12
Years a Slave,
directed by Steve McQueen, is one of the more in-depth looks at what it was like
to be a slave. It’s based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black living
in New York who was attracted by a fiddling job in Washington DC, only to be
drugged and wake up in a slave pen. He found himself transported along with
other kidnapped blacks (and a lot of slaves who were also abducted or were
being resold) to New Orleans. For the next 12 years (1841-1853) he served under
several masters, experiencing different degrees of slavery. Eventually he found
a sympathetic white Canadian, Samuel Bass, who got word of where he was to his
family, and Northup was freed. Understandably, he became a prominent
abolitionist.
There is actually a debate about the veracity of Northup’s memoir. The debate arises form several passages which seem to express white views of slavery and race and others which had uncanny similarities to other slave narratives. The explanation for these bits is that Northup wrote his memoir via dictation through a white writer. The white writer likely decided to make some alterations to make the book more sellable.
