*Note:This is specifically about the latter half of "The Fear" so potential spoiler alert, though it isn't anything very surprising.
When Dana leaves 1819 at the end of Tom Weylin's whip, Kevin is left there. He's alone, and worse yet, unlike Dana he doesn't have a way of getting home. Now Kevin does have the advantage of being White, which in the antebellum South is probably the best 'trait' you can have. Dana says she is gone for eight days, meaning that she's been gone for years in 1819 time. Kevin waited and waited and then went North. Dana is hurt by him not waiting for her. Is it reasonable to expect him to though?
I would say no. Rufus tells Dana that he waited around for a while at the plantation before finally deciding to go north. Kevin couldn't have even be sure Dana was ever going to come back. Even after he goes to the North, he still writes letters to Rufus providing his current address, so on the off chance Dana is there, she has some way of contacting him. Yet the fact is, Dana abandoned him. I realize she couldn't control it, but that is what happened. I hope for him that he did move on and find someone else, or if not another person, at least something to put him at peace in his new life.
Now I know this seems like a pretty minor detail of the whole situation to focus on, but the way Butler sets it up, it is in direct contrast with Tom Weylin's current relationship status. Tom's wife has left for Baltimore after the death of her twins, making him now twice left by women (Hannah, his first wife dying). Unlike Kevin's relative flexibility, Tom can't move because all his wealth his tied up in his land. He has to live in the same house, the same bed even.
I must admit, I haven't come up with anything to really draw from these parallel situations as of yet. However, if Kevin does come back, or if Dana somehow gets to the city he is in, it will be interesting to see how much Kevin may have changed. This change could then lend insight into who Tom was before Margaret. Perhaps when Hannah died he changed just as much as Kevin changed when Dana left. The Tom we see in the present may be a different version of his true self, maybe the past isn't as different as we normally, or want to, believe?
Yes--the question about how this time period might leave its mark on Kevin is raised by Dana at the very start of their adventure, and the fact that he's been making a life of his own in this distant history--for FIVE YEARS--could have profound implications. Dana's time in the past is comparatively brief, and it has been affecting her in all kinds of ways. But Kevin, as far as he knows, has no way of getting back, and at some point he has to just make himself into a 19th-century white man and live his life. (It is heartening when Nigel tells Dana that Kevin used to get "in trouble" for not "knowing" the difference between black and white--not knowing his "place," in other words. She says, approvingly, "that's why I married him.") One of the major strands of Butler's thought-experiment/speculative fiction is here: how will Kevin's 20th-century ethical foundation withstand this involuntary furlough?
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