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Twelve Years a Slave

Freedom Denied…

Author:  Solomon Northup

Born in 1808 to a free black father in Minerva, New York, Solomon received a solid education, learned to play the violin, married, raised three children and worked various jobs in rural New York, establishing himself as a citizen of honorable stature.  However, his unremarkable life was changed forever in 1841 when he was drugged and kidnapped from his hometown by two visiting businessmen.  In chains and stripped of any identifying documents he was transported south to Virginia where his protestations of freedom were met with violent whippings.   Beaten into submission and shipped onward by sea, he was eventually sold to a plantation owner in the bayou country of northern Louisiana where he would spend the next twelve years in the darkest servitude.

Uprooted from anything he had ever known, Northup tells his story with an astonishing balance of sorrow and objectivity.  Despite his violent hatred of the institution of slavery, the regular beatings he receives and his daily yearning for an opportunity to escape, he never hesitates to point out the frequent acts of kindness that he encounters during his time as a slave.  While witness to some of the most cruel and vile acts imaginable, he somehow manages to hold onto his humanity.   As the title alludes, a fortuitous combination of events leads to his freedom in 1853 and reunification with his family.

Shortly upon his return to New York, Northup was motivated to write his story due to the widespread belief, even in the North, that slavery really wasn’t so wicked,  that maybe it was “good for the Negro” to have such a rigorously structured system for their “employment”.   Just one year earlier, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published and had met with strong criticism from slave holding states, protesting that the mistreatment of slaves had been flagrantly exaggerated, so much so that Harriet Beecher Stowe felt the need to publish a second book presenting the source material for her original novel.  Northup wanted to fully document that, at least in Louisiana, the reality of slavery was as horrific as the most zealous abolitionists claimed.    Throughout the book he includes the details of his widespread contacts throughout the Red River Valley in order to buttress the veracity of his claims.

While the modern reader may find Northup’s early 19th century writing style a bit of a challenge, I actually grew used to the formal prose rather quickly.  The author frequently shows great restraint in the descriptions of the horrors he witnesses, lest he be accused of hyperbole or embellishment.  His matter-of-fact delivery – as if he were testifying in court – stands in such stark contrast to the daily terrors he describes that it makes the story that much more moving and gut-wrenching.

In the end, Twelve Years a Slave is both a profound memoir and a well written, passionate abolitionist document from an involuntary inside informant.  Strongly recommended for anyone interested in American history or who has never heard of Solomon Northup.

— D. Driftless

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April 22, 2020

12 years a slave: a true story by solomon northup.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery. 

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Book Review: 12 Years a Slave

ABOUT THE BOOK: Twelve Years a Slave, sub-title: Narrative of Solomon Northup, citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana, is a memoir by Solomon Northup as told to and edited by David Wilson. It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.

REVIEW BY DANIA : (NONE)

OTHER INFORMATION: N.A.

TRIGGER WARNINGS : 1. Graphic Violence 2. Abuse (Physical, Mental, Emotional, Verbal, Sexual) 3. Rape 4. Racism 5. Kidnapping 6. Death

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Screen Rant

'12 years a slave': the movie vs. the true story.

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There's no doubt that Oscar nominations (and possibly some wins) lie ahead for director Steven McQueen's acclaimed drama, 12 Years a Slave . The film is based on the memoir written by Solomon Northup, which reveals what happened after Solomon (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) - a free black man living in New York in pre-Civil War America - was kidnapped and sold into slavery, before he was able to regain his freedom more than a decade later.

If you've read my review , then you're aware that I'm more lukewarm on the 12 Years a Slave film than many other critics and moviegoers - many of whom have proclaimed that McQueen's adaptation is a masterpiece (or, if not quite  that perfect, the next best thing). My overriding complaint about the film is that it's an unflinching look at the atrocities committed by American slave owners - but not so much a movie that sheds additional light on how this (as the euphemism goes) "peculiar institution" worked - and, therefore, feels a bit like "'torture porn' made for arthouse moviegoers."

Question is, does Northup's original memoir offer that kind of insight on American slavery? Or does it foremost strive to document the traumatizing events that Solomon bore witness to, even as he struggled to keep himself alive (like the 2013 film adaptation)? Are the intents of movie and memoir one and the same  - or vastly different?

It almost goes without saying that you have to allow room for some creative leeway and exaggeration/changes for dramatic effect - something I addressed last year with an examination of the truth vs. fiction in Argo - but my argument here is that those difference between 12 Years a Slave the book and the movie add up in a way that shouldn't be overlooked.

NEXT: The Book vs. The Movie [SPOILERS]

Perhaps the best illustration of what I'm talking about is an important turn of events in 12 Years a Slave , which occurs near the end of the first act/beginning of the second act. Solomon defends himself from a slave handler named Tibeats (Paul Dano) - who is embarrassed after Solomon has proven himself to be the smarter man - by fighting back and getting the best of his assailant. Tibeats retaliates by gathering his thugs and attempting to hang Solomon, but is stopped at the last moment. However, Solmon is left half-hanging (standing on his tip-toes) as a punishment, until his Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) rushes home and cuts him free. Thereafter, Ford is forced to sell Solomon, in order to protect him from Tibeats (who still wants his revenge).

In real life, these events played out differently. Ford had sold Solomon to Tibeats when, one day, the latter - being described in Solomon's memoir as "even more morose and disagreeable than usual" - unwisely tried to beat his servant in the way that the film portrays. However, the reason Tibeats was stopped from hanging Solomon was because Ford still held a mortgage on him and, therefore, Tibeats had no right to kill Solomon until Ford's debt was settled (let that sink in for a moment).

Solomon was thereafter left in place tied up and unable to move while exposed to terrible heat from the sun (not half-choking, as in the movie), until Ford arrived and set him loose. Solomon even continued to work for Tibeats in the days that followed; though, the latter tended to stay quiet and keep his distance from then on (having learned his lesson).

Mind you, in his memoir Solomon does not skimp on the harsh details where it concerns how exhausting and punishing his experience working for Tibeats was. The thing is, this chapter in  12 Years a Slave (the book) is a fascinating, yet also simple illustration of how the institution of slavery worked - and just what a deplorable, self-perpetuating machine it was. Even more so, it drives home the reality that slavery - back in the mid-19th century - was seen as being a normal part of everyday life, even by people like Mr. Ford (whom, in his memoir, Solomon still admires as a good man and Christian).

In the film, however, the highlight of this event is the 1-2 minutes of sickening footage that shows Solomon half-hanging to death. Does it show the brutality of slavery? Absolutely. Does it make a profound statement that helps us in the present to really understand how and why this was allowed to happen (and just how much your average non-slave American was culpable in letting it happen)? Well...

