We learn about slavery in America from the time we are in elementary school, starting with almost cheerful overcoming-adversity adventure stories about the underground railroad, and progressing to the story of the transatlantic slave trade. After an overview of the slave trade, we generally leave off on slavery, focusing on manifest destiny until the Civil War and Reconstruction. If you’re lucky, you might encounter a high school AP US history teacher who emphasizes much more than names, dates and geographical locations, but generally history courses try so hard to get facts across that they deprive those facts of any real substance. So although we know that slavery was ‘evil,’ it’s almost difficult to be viscerally shocked or horrified by it when we’ve known about it since we were little kids. 12 Years a Slave breathes life, and horror, back into slavery.
12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen, tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free born African American who lived with his family and worked as a concert violinist in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1841, lured by an offer of employment, Northup was tricked, kidnapped and sold into slavery in New Orleans. The rest of the movie tells the story of his suffering under slavery with real historical nuance, brutal intimacy, and stunning cinematography. McQueen’s film probes certain realities of southern slavery that I’ve never seen come to life on a screen before.
In the midst of Northup’s suffering, the director includes several interesting and important pieces of history. In contrast to the mythic southern luxury shown in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the film illustrated the great variability in economic fortune of the slaveholders, many of whom struggled to turn a profit – owners and overseers consider mortgages and debts, and when a plantation is blighted by cotton worms, Northup is leased to a different owner. The film also explores the unpredictability of slave owners. Northup’s first owner is the benevolent Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who expresses sympathy with the mother who is sold away from her children, takes Northup’s engineering ability seriously, and gifts him a violin for a job well done. However, as his fellow slave, (Adepero Oduye, the sobbing, bereft mother from the auction) points out, Ford is still a slave owner, and despite his appearance of kindliness he is still depriving them of their freedom and exploiting their labor. Indeed, when Ford presents Northup with the violin he mentions that he hopes the music will bring both of them happiness ‘over the years.’ Northup is caught off guard by the benevolence, but you can see him absorb the painful implication of life enslavement in the casual remark, even as he caresses the instrument.
Another fact of slavery that the film explores, in heartbreaking detail, is the institutionalized sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved black women. When Northup assaults an overseer he is sold to a harsher master and known ‘slave-breaker’ named Edwin Epps, who is played as a cruel, crazed alcoholic, by a Southern-accented Michael Fassbender. As Northup suffers under the unpredictable rule of Epps and the whims of his icy wife, he witnesses Epps’s growing sexual fascination with a slave girl named Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o). Patsey’s case exemplifies that of many slave women –she suffers sexual assault and rape from Epps and physical assault and hatred from Epps’s wife, without recourse, gradually beginning to despair under a regime of abuse that promises to last for the rest of her life. McQueen uses Northup’s story to show how slavery cruelly interrupted a rich life, but Patsey and the other slaves show us a different, more common tragedy – the tragedy of human beings who were born into, and will die in slavery, with no hope of realizing their potential.
McQueen lingers both on the Southern scenery and on the character’s faces – the sun sets on the bayou, trees move in the breeze, Patsey makes dolls from corn husks while a whip cracks in the background, Northup stares into the camera, hopeful and hopeless, for long minutes. Ejiofor brings an incredible dignity to the role, and the performances of the rest of the ensemble are magnified in his often wordless reactions. The strange humans that surround Northup are intelligent, stupid, primitive, cruel, kind, righteous, moral, morally bankrupt – Ejiofor’s performance helps us to keep reacting, to understand that the pain caused by the institution of slavery was real and terrible, undiluted by historical distance from the present..
12 Years a Slave is, as a sum of its parts, one of the most engaging, important, and accurate depictions of American slavery that has ever hit the big screen. But why is it being described as ‘essential viewing?’ Why can’t the past be the past? And why should ordinary Americans, looking for entertainment, spend their money and time watching Solomon Northup’s suffering? Why, to be blunt, is legacy of American slavery so special?
Many people have tried to make the case that it isn’t. Epps points out righteously, slavery is in the bible – “that’s scripture,†he says, after quoting a biblical passage about whipping slaves. We know that slavery existed the world over, including in ancient Rome, in the Slavonic tribes, within African empires, and in Russia in the form of serfdom. But American slavery was different than these other forms of slavery; it was definitively worse, and it was worse largely because it was the first race-based form of slavery in the world. Throughout human history, humans have enslaved other humans due to conquest, debt, or war, but never based solely on physical difference. Race-based slavery is perceived (consciously or unconsciously) as a tragic, but inevitable extension of some kind of human predisposition towards racial hatred, when in reality it was a system intentionally created out of the economic need of a labor shortage. In addition to its created basis in race, American slavery was also distinct from other forms of slavery in that there was no way to work out of slavery, pay debts through labor and become free again. Other American innovations to the institution included inheritability (that a slave’s children would also be slaves for the rest of their lives), the tragic separation of the families (a distinguishing factor from serfdom), and the complete lack of rights – most importantly, the lack of a right to be free from physical violence. With these distinguishing features came the brutality and horror caused by the unlimited power of one human over another.
In Jon Stewart’s recent Daily Show interview with Chiwatel Ejiofor, he meditated on the fact that both Ejiofor and McQueen are Brits – maybe, he mused, it’s too hard, too emotionally wrenching, for Americans to explore our own past. But if we’re ever going the legacy of slavery, and the enduring racial inequality in our country, we need to explore it. 12 Years a Slave is essential viewing, in every sense of the phrase.
