Craft Essay: "Twelve Years a Slave" by Solomon Northrop

 Solomon Northrop’s “Twelve Years a Slave” is a riveting piece of literature that serves to stimulate an audience by displaying its masterful and careful manipulation of a given language.  This manipulation is inspiring because of the writers discriminating use of creativity to convey conventional ideas from a different perspective to a given audience. For in doing so Northrop has God given talent and, “The responsibility of a writer to excavate the experience of the people who produced him” (pg. xviii) that James Baldwin speaks of. It is exactly these factors that make Northrop’s book a classic amongst the African American Cannon. 

Mark Twain had once said, “That a classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” (pg. xvi).  On the other hand Italo Calvino has said that, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say” (page xvii).  Fortunately though, Steve McQueen’s movie, of the same name has raised interest in not only Northrop’s book but also his life and death. Some would argue that in McQueen’s movie he has rescued Northrop’s book out of obscurity which in many ways shadows Faulkner’s thinking that:

“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life” (page xvii).

            Some would call the language that Northrop uses as elevated language or even outdated language.  While others would claim that Northrop’s tale is told in a way that is difficult to read and understand. When a writer uses an “elevated language”, the writer must approach the matter in a way that challenges the reader’s conventional mode of thinking.  To actively involve the subject matter, the writer forces readers to think a bit abstractly about the subject manner.  Through this abstract thinking, the reader grows as an individual and discovers something new about existence––– and in the case of the reader being a writer as well, they are led to see writing in another way.  For it is Northrop and his words that create the world that then transports us back into time so we too can see the real horrors of slavery.  It is this ability to transport us that makes this narrative a classic.  Hemingway has said that: 

“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you, and afterwards it belongs to you, the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was” (page xvii)

The expression of ideas and phrases are vital to identifying a successful and relevant writer in any arena that appreciates social change.  Moreover, many individuals have the ability to write, but they fail to gather the necessary tools to disseminate and give interpretation to their challenging ideas effectively.  Individuals possessing this ability to masterfully manipulate language can express ideas to a broad and diverse audience –– and shun the crutch of social stigma.  Frederick Douglass speaks to this idea of delivering exactly what is needed in this time frame ––– and easily could fit in todays society, when he said:

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed… a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.  For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder.  We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”

Furthermore an effective writer’s work will stand the test of time. It will not appear dated nor out of touch as the audiences mature. It is great writers who diligently compose their narratives with modest but compelling details that, letter by letter, compose the stories the writer hopes to portray. Northrop announced that he wanted his narrative to “Present a full and truthful statement of all principal events in the history of my life, and to portray the institution of Slavery as I have seen and known it” (pg. xxvi).  Northrop does this by portraying the strange or familiar realities of which he hopes to convince us that slavery is brutal, and must be ended.  Northrop’s text, like most of the Slave Narratives has the astounding capability to use the apparently mundane details of the day to day African American experiences of its timeframe, and apply those details into something that transforms its time, place and specificity.  It is in the start of the third paragraph of his narrative that Northrop says, “I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came under my own observation ––– only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person” (pg. 5).

“So far as it came under my own observation.”  What led Northrop to write those specific words?  One must remember that, Slavery Narratives are a literary form that grew out of the written “testimonies” of enslaved Africans in Britain and British Colonies, which later included the United States, Canada and the Caribbean. Some six thousand narratives were recorded from North America and the Caribbean during the 18^th and 19^th Centuries. One hundred fifty of those narratives being published as books or as pamphlets.  As late as the 1930’s the United States made the effort to record more than twenty three hundred additional oral histories that were published by the Works Progress Administration.  It is a well-known fact that the Slave narratives from North America were first published in England during the 18^th Century.  These narratives quickly became the main form of African- American Literature in the 19^th Century. 

One must also keep in mind that Slave Narratives were publicized by abolitionists who could –– and sometimes would –– act as editors, or writers if a slave was illiterate. The cooperation of abolitionist editors and writers some influential historians, as late as 1929, suggested that as a category the authenticity of Slave Narratives was doubtful.  Further attention was placed on using the slaves’ own accounts as well as the research of a broader class of data. Since the late 20^th Century historians have validated the Slavery Narratives as the slaves own experience.  These narratives include but are not limited to Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass and Lucy Delaney.  Northrop like so many other Slave Narrative authors had to address the issue of credibility.

