Is it weird to have a favorite slave narrative? This is my favorite slave narrative, mainly because Solomon Northup was BAD. ASS.Somebody needs to make a superhero-style comic about this man.Northup was born free and lived most of his first thirty-three years in New York, where he married and had three children. His wife, Anna, was a chef and one of his talents was playing the violin, so during the social season they often parted ways and took temporary jobs in catering and entertaining.In 1841 Northup was approached by two friendly men who offered him a violin-playing job in New York City. Thinking he wouldn't be gone long, he didn't leave a note for Anna, who had already found a job away from home.The two men persuaded him to accompany them to Washington, D.C., where they drugged him. He awoke shackled in the slave pen of one Burch, who beat him into silence when he protested that he had been kidnapped.Burch sold him down South to Louisiana where, as the title says, he spent the next twelve years of his life enslaved. Until the very end of this period, he kept his history a secret, even his name -- he went by the name "Platt" which Burch had assigned him.This was a country from which total escape, it seems, was unheard of -- too much of the South to travel North through, too much careful searching of departing ships, dangerous swamps. People did sometimes manage to escape to the swamps for a short respite from their work. Northup went there once, on the run after beating up one of his masters (a scene I would very much like to see in comic-book form). He had the advantage of being able to swim, and, although the swamp was full of alligators and poisonous snakes, none of them hurt him.His plan was to send a letter to the white men he had known in New York, enlisting their help to rescue him. It took him nine years to obtain a piece of paper for this act, and then he had to burn the letter because the person he had nearly trusted to tried to betray him. Not until the last year did he find one trustworthy white man who could help him.In his twelve years in Louisiana Northup observed the slaveholding South in great detail, and he reports in his book about the personalities of his different masters and fellow slaves, architecture and social customs, and how the work of cotton- and sugar-production was done. This is all fascinating but what I love best is to read about the ingenuity, courage, and physical prowess of Northup himself. Partly because of what he learned in his early life in the North, but I think mostly because he was an extraordinarily intelligent man, he was able to do so many novel things: For his first master, he proposed and executed a system of river transportation that greatly improved on the road transportation hitherto used. After examining another plantation's loom, he built one himself that worked perfectly. He invented a fish trap so that slaves whose masters had not given them enough food didn't have to hunt at night after exhausting themselves in the fields. He made his own ink for the first letter-writing attempt. Etc. etc.There are also many examples of his strength and dexterity (at some things -- he admits that he was terrible at picking cotton). My favorite occurs when his master Epps makes him a driver of the other slaves, requiring him to whip them:If Epps was present, I dared not show any lenity, not having the Christian fortitude of a certain well-known Uncle Tom sufficiently to brave his wrath, by refusing to perform the office. In that way, only, I escaped the immediate martyrdom he suffered, and, withal, saved my companions much suffering, as it proved in the end. ...... If, on the other hand, he had seen me use the lash freely, the man was satisfied. "Practice makes perfect," truly; and during my eight years' experience as a driver, I learned to handle the whip with marvelous dexterity and precision, throwing the lash within a hair's breadth of the back, the ear, the nose, without, however, touching any of them. If Epps was observed at a distance, or we had reason to apprehend he was sneaking somewhere in the vicinity, I would commence plying the lash vigorously, when, according to arrangement, they would squirm and screech as if in agony, although not one of them had in fact been even grazed.<3 <3 <3 <3
Is it fit or can it bear the shockOf rational discussion, that a man Compounded and made up, like other men, Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust And folly in as ample measure meet, As in the bosom of the slave he rules,Should be a despot absolute, and boast Himself the only freemen of his land?-CowperPoem from the original 1853 publication.Solomon Northup was a free citizen of New York State when he was abducted and sold into slavery in 1841. He went from the slave trading pens of Washington and New Orleans to service under several masters, finally spending ten years as a field hand and occasional carpenter on a cotton plantation in Louisiana. Northup's story is one of many accounts of injustice and human brutality during what is considered the darkest period in American history. The true worth of Northup's narrative is primarily attributable to his recollection of slavery in Louisiana in stunning detail, creating a convincing authentic story. He vividly recounts the typical daily slave life; the horrifying observations of human degradation at the hands of their captors; the cruelty and severity of the slave system; its constant torture