Chapter 6 Dying to Live in Octavia Butler's Kindred and Breonna Taylor's America Discourses of Policing, Misogynoir, "Runaways," and Zombies Jamie A. Thomas DYING TO LIVE1 Essentially, the only reason Dana is alive today is because she is dead. She lays injured in a Los Angeles hospital bed as Kevin, her white American hus band, desperately tries to fathom how she has become so bruised and bloodied. “Who did this to you?” “A patroller. He . . . he thought I was a runaway.” “And what’s a patroller? All I could think of was the Highway Patrol.” (Butler 1988, 44^45) At Kevin’s urging, Dana recalls how she was mercilessly racialized and beaten by a slave patroller, one of many white men paid to restrict and pun ish the movement of Black people in the US. The moment of dialogue calls to mind how the present-day commitments of California Highway Patrol and Police Departments to “serve and protect” actually derive from historical slave patrol units in the US and other countries, which sustained the system 93