Slave Narratives can be universally identified into three noticeable forms: tales of religious redemption, tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle and tales of progress.  Northrop’s “Twelve Years a Slave” falls into the category of tales to inspire the abolitionist struggle. Beginning in the mid-1820’s, authors chose the autobiographical form to develop interest to join the abolitionist struggle.  Some authors used literary techniques, including their use of fictionalized dialogue.  This form was so popular that between 1835 and 1865 more than eighty such Slave Narratives were published.  Reoccurring themes included: slave auctions, the break-up of families, accounts of escapes which there were usually two, one of which was successful.  It was during this timeframe of forced migration of nearly one million slaves through internal slave trade; that the experiences of auctions and family separations were very common.  Northrop’s “Twelve Years a Slave” falls into this category of inspiring abolitionism and the abolition cause.  This can be easily seen at the end of chapter one when Northrop writes:

“Now I have reached a turning point in my existence ––– reached the threshold of unutterable wrong, and sorrow, and despair.  Now had I approached within the shadow of the cloud, into the thick darkness whereof I was soon to disappear, thenceforward to be hidden from the eyes of all my kindred, and shut out from the sweet light of liberty, for many a weary year” (pg.11).

            Usually, a well-chosen characterization can tell us more about someone or something ––– their social and financial status, their hopes and dreams, their vision of themselves ––– than a long informative passage.  I feel Northrop excels at this aspect of writing when describing either people, places and even events.  His first example of using this skill is describing a well-known slave dealer James H. Burch when he writes:

“A large, powerful man, forty years of age … with dark, chestnut-colored hair, slightly interspersed with gray.  His face was full, his complexion flush, his features grossly coarse, expressive of nothing but cruelty and cunning… about five feet ten inches high, of full habit, and without prejudice… whose whole appearance was sinister and repugnant” (pg. 20).

The beginning of this description we can feel the discomfort, hesitation, displacement, and the suppressed horror that foreshadows some of the horrors Northrop will endure.  We understand immediately why he chose to describe James H. Burch in the manner that he did.  We also know by the end of Burch’s description that Northrop has suspicions that have crystalized into something much stronger than just describing a man. While Northrop’s second instance of using the same skill is in describing his dwelling.

“The room in which I was confined. It was twelve feet square –– the walls of solid masonry.  The floor was of heavy plank.  There was one small window, crossed with great iron bars, with an outside shutter, securely fastened”(pg. 21)

            Every word in this subtly, straightforward exchange is a smartly choreographed step in a distasteful display of provinciality and opposition, of control and resignation.  What is not being said is as important as what is.  Northrop’s reference to “the room” (as opposed to a “jail” or a “cell” or even a “prison”) is immediately drawing us into his personal space where he is forced to be. “One small window, crossed with great iron bars” could hardly be more distinct.  It is understandable why Northrop shifts our attention into the further sketch of his surroundings when he says:

“The furniture of the room… consisted of the wooden bench on which I sat, an old fashioned, dirty box stove, and besides these, in either cell, there was neither bed nor blanket, nor any other thing whatever” (pg. 21).

          

  Until this point we’d had no clear description of his surroundings as we have had here.  His surroundings are just as troubling as his circumstances.  His surroundings have even taken on this aspect of his pending treatment.  What seems at issue here is far more serious than just his meager surroundings, and within the next couple of paragraphs we read of his brutal treatment of his “masters”. We maybe led to ask what was the motivation behind this description and those that follow.  We know as people that we argue, fight, complain, criticize and many times find ourselves saying things we don’t mean.  Even then, we ask what was my motivation for doing that? If all of these actions are based on the belief that these actions are, in fiction as they are in life, then we must realize that often time’s people do horrific things for no good reason at all.

            Yet Northrop also presents the direct opposite of these horrific actions and the people commit them when he describes a child of slavery named Emily when he writes:

“Emily, the child, was seven or eight years old, of light complexion, and with a face of admirable beauty.  Her hair fell in curls around her neck, while the style and richness of her dress, and the neatness of her whole appearance indicated she was brought up in the midst of wealth” (pg. 27).

            One wonders if Emily in this description falls into the category of “tragic quadroon”?  Based on the terminology of the time Quadroon was used to label a person of one-quarter African ancestry.   Meaning that this person has one biracial parent (African and Caucasian) and one Caucasian parent.  Termed another way one set of African grandparents and three sets of Caucasian grandparents.  The idea of this child Emily as quadroon goes even further.  This figure, the “tragic octoroon” was a routine character in abolitionist literature. She was a light-brown-skinned woman who was raised as if she were a white woman in her father’s household.  This continued until the father went into bankruptcy or died leaving the octoroon –– as well as the rest of the family –– in a reduced position.  The octoroon is left at a larger disadvantage, as she was primarily unskilled.  This woman many times could be unaware of her changed status before being further reduced to being a victim of more than just slavery.  Based on the story Northrop tells Emily does fall into the category of “tragic octoroon.  She at the age of seven or eight years old misses the mark of sexual exploitation by only four or five years.  For it is this character, the “tragic octoroon” that abolitionists were able to attract attention to the sexual exploitation that was allowed in slavery; unlike the misery of the field hands who may have not suffered as much sexual exploitation.  It was this type of character that would allow white female readers to identify with the victims of the story by gender, but would distance the white female reader by racial ideology that would, and many times did, deny the full realm of humanity toward nonwhite women.