inflicted on the people ensnared by it. "Throwing down the whip, I declared I could punish her no more. He ordered me to go on, threatening me with severer flogging than she had received, in case of refusal. My heart revolted at the inhuman scene, and risking the consequences, I absolutely refused to raise the whip. He then seized it himself and applied it with ten-fold greater force then I had. The painful cries and shrieks of the tortured Patsey, mingling with the loud and angry curses of Epps, loaded the air. She was terribly lacerated-I may say, without exaggeration, literarily flayed. The lash was wet with blood which flowed down her sides and dropped upon the ground."Northup makes compelling disclosures regarding the point of view of the slaves, their relationships with their masters, and his own position:"There was not a day throughout the ten years I belonged to Epps that I did not consult with myself upon the prospect of escape." He definitively reports just how minute a sense of humanity was present in the structure of the system, despite the very few moments of human feeling.After twelve years in bondage, he was finally able to sneak out a message that would, with the help of an abolitionist, lead to his freedom. His story was told to David Wilson who published the copy in 1853. It's in this 'ghostwriting' that I have my only misgivings of Northup's story. David Wilson, a New York State newspaperman rendered Northup's experience with an exuberant literary flare, using verbiage and purple prose perhaps too sophisticated to reflect, I would imagine, Northup's daily manner of speech:"No opportunity was omitted of addressing me in the language of approbation; while on the other hand I was certainly much prepossessed in their favor." "I come now to the relation of an occurrence, which I never call to mind but with sensations of regret. I thank God , who has since permitted me to escape from the thralldom of slavery, that through his merciful interposition, I was prevented from imbruing my hands in the blood of his creatures". "..was I passing only through the dismal phases of a long protracted dream? It was no illusion. My cup of sorrow was full to overflowing." "He sought to inculcate in our minds feelings of kindness towards each other of dependence upon God."The list goes on. I felt in Wilson's earnestness to put out an important story as this, that his own voice of justice drowned out the originality of Northup's. The book did become an instant success in 1853 and a powerful tool for the abolitionists' cause.Twelve Years a Slave would be still in obscurity today if not for the tenacity of Dr. Eakins, whose efforts to document Solomon Northup's life became a project that spanned over seven decades. It is one among many important accounts of the ruthlessness and brutality of slavery and now, thanks to Dr. Eakins, it is also immortalized on screen in the movies.
What do You think about Twelve Years A Slave (2013)?
I appreciated this excellent book (some of its scenes still haunt me), but compared to other non-fiction slave narratives such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, there was a bit more distance of perspective here. The facts are still searing; the antidotes still filled me with horror. But sometimes the narrator feels a step removed. I read much of the account before I realized why I felt that way .. and then I got to Northup's description of the Christmas celebrations among the slaves. He writes, "Marriage is frequently contracted during the holidays, if such an institution may be said to exist among them." He wasn't one of "them." He was a Northerner. Not only does he not consider himself one of them, he wonders here if their marriages are even fully real. That comment struck me immediately as odd; looking back, I remember many of them.Solomon Northup was an exceptionally intelligent man. Southern culture wasn't his, and at times he almost seems to take the tone of an anthropological study. Perhaps that's why he includes long tracts on various customs and planting methods. The planting methods are eye opening in giving a true depiction of the slaves' grueling labor, but he goes beyond this to describe the methods in great detail - the irrigation, the plowing process, the sort of mounding for each crop. In the end, I think his objective is much larger than telling his and his fellow slaves' human stories. Much as an anthropologist studying a foreign tribe, he tries to give full picture of the Southern life and culture in that area of the South.This focus and his striking intellect make for a unique experience. Yes, sometimes the human story is slowed down a bit by the seeming diversions, but the fuller picture he provides is fascinating as well as searing. If being moved by a human story's raw power is primary, I would recommend Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl first - that book is unforgettable in its immediacy; the reader is pulled directly down into the dark pit of horrors that was slavery. If instead, one wants a fuller historical and cultural study of the period, I would highly recommend this excellent book. In the end though, the distinction is a bit artificial. The world could be improved much if every American were to read both books and many other stories besides from other periods, books that describe periods of history in enough detail that they can be understood not only with the mind but also, even more importantly, with the heart!