NEXT: List of Differences between Movie & Book...

Here are a handful of additional examples, comparing/contrasting scenes from 12 Years a Slave the movie vs. the true story depicted in Northup's memoir:

• In the book, Solomon described a number of incidents that occurred when he was being transported to the Southern U.S., like how he and his fellow prisoners planned an Amistad -style revolt, before one of them fell ill and died from smallpox - or, how Solomon encountered a sailor who helped him and wrote a letter to Solomon's friends in the North. However, although you might think the sailor would treat this as his moral responsibility, the way Solomon described it, the sailor regarded what he did for Solomon as a simple favor. By comparison, in the film we see the slaves being harassed, raped and murdered, as one of Solomon's peers advises him to keep his head down.
• Mr. Epps (Michael Fassbender) - the man who owned Solomon for nearly a decade - is described in Solomon's memoir as being just as detestable and menacing as he is portrayed in McQueen's film. However, when detailing his interactions with Mr. Epps, Solomon also paints the man as being neurotic, pompous, disillusioned and even (bizarrely) gratified by Solomon's relentless hard work and polite manner. Similarly, Solomon reveals that - in a twisted way - he formed a personal relationship with Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson), by doing her many biddings. In fact, Mrs. Epps seems genuinely sad and is moved to tears at having to bid farewell to her beloved slave (again, let that sink in), when Solomon is finally rescued. In the film, though, we're only shown how the Epps' tormented and brutalized Solomon along with his fellow slaves (out of jealousy, anger and lust).

• Solomon, in his memoir, explains that he was empowered to survive his nightmarish ordeal by dwelling on the thoughts of his ancestors, his father, his family, his own personal spiritual beliefs - even by memories of the idle pleasure he got from playing the violin, when he was younger. Likewise, Patesy (Lupita Nyong'o) - the hard-working slave that is frequently abused by Mr. Epps and a jealous Mrs. Epps - told Solomon how she's inspired to live on by her belief in goodness elsewhere in the world, and dreams of finding her freedom in the Northern U.S. In McQueen's film, we get very few details about how Solomon sustained his spirit - save for a scene where he symbolically smashes the violin given to him by Ford (does that count?) - and we get a scene where Patesy asks Solomon to mercy-kill her.
• The film  12 Years a Slave  skips a very intriguing chapter from Solomon's memoir, where he recounts how Henry B. Northup - a lawyer and the  "relative of the family in which my forefathers were thus held to service, and from which they took the name I bear"  - was the one contacted by the Canadian Bass (Brad Pitt) and ended up being responsible for Solomon's rescue.

In particular, the story of how Henry had to deal with so much red tape and other government roadblocks - in order to address the crime committed against Solomon - is a highly insightful look at U.S. history all its own - one that is as relevant today as ever, with regard to the ongoing conversation about the U.S. legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism. The same goes for information and aspects of Solomon's memoir that are excluded (or not explored) in the movie adaptation, but would've helped to drive home just how real the people and events depicted therein are.

Again, it goes without saying that you have to allow some room for artists to change the facts of history (as McQueen and Ridley did on 12 Years a Slave ), in order to produce an engaging piece of storytelling. However, when you add up the many deviations in McQueen's film - more importantly, how the facts were altered - I would argue that it demonstrates that the movie version of 1 2 Years a Slave doesn't hold up as the 'statement' about slavery that many people have argued it is. (The devil, as they say, is in the details.)

Instead, McQueen's project is a technically well-made film about a man's quest to survive, which tends to (over-)indulge in showing the ugliness of slavery. Yet, McQueen's 12 Years a Slave forgoes teaching some of the most important lessons to be gained from looking back at history (which are the true reasons we should never forget what happened in the past).

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments section (and, as always, keep it civil).

12 Years a Slave is now playing in limited release and will continue expanding to more theaters over the forthcoming weeks.

To learn more about Solomon Northup, read his original memoir  Twelve Years a Slave:Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 ( available online here ).

• 12 Years a Slave

Historical Context

Twelve years a slave, by solomon northup.

This was one of the most important novels of the 19th-century. Written after escaping from twelve years of enslavement, the book details the author’s life experiences. 

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Published in 1853, ‘ Twelve Years a Slave ’ provides a unique and firsthand account of the institution of slavery, revealing the systematic dehumanization and oppression faced by those held in bondage. To fully grasp the significance of this powerful narrative, it is imperative to explore the historical context in which it unfolds.

Table of Contents

• 1 Slavery in 19th-Century America 
• 2 Slave Auctions 
• 3 The Slave Trade and Northern Abductions
• 4 Life as an Enslaved Person 
• 5 The Abolitionist Movement 
• 6 FAQs 

Slavery in 19th-Century America 

Slavery was deeply entrenched in the fabric of 19th-century American society. Originating during the colonial era, the institution of slavery took root in the Southern states primarily as a means to support the labor-intensive plantation economy. 

Enslaved individuals, predominantly of African descent, were considered property rather than human beings, subjected to dehumanizing conditions, and denied basic human rights.

The legal framework supporting slavery was upheld by various legislative acts and court decisions that further solidified the status of slaves while also reinforcing the belief that they were devoid of any legal rights or citizenship.

The Southern States 

During the early 19th century, the Southern economy heavily relied on cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar cane, all of which required extensive labor to cultivate and harvest, something that Solomon Northup experienced when he was kidnapped there. 

Slavery provided a cheap and abundant workforce that enabled plantation owners to maximize their profits. The Southern states vehemently defended the institution of slavery, as it became the backbone of their economic prosperity.

Slave Auctions 

Slave markets and auctions were integral components of the slave trade, where individuals were bought and sold as commodities. Cities such as New Orleans (where Northup was initially abducted), Richmond, and Charleston were prominent centers for these auctions. 

Enslaved people were often forcibly separated from their families during these auctions, leading to profound emotional trauma and loss. The existence of slave markets and auctions, along with the brutal realities of slavery, drew increasing criticism from abolitionists in the North.

The Slave Trade and Northern Abductions

An integral part of ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ is the fact that Northup was not born into slavery, nor was he brought to the United States from Africa as a slave. He was born a free man in the North and was tricked, drugged, and kidnapped by slave traders who took him to Louisiana. 

Kidnappers, known as “slave catchers” or “slave stealers,” would seize free black individuals, often in urban areas, and transport them to the South to be sold as slaves. These abductions were particularly alarming for free Black communities, as they lived under constant fear of losing their freedom and being forced into a life of bondage.