            An accepted objection to this type of character is that “she” is allowing the reader to pity their plight of being both oppressed and an enslaved race, but this is individually done through a veil of whiteness –– that is, rather than sympathizing with the true racial “other”, the reader is sympathizing with a character who made as much like ones own race.  The “tragic octoroon many times appears in a novel that is intended for women readers, while some of the character’s charm lays in the melodramatic fantasies of a person who is just likely to suddenly be cast into a lower social class which takes place when one discovers a small amount of “black-blood” that would bestow on her the labeling of unfit for marriage.

          

  Northrop, as well as Steve McQueen with the movie of the same name, honors the delicate narrative of the unique suffering of women in and during slavery.  The life of a slave woman is that it is one marked by inescapable psychological, sexual and physical afflictions. They both honor the brutal truth of those lives than sermonizing about the very obvious injustice of the institution of slavery.  However, it is within nineteenth-century America that a subgenre of the sentimental novel developed around a character known as "the tragic octoroon." Abolitionists made this pre-war character the most inexhaustible form to occur throughout the century. The "tragic octoroon" helped to develop stereotyped characters, settings, and situations, which were familiar to the late nineteenth-century reader. These conventions included: a pastoral setting, and characters who are legally black but appears to be white.

The sentimental formula involves a traditional metaphysics of hierarchies and dualities; its plot is the transcendent story of good versus evil acting itself out through fixed types. It ends with the restoration of essential order. Consequently the story becomes a series of actions determined by environment and chance, acted out by characters whose identities are relative and always subject to change, and it ends with the deception of an order which is clearly manmade.

Beyond the sentimental formula, and past the main character of Solomon himself the story that resonates with me is the story of Patsey.  Out of all the injustices that are depicted, the brutal whipping of Patsey at the hands of her master and Northrop himself (who was forced against his very will) left Patsey near her demise. 

Amazingly enough when the newspaper reviews of the movie “Twelve Years a Slave” came out cited this scene as the devastating climax of the movie.  As I sat in the theater that day, this scene started and I remember sitting in my seat sobbing hysterically as Patsey was whipped.  Northrop’s written account is horrifying, but it is McQueen who makes this scene even more devastating and unbearable because of the circumstances behind that beating.  However, one needs to point out that this scene is written in the text and executed exquisitely.  It is the visual of the movie that brings the text to living, breathing life.  This beating occurred simply because Mistress Epps in her jealousy denied to give Patsey a bar of soap for washing.  Patsey left the plantation without permission to borrow soap from a kind neighbor woman.  Master Epps was so infuriated upon Patsey’s return that she was instantly staked to the ground, while Northrop was ordered to beat her with the whip. Accommodating out of sheer fear, Northrop “struck her as many as thirty times”(pg. 170) before he tried to stop.  Epps demanded Northrop to deliver more or he too would receive a beating.  Northrop “inflicted ten or fifteen blows more,” (pg. 170) until he refused to continue.  Thus risking his consequences.  It is then that Epps assumes the whip and continues to beat Patsey until she was, as Northrop describes as, “literally flayed.” (pg. 171)  Somehow Patsey, who herself could be described as a tragic mulatto, survives the unimaginable punishment.  However, Northrop writes, “From that time forward she was not what she had been” (pg. 171).

It is heart rendering to think how someone as young as Patsey was, who sustained such grace under indescribable circumstances, absolutely had her spirit broken. Her life as well as so many other slaves had a life filled with traumatic images that are routinely suppressed from our national memory, it should be required reading—especially for anyone who groans about our lost decency and the humbler values on which this country was allegedly founded. It is these distortions that are still very much alive, and in light of the popular wish to forget, I can only imagine the struggles that these our people faced to reach full equality.  This scene is among the hardest to read, but they are honorably straightforward: Patsey agonizes in her pain, Christ-like, eventually asking Northup to kill her. Remaining noble, he refuses. But Northrop almost complicates the relationship in a terrifying scene, when the deranged Epps forces Northup, at gunpoint, to whip a naked and bound Patsey. This is the moment when Northrop, as the writer, is the most poised to challenge Northup’s, as the character, individual strength; slavery has simply put him in a position where it is impossible to stay pure.

It could be that Northrop himself speaks to this inability to stay pure through the story of Patsey when he says:

“A blessed thing it would have been for her –– days and weeks and months of misery it would have saved her –– had she never lifted her head in life again” (pg. 171).

We know in reality though that both Patsey and Northrop never gave up their chance to gain their freedom.  We do know that Solomon Northrop was granted his return to freedom but what became of Patsey Epps?  Was freedom something that never came?  Was she the tragic mulatto in this story and doomed from the beginning of the introduction of her character, or is her untimely demise the result of the horrors of slavery.  We may never know.

In closing I am reminded of James Baldwin when he said, “ Freedom is not something that anybody can be given.  Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”