slavery and hope:
• Dana holds onto the belief that being alive means having a chance at freedom, while Alice mostly holds her mother's own bitter belief that death is better than slavery. After Alice explains to Dana that her mother said she'd rather be dead than be a slave, Dana says, "Better to stay alive . . . at least while there's a chance to get free" (158). She wonders if she's a hypocrite for saying that to someone like Alice and advising her to live with her pain while she herself knows that she will (hopefully) eventually return to a time without slavery. Alice ends up attempting to run away and escape slavery, but when she is caught, Rufus punishes her by saying that he sold her children away (which is a lie). As a result, Alice loses the small amount of hope she had, and she fulfills her mother's belief by killing herself.

Dana and Alice have a cosmic connection. (Time travel just has a way of enhancing bonds like that.) They may come from different time periods and points of view, but they're both African American women navigating their way through an unjust world—and I don't just mean in 1815. Even in Dana's home timeline of 1976, race relations had a long, long way to go.

If we focus on 1815, though, both Dana and Alice are strong-willed women who start out free and are later enslaved. Both are tormented by Rufus and hated by Liza. Dana and Alice are each driven by their pain, too. Alice, for example, resents Dana and her relationship with Rufus, and that motivates her to attack Dana's character and paint her as a disloyal white sympathizer. Dana uses her physical pain to make it through each day; the other slaves can hate on her all they want, but she'll even be Margaret's personal slave if it means avoiding another whipping. At the end of Kindred, Dana uses her emotional pain, as well. Her anguish over Alice's suicide drives her to kill Rufus. Then she can finally heal.

Both Dana and Alice are African American females who get married to white men; Dana to Kevin, and Alice to Rufus. Both women are slaves and suffer and endure great brutality at the hands of their masters at the Weylin plantation. Dana, during her journeys to the past, assumes the role of a slave and in one instance even pretends to be Kevin’s slave. On the other hand, even though Alice had been freed and had a slave husband, Rufus manages to enslave her once again and forces her to be his mistress.

Both their husbands are slave owners; Rufus, through his father, owns a large plantation with slaves in antebellum Maryland. Kevin, during one of Dana’s journeys back to the past, gets stuck for five years, during which time he owns slaves.

Rufus threatens to rape both of them; first, he threatens to rape Alice if she refuses to accept to yield to his advances. Then, he threatens to rape Dana, after Alice commits suicide, simply because of their physical resemblance.

Butler writes Dana and Alice almost as mirror images of each other, and in many ways, Dana's ancestor, Alice, is like her in many more ways than simple physical appearance. Both women are disliked by Liza and loved by Rufus, over whom both women have a certain amount of sway, but to whom both will usually submit in the end. Both women are freeborn but become enslaved over the course of their lives, with Dana becoming entangled with white men by her own choice and Alice because of circumstantial pressure.

However, the generations between them mean there are also many differences between the women. While Dana has received an education and been allowed a degree of control over her own existence, Alice is uneducated and has been treated as subhuman, which naturally has diminished her natural spirit and the fight within her. Her depression and broken will are indications of what Dana might have been if she had endured the suffering Alice has endured. We see this further as the harshness of the past begins to take its toll on Dana, rendering her ultimately less able or willing to fight.

Dana and Alice are alike in many ways. They are genetically linked, since Alice is Dana's ancestor. They look alike. They are both intelligent African-American women, and Rufus desires both of them. He gets angry at both of them because he can't have as full a control over them and their desires as he would want.