Northern abductions were motivated by various factors. Some kidnappers were individuals seeking to profit from the lucrative slave trade by capturing and selling free black people. Others were unscrupulous slave traders who disregarded the legal status of their victims and sought to increase their profits by selling free black individuals as slaves.

Life as an Enslaved Person 

First-hand accounts like Northup’s make it clear to contemporary readers that life as an enslaved person in the 19th-century United States was characterized by extreme hardship, oppression, and dehumanization. Their experiences varied depending on location, the temperament of their masters, and the nature of the labor they were forced to perform. However, common themes emerged across the institution of slavery, painting a grim picture of the lives endured by those held in bondage.

Men and women, such as those real-life people depicted in ‘ Twelve Years a Slave’ toiled on plantations, in mines, in households, and on construction projects, working fall day often with minimal or no rest or breaks. Plantation work involved cultivating crops such as cotton, tobacco, sugar cane, and rice.

The Abolitionist Movement 

The Abolitionist movement is another part of Solomon Northup’s memoir that’s integral to his life and escape from slavery. It was a social and political campaign in the 18th and 19th centuries that sought to end the institution of slavery in the United States and other parts of the world. 

Abolitionists were individuals and groups dedicated to the immediate and complete emancipation of enslaved people and the promotion of equal rights for all.

The Abolitionist Movement culminated with the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. This amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, formally ending the institution of slavery in the United States.

Who was Solomon Northup, and why is his story important?

Northup was a free Black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the mid-1800s. His autobiography highlights his life experiences and brings to light the true complexities and multifaceted horrors of slavery. 

How were enslaved individuals treated on Southern plantations?

Enslaved individuals on Southern plantations endured harsh conditions, forced labor, and physical and psychological abuse. They were denied basic human rights and were subject to the absolute authority of their owners.

How did ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ impact the Abolitionist Movement and public opinion?

‘Twelve Years a Slave’ provided a powerful personal account that humanized the experiences of enslaved individuals. The narrative played a significant role in galvanizing public opinion against slavery, as did several other novels, like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin ,’ which were published around the same time. 

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Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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'12 Years' Is The Story Of A Slave Whose End Is A Mystery

Hansi Lo Wang

In the new film adaptation of Twelve Years A Slave , Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. Jaap Buitendijk/Fox Searchlight Pictures hide caption

In the new film adaptation of Twelve Years A Slave , Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841.

There's a true American saga on screens this weekend.

Twelve Years a Slave tells the story of Solomon Northup. He was an African-American musician from New York — a free man, until he was kidnapped in Washington, D.C., and sold into slavery. After an unlikely rescue from a Louisiana cotton plantation, he returned home and wrote a memoir , first published 160 years ago.

But the end of Northup's story is an unsolved mystery that has confounded historians for years.

A Story Brought To Life

Northup was drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery not far from the National Mall in 1841. What is now the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters was once the site of "a slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol," as Northup described it in his book, which he dictated to writer David Wilson.

An illustration from the memoir Twelve Years A Slave shows Solomon Northup in his "plantation suit." Wikimedia Commons hide caption

An illustration from the memoir Twelve Years A Slave shows Solomon Northup in his "plantation suit."

Carol Wilson (no relation to David Wilson), a history professor at Maryland's Washington College, has studied hundreds of documented kidnappings of African-Americans before the Civil War. She says Northup's story is unique.

"First of all, that he could spend over a decade in slavery and then still get out — but also that he wrote an account, and it's really one of the most valuable narratives of a slave that we have because he experienced slavery as a free person," she says.

This kind of documentation is rare, says John Ridley, who wrote and produced the new film adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave.

"Even though we think we've seen every slave narrative, the reality is that very few of these stories have really ever been told and brought to life," he says.

The film is a visceral portrayal of the brutality of slavery — so is the book.

"When he's being whipped, you feel it. When he triumphs over something, or pulls a fast one on his owner, you're there with him, too," says Clifford Brown, who teaches at Union College in New York and has co-authored the new biography Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave.

He says Northup's return home in 1853 made headlines. His memoir was published later that year.

His Final Request

After the book came out, Northup hit the lecture circuit, produced two unsuccessful stage plays about his experience and sued his kidnappers. There is also some evidence that he helped fugitive slaves escape through the Underground Railroad.

But by the end of the Civil War, Northup had disappeared from the public record.

"We know where his son is buried. We know where his father is buried. But we don't know where he's buried. It's a mystery," Brown says.

Brown and his co-authors, David Fiske and Rachel Seligman, have tried to solve that mystery for almost two decades. They've visited graveyards and combed through old death notices. They've even spoken with Northup's descendants, including Clayton Adams, Northup's great-great-great-grandson.

Adams shared a copy of Northup's book with his wife, India, when they were dating.

"I told her, 'I have this one book here that was very interesting and based on a true story,' " he says. After a few days, Adams' wife finished the book — and then learned that she was dating one of the author's descendants.

"I think I was just in awe that I knew someone that could actually have their history documented, which unfortunately, a lot of African-Americans don't have," India says.

Adams says he wishes he knew how the story of Northup ended. "It still is open. It's not closed," he says.

Adams describes reading the last words of Northup's book as heartbreaking; "I hope henceforward to lead an upright though lowly life, and rest at last in the church yard where my father sleeps," Northup wrote.

"So after all of that ordeal, his last request in his book, the last line is that he just wished when he dies he could lay right next to the grave of his father," Adams says.

He says the line still haunts him "every time I read it or think about it."

Don’t Look Away: On the Artistry and Urgency of “12 Years a Slave”

I believe in national memory. I believe in racial memory. “ 12 Years a Slave ” is about both kinds of memory, and how they are suppressed, and why they are suppressed, and why they shouldn’t be, and how art can tease them out and look at them honestly, without flinching.

The film’s script, by John Ridley , and its direction, by Steve McQueen , treat the experience of Solomon Northup ( Chiwetel Ejiofor ), a free man sold into bondage, as a series of meticulously described visceral moments, like “ Pickpocket ” or “ Taxi Driver ” or “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” or “ Apocalypse Now ” or “ Born on the Fourth of July .” The movie concentrates on how experiences looked and sounded and felt. It “remembers” slavery as individuals remember private traumas, but gives us just enough distance to process the cruelty. The director’s choreography is so exact that one can imagine a wooden frame around each image, or a proscenium. The effect is akin to a series of moving paintings, or long scenes in an opera or a religious play. The film is pain, transformed into real art, useful art, art that triggers empathy and understanding. It takes Black history, White history and American history out of the past and says, “This is happening right now. To you .”  It makes a true story from America’s deep past feel immediate, so that the viewer can go beyond, or beneath, the historical aspects, and understand the lived experience of slavery.  

