Rufus Weylin doesn't intentionally set out to be like his father. When he is a young
boy and falls and breaks his leg, Tom's first comment is that the accident is going to cost him
a lot of money. Rufus doesn't gravitate toward Tom's rough and violent personality, but it is
important to remember the setting the two men live in. In this era, they were behaving as
society expected them to do. Even Dana, African American herself, notes this about Tom in
Chapter 4:
His father wasn't the monster he could have
been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man
who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no
particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased....
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