12 Years a Slave |
Dr. Autry |
Khristopher Foreman |
It was a Friday night at the Lockhart where they had Black Film Festival, where they were showing the movie “12 Years a Slave”. They were serving free popcorn and a soda for the first 100 people. They showed the movie on this gigantic screen with surround sound. The movie was about a black man in the 1840’s named Solomon Northup, who lives as a free man in Saratoga, New York with his wife and two children. He earns a living as a violinist, on what he believes will be an out of town music gig. He is instead drugged and sold into slavery in the Deep South under the name Platt as that is for whom the slave trader has papers. Initially, ...view middle of the document...
He speaks with authority on all subjects of his enslavement, naming names and pointing out landmarks along the way. In doing so, he dares skeptics to refute his story, knowing that public records and common knowledge would defend it. For example, when Northup accuses a wicked slave trader of keeping him captive in Washington, D.C., he not only names that slaver, he names the slaver’s accomplice, identifies exactly where the slave pen is hidden, and describes the physical structure of the slave pen in detail. The result was during the trial that took place after Northup had been freed, that slave trader couldn’t deny having kept Northup as his captive in that now-exposed slave pen. Additionally, the accuracy of and factual detail in 12 Years a Slave have kept this book prominent as a reliable historical reference on slavery for more than 150 years since it first debuted.
12 Years a Slave serves as a timeless indictment of the practice of “chattel bondage,” or human slavery. Northup’s detailing the abuses he endured and those he was forced to inflict provides a warning to all generations of the moral costs that slavery exacts from everyone involved. The slave himself or herself is degraded, made to suffer awful...