The pre-credits prologue shows Northup fashioning a makeshift pen from a stick, using a smashed berry for ink, and trying to record his experiences on parchment, and failing, and tossing the instrument away and crying, because his tools are too crude. The movie that follows plays like the psychic rough draft of the story he’ll write later, when he has regained freedom and had time to heal and reflect. We’re seeing the intermediate stage of recollection: the jumble of sensations that memoirists must grapple with before they can shape and contain them with words. 

“12 Years a Slave” envisions Northup’s odyssey as a series of tableaus of suffering, endured and transcended but never forgiven.  The storytelling is similar to McQueen’s first two features, “ Hunger ” and “Shame.”  They could all be packaged together in a “Stations of the Cross” box set. The critic Noel Vera compares the hero of “Shame” to “a pilgrim on a personal Calvary,” and writers, “You get the impression that if McQueen had used unknown actors and just tilted his camera a few inches to the right or left of the shot’s focus, one might mistaken the film for something directed by Robert Bresson–back when Bresson thought there might be such a thing as a human soul worth saving.” These films are about the landscapes of bodies and spirits tested and twisted, broken and exposed. They’re stripped-down, aestheticized but never prettified, made mythological but never abstract.

Legends and myths and religious fables are remembered not just for their content but because of how they’re told: directly, always appealing to emotion and what we think of as plain truth. 

The truth of “12 Years a Slave” is basic, a list of experiential facts: Families traded like livestock, separated and sold. Men and women and children renamed and brainwashed, worked from dawn to dusk, and awakened from deep sleep, and made to dance and sing, and told to strip and be whipped, or raped. 

Chains on wrist and ankles. Lashes on the back. Flesh cracked like wet sod. That’s what this country was founded on, along with ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what this film is about. That’s what Americans deny when they praise the ideals of equality while downplaying the gory reality, on grounds that it’s in the past now, and it doesn’t do anyone any good to “dwell” on it. 

“It is a simple fact that what is true and right is true and right for all,” says a Canadian abolitionist ( Brad Pitt ) in a scene late in the film. What is true and right for all is that slavery and exploitation are evil. 

Of course the problem with saying that is that it invites viewers to brush it off, by saying something like, “Well, I already know slavery was evil, so I don’t need to see a film telling me that slavery was evil, and hey, look, a new ‘Hunger Games’ movie.”  “12 Years a Slave” pushes past such rationalizations, not simply by repeating abstractly and distantly that, as a matter of fact yes, slavery was evil, or by speechifying about it in a way that invites viewers to nod and think, “Ah, yes, how horrible it was! And what a relief that it’s not happening here now!” but by showing, in a series of very straightforward and exact scenes, precisely  how  slavery was evil—by envisioning its day-to-day particulars in terms that anyone can understand, even if they don’t know anything about slavery except that it once existed in the United States of America, and that the Civil War ended it.  

That a film as searing and necessary as “12 Years a Slave” is having trouble drawing large audiences is a testament to the power of denial. That so few mainstream films have been made about slavery is also a testament to the power of denial.

You can tell what a country finds most shameful in its history by looking at how long it took for that country’s popular art to begin seriously addressing that history. The first films about slavery (as opposed to films about the American south that happened to include slave characters) did not appear until the 1960s, six decades after the creation of motion pictures. Most of them had elements of genre or exploitation. Few addressed the subject in a straightforward way. Even the most high-profile recent film about slavery, “Django Unchained,” gave itself a cushion of cowboy action and revenge fantasy, even as it depicted the casual physical savagery of slavery with an unprecedented (for Hollywood) frankness. 

There is no genre cushion in “12 Years a Slave.” None. 

It’s simply saying, “Here is the story of a man who experienced slavery.”  

As we watch it, we don’t just understand Solomon’s experience. We start to grasp why films like this one are so rare: because Americans do not want to talk about slavery, or think about slavery, much less pay to see a film about slavery. 

It’s too shameful.  

Northup plays the fiddle. Northup gets approached to play the fiddle in Washington, D.C. He is drugged and sold into slavery in an auction, stripped naked and inspected like a farm animal. He’s made to work at a plantation run by a master who thinks showing slaves a glimmer of compassion makes him a good person. Solomon rebels against an overseer who’s cruel and petty even by the standards of overseers. He gets sold to a different plantation run by a monstrous man described as a “n—-r breaker,” and is confronted with the worst of the many horrible truths he absorbs during his years of bondage: that after a while, this kind of life grinds the righteousness and even the sorrow from everyone, even passionate and moral people, and replaces them with but one desire: to survive.

The master’s indifference to suffering is passed down to the overseers and plantation workers, and ultimately to the slaves and their children. 

By the end, Northup, who had previously survived a lynching for daring to fight an overseer, obeys an order to whip another slave, the new master’s concubine. There are tears in Solomon’s eyes, but he does as he’s told. He’s learned his lesson. Don’t argue. Don’t question. Look away. Survive.

This is how evil is perpetuated: it wears people down. They can’t imagine life any other way. They’re afraid. They’re exhausted. They’re numb. The victims just want to avoid pain or worse. The perpetrators just want to be able to look at themselves in a mirror and say, “This is normal behavior. There is nothing unusual about it.” 

Everyone looks away.

When a man arrives at the plantation bearing proof that Solomon was once a free man and demanding his release, the master who put that whip in Solomon’s hand reacts with petulant fury, like a child whose toy is about to be taken from him. Solomon would like to bring other slaves to freedom with him, but he can’t.  A series of post-credits titles inform us that Solomon took his two kidnappers to court but lost the case. He never got justice in the Hollywood sense. He just had to learn to live with the pain of his experience. He wrote a book about it, a book that enlightened many people and gained him some measure of fame, but accolades don’t make whip scars heal.

The film’s greatest scene finds Solomon hanged by the overseer he attacked, bare toes on-point in slippery mud, barely saving himself from strangulation. McQueen holds the shot long after the shock of the hanging has worn off. He keeps holding it after every other dramatically significant participant in the scene has gone inside. He keeps holding the shot, and holding it. 

After a while we see action return to the background behind Solomon. Workers go on about their business. A reverse angle puts Solomon in the foreground, out-of-focus, still dangling from the noose and gasping for breath. Over his shoulder, in focus, slave children play. We realize this is a normal sight for everyone on the plantation: a personnel matter. Nobody’s shocked by it, except the man dangling from the rope.

This is how a film transforms history into experience. This is how a film explains what slavery meant, not just to the body, but to the body politic. 