—Greg
There's a sin, a fearful sin, resting on this nation, that will not go unpunished forever. There will be reckoning yet ... it may be sooner or it may be later, but it's a coming as sure as the Lord is just.-Solomon Northup, 1855I am a middle-age American white guy obsessed with my country's shameful chapter, our "peculiar institution" - slavery. No matter how many books I read, movies I see or any other means of approaching the subject there exists a gulf of understanding that can never be bridged. I can feel pity, shame, anger or any other emotion, but I will never know. Only sympathy. I've got nothing in my present or past that can make for empathy.Northup's harrowing, page-turning narrative is the first book that I have read on the subject of American slavery that has allowed me the first inkling of answers to some of my questions of "how" and "why". Northup was a free man, born free in New York State, married to a free black woman and father of three children. Humanity's dark side shows its teeth and while away on business he is drugged, chained and then sold into slavery in Louisiana until he is rescued 12 years later. A horrible story with a happy ending, but as Northup makes clear by way of his being an interloper into that sickening economic system: his tale only runs parallel with the multi-generational truth of slavery. He fell into it, got out of it. For those hundreds of thousands of men, women and children that are born and ultimately die into it, there is only hopelessness.So what Northup does, where he reaches across the ages and a race divide that I can never cross - he takes a look at his oppressors and states: "I get it." You take a white boy, the son of a slave owner, and from his birth you instill in him that there is no humanity in a slave. Northup: "..with such training, whatever may be his natural disposition, it cannot well be otherwise than that, on arriving at maturity, the sufferings and miseries of the slave will be looked upon with entire indifference." So in 2013, I am equally unable to understand the mind of a white slave owner. I was not born into this - how could I ever empathize with a multi-generational slave owning white southern man? "Brought up with such ideas - in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity - no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race."William Tanner Vollmann refers to this book several times in Rising Up and Rising Down - and this is how I first became aware of it. I wish that everyone would get the chance to read it - Northup's writing style and the story itself, while horrific and sad, is still so very important. This past weekend I was in a movie theater and I saw a preview for an upcoming big budget movie made from this book. I nearly choked on my popcorn. I just hope that Hollywood didn't make hashwork of this story and for those that won't get the chance to read the book, that Northup's tale will educate and inspire a new generation. And perhaps help those of us that are searchers for truth get a little bit closer to understanding.
—Brian
A lot of people are saying this book reads like a novel, but I couldn't disagree more. It reads like a man telling his life story, which is fascinating, giving what the man became for twelve years, but not as engrossing as some of the new journalism that came out in the 60s and 70s by people like Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer. Call it a book of its time. I actually saw the movie before I read the book, and there's an interesting difference. The movie is about the life of a slave, while the book is more about slave life. There's actually a huge difference between the two. While I could empathize more with Solomon in the movie, in the book, you actually get a sense that slave life wasn't as horrific as it truly was, given that Solomon presents a fair depiction of both a kindly slave owner and a tyrannical slave owner. There's also much more hope in the book, which is refreshing, but it makes the situation not feel as dire as it truly was. This is one instance where I think the movie is better than the book. Give it a read to get probably the most accurate depiction of slave life ever put to page. Just don't expect it to read like a movie, because it doesn't.
—Richard Knight
