KINDRED ANNOTATION III
Dana's fullest description of losing her arm occurs at the end of the seventh chapter. She has just killed Rufus after his attempt to rape her, when she finds herself transported to Los Angeles. Although he is dead, Rufus still has her arm in his death grip.
“Something harder and stronger than Rufus's hand clamped down on my arm.... Something cold and nonliving.... The wall of my living room. I was back at home-in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it-or growing into it. From the elbow to the ends of the fingers, my left arm had become a part of the wall. I looked at the spot where flesh joined with plaster, stared at it uncomprehending. It was the exact spot Rufus'sfingers had grasped" (260-61).
She loses her arm, apparently, between "homes"-between a past that has a claim on her and a present on which she has a claim. "Home," in Kindred, is more than a place; it signifies the liminal site where one can lose or reclaim a historically-defined modern self. As John Washington says, in David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident, home "is a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run" (13). Both Dana's and Kevin's meditations on their travels involve a concept of home as the place they must seek and escape, must construct and avoid. When Dana returns to Los Angeles, she defines the term for herself: "Home. It didn't have to do with where I had been. It was real. It was where I belonged" (115). However, shortly after she is trans- ported back to Maryland, she is "startled to catch [herself] saying wearily, 'Home at last' " at the sight of the Weylin plantation (127). Even more ominous, though, is Rufus's insistence that Dana is "home" (143). "Home" becomes a variously significant term and concept. For Dana, it marks the place between present relations with Kevin and past relations with Rufus. For Rufus, it marks owner- ship-of property as different as the house and Dana. For Kevin, it marks the places where he and Dana can communicate