It’s not just about the infliction of pain by oppressors, and the endurance of pain by the oppressed. It’s about looking away, even if the person being mistreated resembles you, because you’re glad it’s not you.  It’s about the entrenched status quo that lets atrocities continue for years or decades. It’s about suppression. It’s about denial.  

Solomon was twelve years a slave. The United States was 89 years a slaver. 

Slavery didn’t persist for decades because every living free man and woman in the United States was an irredeemably evil person. It continued because people got used to it and compartmentalized it. What happened was a national version of the personal denials shown in “12 Years a Slave.”

White people in free states told themselves, “The country would be better off if there were no slavery, but it’s been a part of life since the country was founded, and it’s probably never going away, but at least it’s not legal in my state.” White people in slave states who did not own slaves told themselves, “I don’t personally own slaves, so I’m not part of the problem,” while looking away from the scarred men and women clearing underbrush and picking crops and hoping that somehow, someday they wouldn’t have to see that anymore, or explain it to their children. White people in free and slave states who could not rationalize or compartmentalize slavery became abolitionists or helped abolitionists. Free Blacks tried to forget or distance themselves from the continuing reality of slavery or else worked to end it.

But collectively the nation made peace with slavery, accepted slavery, for a very long time. 

It wasn’t until the two decades leading up to the start of the Civil War that the majority of Whites began thinking of slavery as anything other than a part of the national reality, and abolitionist beliefs as anything other than a utopian fantasy, or a nuisance to commerce. 

Part of the genius of “12 Years a Slave” is its capacity for showing us that this sort of thinking—characteristic, we like to tell ourselves, of a distant and thoroughly discredited past—continues today, in a watered-down form.  We encounter it again whenever movies such as this one are discussed. Or not discussed. Or avoided.

When a viewer says, “I know slavery was wrong, so I don’t need to see this film,” or, “I saw scenes from ‘Roots’ in school, I get it,” or “I saw ‘Django Unchained,’ what is it with all these slavery movies dredging up the past?” it’s a denial, a suppression.

This happened in the United States of America. Its legacy is all around us. We need to look. We need to imagine. 

In one of the movie’s most extraordinary close-ups, a traumatized Solomon looks offscreen for a while, his gaze slowly moving around the edges of the frame, until he seems to make eye contact with the viewer. You want to reach out to him. You want to help him. You want to free him. But you can’t. It’s not possible. It’s not done. All you can do is stare  into his beseeching eyes.

After a while he gives up and looks somewhere else.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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How 12 Years a Slave Gets History Right: By Getting It Wrong

Steve McQueen’s film fudges several details of Solomon Northup’s autobiography—both intentionally and not—to more completely portray the horrors of slavery.

At the beginning of 12 Years a Slave , the kidnapped freeman Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) has a painful sexual encounter with an unnamed female slave in which she uses his hand to bring herself to orgasm before turning away in tears. The woman’s desperation, Solomon’s reserve, and the fierce sadness of both, is depicted with an unflinching still camera that documents a moment of human contact and bitter comfort in the face of slavery’s systematic dehumanization. It’s scenes like these in the film, surely, that lead critic Susan Wloszczyna to state that watching 12 Years a Slave makes you feel you have “actually witnessed American slavery in all its appalling horror for the first time.”

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And yet, for all its verisimilitude, the encounter never happened. It appears nowhere in Northup’s autobiography, and it’s likely he would be horrified at the suggestion that he was anything less than absolutely faithful to his wife. Director Steve McQueen has said that he included the sexual encounter to show “a bit of tenderness … Then after she climaxes, she’s back … in hell.” The sequence is an effort to present nuance and psychological depth—to make the film’s depiction of slavery seem more real. But it creates that psychological truth by interpolating an incident that isn’t factually true.

This embellishment is by no means an isolated case in the film. For instance, in the film version, shortly after Northup is kidnapped, he is on a ship bound south. A sailor enters the hold and is about to rape one of the slave women when a male slave intervenes. The sailor unhesitatingly stabs and kills him. This seems unlikely on its face—slaves are valuable, and the sailor is not the owner. And, sure enough, the scene is not in the book. A slave did die on the trip south, but from smallpox rather than from stabbing. Northup himself contracted the disease, which permanently scarred his face. It seems likely, therefore, that in this instance the original text was abandoned so that Ejiofor’s beautiful, expressive, haunting features would not go through the entire movie covered with artificial Hollywood scar makeup. Instead of faithfulness to the text, the film chooses faithfulness to Ejiofor’s face, unaltered by trickery.

Other changes seem less intentional. Perhaps the most striking scene in the film involves Patsey, a slave who is repeatedly raped by her master, Epps, and who as a consequence is jealously and obsessively brutalized by Mistress Epps. In the movie version, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) comes to Northup in the middle of the night and begs him, in vivid horrific detail, to drown her in the swamp and release her from her troubles. This scene derives from the following passage at the end of Chapter 13 of the autobiography:

Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see [Patsey] suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp. Gladly would Patsey have appeased this unforgiving spirit, if it had been in her power, but not like Joseph, dared she escape from Master Epps, leaving her garment in his hand.

As you can see, in the book, it is Mistress Epps who wants to bribe Northup to drown Patsey. Patsey wants to escape, but not to drown herself. The film seems to have misread the line, attributing the mistress’s desires to Patsey. Slate , following the lead of scholar David Fiske (see both the article and the correction ) does the same. In short, it seems quite likely that the single most powerful moment in the film was based on a misunderstood antecedent.

Critic Isaac Butler recently wrote a post attacking what he calls the “realism canard”—the practice of judging fiction by how well it conforms to reality. “We’re talking about the reduction of truth to accuracy ,” Butler argues, and adds, “What matters ultimately in a work of narrative is if the world and characters created feels true and complete enough for the work’s purposes. ” (Emphasis is Butler’s.)

His point is well-taken. But it’s worth adding that whether something “feels true” is often closely related to whether the work manages to create an illusion not just of truth, but also of accuracy. Whether it’s period detail in a costume romance or the brutal cruelty of the drug trade in Breaking Bad , fiction makes insistent claims not just to general overarching truth but to specific, accurate detail. The critics Butler discusses may sometimes reduce the first to the second, but they do so in part because works of fiction themselves often rely on a claim to accuracy in order to make themselves appear true.

This is nowhere more the case than in slave narratives themselves. Often published by abolitionist presses or in explicit support of the abolitionist cause, slave narratives represented themselves as accurate, first-person accounts of life under slavery. Yet, as the University of North Carolina professor William Andrews has discussed in To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography , the representation of accuracy, and, for that matter, of first-person account, required a good deal of artifice. To single out just the most obvious point, Andrews notes that many slave narratives were told to editors, who wrote down the oral account and prepared them for publication. Andrews concludes that “It would be naïve to accord dictated oral narratives the same discursive status as autobiographies composed and written by the subjects of the stories themselves.”

12 Years a Slave is just such an oral account. Though Northup was literate, his autobiography was written by David Wilson, a white lawyer and state legislator from Glens Falls, New York. While the incidents in Northup’s life have been corroborated by legal documents and much research, Andrews points out that the impact of the autobiography—its sense of truth—is actually based in no small part on the fact that it is not told by Northup, but by Wilson, who had already written two books of local history. Because he was experienced, Andrews says, Wilson’s “fictionalizing … does not call attention to itself so much” as other slave narratives, which tend to be steeped in a sentimental tradition “that often discomfits and annoys 20th-century critics.” Northup’s autobiography feels less like fiction, in other words, because its writer is so experienced with fiction. Similarly, McQueen’s film feels true because it is so good at manipulating our sense of accuracy. The first sex scene, for example, speaks to our post-Freud, post-sexual-revolution belief that, isolated for 12 years far from home, Northup would be bound to have some sort of sexual encounters, even if (especially if?) he does not discuss them in his autobiography.

The difference between book and movie, then, isn’t that one is true and the other false, but rather that the tropes and tactics they use to create a feeling of truth are different. The autobiography, for instance, actually includes many legal documents as appendices. It also features lengthy descriptions of the methods of cotton farming. No doubt this dispassionate, minute accounting of detail was meant to show Northup’s knowledge of the regions where he stayed, and so validate the truth of his account. To modern readers, though, the touristy attention to local customs can make Northup sound more like a traveling reporter than like a man who is himself in bondage. Some anthropological asides are even more jarring; in one case, Northup refers to a slave rebel named Lew Cheney as “a shrewd, cunning negro, more intelligent than the generality of his race.” That description would sound condescending and prejudiced if a white man wrote it. Which, of course, a white man named David Wilson did.

A story about slavery, a real, horrible crime, inevitably involves an appeal to reality—the story has to seem accurate if it is to be accepted as true. But that seeming accuracy requires artifice and fiction—a cool distance in one case, an acknowledgement of sexuality in another. And then, even with the best will in the world, there are bound to be mistakes and discrepancies, as with Mistress Epps’s plea for murder transforming into Patsey’s wish for death. Given the difficulties and contradictions, one might conclude that it would be better to openly acknowledge fiction. From this perspective, Django Unchained , which deliberately treats slavery as genre, or Octavia Butler’s Kindred , which acknowledges the role of the present in shaping the past through a fantasy time-travel narrative, are more true than 12 Years a Slave or Glory precisely because they do not make a claim to historical accuracy. We can’t “actually witness … American slavery” on film or in a book. You can only experience it by experiencing it. Pretending otherwise is presumptuous.

But refusing to try to recapture the experience and instead deciding to, say, treat slavery as a genre Western, can be presumptuous in its own way as well. The writers of the original slave narratives knew that to end injustice, you must first acknowledge that injustice exists. Accurate stories about slavery—or, more precisely, stories that carried the conviction of accuracy, were vital to the abolitionist cause.

And, for that matter, they’re still vital. Outright lies about slavery and its aftermath, from Birth of a Nation to Gone With the Wind , have defaced American cinema for a long time. To go forward more honestly, we need accounts of our past that, like the slave narratives themselves, use accuracy and art in the interest of being more true. That’s what McQueen, Ejiofor, and the rest of the cast and crew are trying to do in 12 Years a Slave . Pointing out the complexity of the task is not meant to belittle their attempt, but to honor it.

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Director Steve McQueen's raw document stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and — isn't that Brad Pitt?

Did Jesus approve of slavery, and of the whipping of a slaver’s chattel? Edwin Epps believes so. He quotes Luke 12:47: “And that servant … shall be beaten with many stripes.” By “many stripes,” the Louisiana plantation owner tells his slaves, Jesus meant 40 or 50. In this example of the deranged quoting scripture, even the God of peace taught the inhumanity of one man to the men and women he thought of as animals .

In director Steve McQueen’s  12 Years a Slave , plantation owners poke and stroke the bodies of their slaves, appraising them like horseflesh — except that they would not flog, humiliate or sexually defile their livestock. The lady of the plantation, jealous of the attentions her husband pays to a slave woman, shies a heavy glass decanter at the poor girl’s head. Another slave is roped up to be hanged, his toes barely touching the ground, and there he dangles, when losing his balance means death. The plantation owner’s wife stares at him from the veranda, ignoring his agony, as do the other slaves, going about their yard chores. They know better than to help a renegade.

(READ: Jessica Winter on director Steve McQueen )

The madmen are the masters in this searing film document, based on Twelve Years a Slave , the 1854 memoir of Solomon Northrup, a free black New Yorker abducted into servitude. Northup has found an apt adaptor in the Anglo-African McQueen, whose first two features proved him a picture poet of physical degradation. McQueen’s  Hunger  (2009) portrayed the hunger strike of IRA volunteer Bobby Sands; his 2011  Shame  detailed the bleak life of a Manhattan sex addict, and both films starred Michael Fassbender, who plays Epps in 12 Years a Slave . Here, McQueen immerses viewers in the magnolia-scented hell to which his protagonist was exiled. You will recoil at every punishment, feel each slur, with an immediacy that makes the long-ago, “peculiar institution” of slavery as vivid as a whiplash.

In the script by John Ridley, who wrote the novel Those Who Walk in Darkness  and the screenplays for U Turn  and  Red Tails , Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is first seen as a free man in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with a loving wife and two children (one of them played by Quvenzhane Wallis of Beasts of the Southern Wild ). He earns a comfortable income as a fiddler and is treated as an equal by his white friends and neighbors. Lured to Washington, D.C., for what he thinks is a brief musical engagement, he is pumped with alcohol until he passes out and awakes in chains. (We do not learn why the kidnappers went to the trouble of importing a black man from upstate New York to the nation’s capital, when they could have corralled dozens, hundreds, who already lived there.) Ignoring his pleas of full citizenship, his captors beat him and send him south to servitude in Louisiana.

(READ:  John Ridley on “Why I’m Good With the N Word” )

Solomon is untutored at this deadly game. If he wants to survive, a fellow black advises him, “Tell no one who you really are, and tell no one you can read and write, unless you want to be a dead nigger.” Northup insists, “I don’t want to survive. I want to live.” Instead, he keeps silent and endures the insult of a slave name: Platt Hamilton — yes, like Olivia de Havilland’s Melanie Hamilton from  Gone With the Wind.

These sprawling farms are no Tara — they are gulags — and  12 Years a Slave  stands as a fierce refutation of the genial racial stereotypes on display in the Margaret Mitchell novel and David O. Selznick’s movie version. Indeed, McQueen’s film is closer in its storytelling particulars to such 1970s exploitation-exposés of slavery as  Mandingo  and the astoundingly coarse schlockumentary Addio zio Tom ( Goodbye, Uncle Tom).  The difference is that McQueen’s scenes of black flesh peddled by venal salesmen are meant not to excite the senses but to repel any good conscience.

(READ: Corliss on Gualtiero Jacopetti, the director of Addio zio Tom ) Repellent  is the word for the New Orleans slave trader Theophilus Freeman (Paul Giamatti), who tells prospective customers that the young black boy before them “will grow into a fine beast.” The plantation owner William Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch, who impersonates Julian Assange in this week’s The Fifth Estate ) purchases Solomon/Platt and Eliza (Adepero Oduye, star of the indie film Pariah ). Though she begs Ford to take her two young children, and though Solomon must play a violin to muffle the screams of Eliza’s kids, Ford cannot be troubled to buy them. And he is the “decent” master: a man who must think of himself as a slave to the system he is profits from; a genteel soul and a moral coward.

On the Ford farm, aggressive rather than passive wickedness resides in the overseer Tibeats (another fine slimeball performance from Paul Dano), who leads the slaves’ work in the cotton fields to the rhythm of the slave song “Run, Nigger, Run.” When Solomon’s intelligence and industry impress Ford and demean Tibeats, the overseer hangs the slave from a tree. Solomon must pay for Tibeats’ crime; he is sold to the venomous Epps, who believes that “A man does what he wants with his property.” Slipping on pig slop and pratfalling over fences, whipping his slaves for want of other entertainment, Epps is a sadistic oaf, a graceless Satan.

(READ: Corliss on Benedict Cumberbatch in The Fifth Estate )

Epps has engaged in a running dispute with his imperious wife (Sarah Paulson) over his attentions to the slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o); it was Mrs. Epps who, in the film’s most startling act of violence, beaned Patsey with the decanter. One Sunday Patsey, who is also the most productive cotton picker on the plantation, has visited the home of a black woman (Alfre Woodard) who achieved freedom by marrying a white man. When she returns, Epps, enraged by her brief absence, orders Solomon to whip her. In a shot lasting seven agonizing minutes, the camera circles the two, as lash follows lash, to make the spectator share the suffering of Patsey and Solomon — two victims of a sick master in a diseased social order. Though they considered their slaves less than human, Southern whites of the plantation aristocracy were the true troglodytes: inferior but in charge.

(READ:  Madonna banned from theater chain after texting through a screening of  12 Years a Slave )

McQueen shows that racism, aside from its barbarous inhumanity, is insanely inefficient. It can be argued that Nazi Germany lost the war both because it diverted so much manpower to the killing of Jews and because it did not exploit the brilliance of Jewish scientists in building smarter weapons. So the slave owners dilute the energy of their slaves by whipping them for sadistic sport and, as Epps does, waking them at night to dance for his wife’s cruel pleasure. It is the rare white man who will speak racial equality to the plantation owner’s power. In  12 Years a Slave,  that voice belongs to Brad Pitt (one of the film’s executive producers) as the Canadian surveyor and abolitionist Bass. He tells Epps, “If you don’t treat them as humans, then you will have to answer for it.” Epps can’t even understand the question.

McQueen keeps the content hot but the imagery cool: long takes of brutality alternate with probing closeups of Ejiofor as he joins the slaves in an elegiac chorus of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” (the spiritual antidote to “Run, Nigger, Run”) and, in a climactic shot, muses wordlessly on his fate. Though it is no less insistent on showing the particulars of corporal punishment than, say, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ , the movie has the eerie impact of a museum exhibit; it is a diorama of atrocity.

(READ: Corliss on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ ) Ed Gonzalez and Armond White , two critics bucking the consensus admiration for  12 Years a Slave , have noted that the film does not build to dramatic points so much as it repeats them. Early in the movie, Solomon is flogged 16 times with a plank, another 14 with a rope. Toward the end, the slave must administer the discipline, by whipping — and whipping, and whipping — the hapless Patsey.

(READ:  The contrarian voice of Armond White on  12 Years a Slave ) 

But traditional film suspense does not apply here. The title, like that of Robert Bresson’s prison film A Man Escaped , gives away the entire narrative. McQueen and Ridley want to portray Solomon’s ordeal as minute variations on the same slog of awful. You will find no jolly racists, no sneering black traitors to their indentured race, whom Quentin Tarantino used to enliven his slave tale,  Django Unchained . This movie has the grind of painful work with no hope of reprieve.

(READ: Corliss on Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained )

Except for Solomon — a figure apart from his fellow blacks on the plantation. He is a free man; Northern mores say that he doesn’t belong there. The others are slaves; Southern morality says that they do. He fights to regain his freedom, while they seem consigned to their servitude. Solomon is a bit like the journalist played by Gregory Peck in the 1947 Gentleman’s Agreement , who pretends to be a Jew to do a undercover story on American antisemitism. While shooting the movie, director Elia Kazan asked one technician what the moral of the film was. The answer: “You should be nice to Jews, because they might turn out to be gentiles.”

At the end of 12 Years a Slave  — no Spoiler Alert needed — Solomon is reunited with his family, and says, with heroic understatement, “I’ve had a difficult time these last several years.” Like the 1,200 lucky Jews in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List , Solomon is again free (thanks to the intercession of white men), while nearly 4 million blacks in the South remained enslaved.

(READ: Richard Schickel’s review of Schindler’s List )

We must see their pain in the face of Ejiofor, whose film roles have ranged from an interpreter for the slaves in Spielberg’s Amistad to the drag queen in Kinky Boots , the inspiration for the Tony-winning Broadway musical. For two excruciating hours, his Solomon is on the receiving end of abuse. His saving grace is the dignity with which he endures and, for posterity, observes his own and a nation’s shame. The gentle center of a demonic land, Ejiofor provides the eyes and soul of  12 Years a Slave  — which, for all its cool distance, remains a raw, horrifying and essential document.

The IndiaBookStore blog

Review: 12 Years A Slave

12 Years A Slave started filling the bestseller line in almost all bookstores, having gained widespread acclaim due to the award winning success of its movie adaption . Movies based on books inadvertently bring out the need for comparison where, almost unfailingly, the books gain the upper hand . Amazingly enough, this time the movie topped the book!

The book portrays the tale of a ‘free black man’ that will make your heart bleed for him. The story is of Solomon, from the state of New York, who got kidnapped in Washington and was sold into slavery and the horror that ensues for the next twelve years. Coming from an audaciously independent breeding, with no sense of bondage, Solomon falls into the abyss of slavery with no respite in sight.

The book goes through various philosophies and emotions. How the loss of a friend and hope can make life that much more worthless. How love commands respect and how the owners who treat their slaves with even a modicum of compassion get better output. And the extent to which the fight for survival changes a person. The story also has a poignant reminder of how even the most kind hearted and well meaning are suppressed by societal influence, and how music can inculcate companionship. The protagonist is in a place in his life where humans feel more dangerous than hounds, snakes or alligators. Despite the end being known, one would still want to go through the whole book because it contains such heart wrenching comparisons that one cannot help but sympathize with the protagonist for the hardships endured.

There is a lot of literature on this subject, but this book comes forth with a different understanding, which has not been explored by any other artist in any other medium. The story of Solomon Northup highlights the difference between being born into slavery and being pushed into it. There is no question that the plight suffered by slaves is the same, regardless of where they come from, but the quintessential difference is how a person reacts and adapts to it. The author also expresses extreme indignation towards whites who assume they know the plight of slaves.

The book had an interesting and gripping storyline, but shifted its perspective a lot. The slow progression of events and unnecessary details that had nothing to do with the story made it mind numbing at times. But one has to remember that this is not a piece of sophisticated literature; this an account of a person, who put it in the best way that he could – the story of his life with horrors many of us could never imagine.

The abovementioned lacunas are where the movie trumps the book; it does away with the inessential description and irrelevant plot lines and makes it real. The brilliant use of cinematography and the contrast in music to emphasize the conflicting emotions prevalent in a scene made it that much more hard-hitting. The movie tugs at your heartstrings in a way the book couldn’t.

Want to explore the books vs movies connection a bit more? Go no further than our Talkies or Text? comparison of Wuthering Heights ! 

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The Blood and Tears, Not the Magnolias

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By Manohla Dargis

• Oct. 17, 2013

“12 Years a Slave” isn’t the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that finally makes it impossible for American cinema to continue to sell the ugly lies it’s been hawking for more than a century. Written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen , it tells the true story of Solomon Northup, an African-American freeman who, in 1841, was snatched off the streets of Washington, and sold. It’s at once a familiar, utterly strange and deeply American story in which the period trappings long beloved by Hollywood — the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest — are the backdrop for an outrage.

The story opens with Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) already enslaved and cutting sugar cane on a plantation. A series of flashbacks shifts the story to an earlier time, when Solomon, living in New York with his wife and children, accepts a job from a pair of white men to play violin in a circus. Soon the three are enjoying a civilized night out in Washington, sealing their camaraderie with heaping plates of food, flowing wine and the unstated conviction — if only on Solomon’s part — of a shared humanity, a fiction that evaporates when he wakes the next morning shackled and discovers that he’s been sold. Thereafter, he is passed from master to master.

It’s a desperate path and a story that seizes you almost immediately with a visceral force. But Mr. McQueen keeps everything moving so fluidly and efficiently that you’re too busy worrying about Solomon, following him as he travels from auction house to plantation, to linger long in the emotions and ideas that the movie churns up. Part of this is pragmatic — Mr. McQueen wants to keep you in your seat, not force you out of the theater, sobbing — but there’s something else at work here. This is, he insists, a story about Solomon, who may represent an entire subjugated people and, by extension, the peculiar institution, as well as the American past and present. Yet this is also, emphatically, the story of one individual.

Unlike most of the enslaved people whose fate he shared for a dozen years, the real Northup was born into freedom. (His memoir’s telegraphing subtitle is “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, From a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana.”) That made him an exceptional historical witness, because even while he was inside slavery — physically, psychologically, emotionally — part of him remained intellectually and culturally at a remove, which gives his book a powerful double perspective. In the North, he experienced some of the privileges of whiteness, and while he couldn’t vote, he could enjoy an outing with his family. Even so, he was still a black man in antebellum America.

Mr. McQueen is a British visual artist who made a rough transition to movie directing with his first two features, “Hunger” and “Shame,” both of which were embalmed in self-promoting visuals. “Hunger” is the sort of art film that makes a show of just how perfectly its protagonist, the Irish dissident Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), smears his excrement on a prison wall. “Shame,” about a sex addict (Mr. Fassbender again), was little more than glossy surfaces, canned misery and preening directorial virtuosity. For “12 Years a Slave,” by contrast, Mr. McQueen has largely dispensed with the conventions of art cinema to make something close to a classical narrative; in this movie, the emphasis isn’t on visual style but on Solomon and his unmistakable desire for freedom.

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The National Archives at Fort Worth

Slave Manifest of Solomon Northup

This item is a Slave Manifest listing Solomon Northup, the primary author of Twelve Years a Slave . The Constitution of the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved peoples into the country in 1808. The domestic slave trade, however, remained legal. With the rise of cotton as a southern commodity, thousands of enslaved people were shipped from the upper south to the lower south regularly from 1808 to 1860. Slave manifests were required by law for each ship transporting enslaved individuals and included the name, sex, height, and complexion or class of each enslaved individual. In addition, slave manifests required the names of the enslavers or shippers of enslaved people and their residence, plus the names of the individuals the enslaved were consigned to if necessary.

This manifest for the Brig Orleans documents 41 enslaved individuals who were shipped to New Orleans, LA, from Richmond, VA, in the spring of 1841. Among them was Solomon Northup, who was listed as Plat Hamilton on line 33. A free Black man in New York, Northup had been kidnapped and sold into slavery; he was given the name Plat Hamilton aboard the ship. Years later, after he regained his freedom, he told his life story in his autobiography Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River in Louisiana. Northup’s story was made into a major motion picture and won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2014. Additional slave manifests from New Orleans can be found in the National Archives Catalog. 

Slave Manifest of Solomon Northup, dated 1841. National Archives Identifier:7456569

View in National Archives Catalog

View and download the Manifest for the Brig Orleans  on the National Archives Catalog. You can explore more of our holdings by visiting our online  Catalog  or by visiting the  National Archives at Fort Worth . This record is located within  Record Group 36: Records of the U.S. Customs Service , Series:  Slave Manifests, 1817–1861 . Many of the records in this collection have yet to be digitized. We encourage researchers to  visit us  onsite to explore these records and learn more about the archival collections held in the National Archives at Fort Worth.