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4.5
"The Journals of Lewis and Clark" is a moving, epic 19th century document of Americana that was one of the very special events in my literary life. "Twelve Years a Slave": this is another. "The Journals" is the first-person account of a triumphant trek across a still-virginal continent, full of youth and optimism. This, in utter contrast, is an account of a trip through hell, through our national shame, the antithetical document. "The Journals" was written by the voyagers themselves, and thus is full of misspellings, bad grammar, sketchy descriptions. But whereas "Twelve Years" was told by the kidnapped freeman Solomon Northup, he wisely told it to a professional writer, a journalist and poet named David Wilson. It must have been an ideal collaboration, because Northup's voice comes through consistently, there is a plethora of meticulous detail that only he could have known, it is tightly organized and the reader's attention is held throughout.And yes, it is graphic. I thought the refined, 19th century style would shield me from the raw sadism and brutality that I sensed from the movie clips I saw, but no such luck: the euphemisms and gentility seem to make the outrages all the worse. But surprisingly it wasn't the physical savagery--the whippings and punishments--that were hardest to take, or most moving; I was braced, more or less, to hear about those. It was other moments. Northup, naturally respecting the humanity of his fellow slaves, took time to get to know them as people, as individuals, even in the "slave pens" where they were held awaiting sale. One woman named Eliza was unforgettable. She had been forced to be the concubine of a plantation owner whose estranged wife, unfortunately, wound up in possession of her. Told she was finally going to be freed, along with the children she had by him--this was something the man had promised--Eliza was taken to Washington D.C. and sold off instead. As if that weren't cruel enough: shipped along with her children to a slave trader in New Orleans to be re-sold there, she watched her 10-year-old son Randall being sold first, to a separate owner. All her cries, begging and pleading and bargaining couldn't alter what she knew would be an everlasting separation. In his naive, childish attempt to comfort his mother, Randall said, "Don't cry, Mamma. I'll be a good boy." As if it HIS future conduct were any part of her agony, as if he had any idea of what his sale meant or portended. I had heard always that American slavery "separated families"; these particulars brought it home with a vengeance.There was worse to befall Eliza, to befall her still younger daughter; but I will leave that for you to discover. My watershed emotional moment won't be yours, anyway; there are too many others to count. But they are all credible, and Northup's evenhanded recital allows for (relatively) kind slaveholders and even confessions of his own shortcomings: this is an honest narrator. But the fact that we know in advance to expect a happy ending (and an eventual end of slavery, for that matter) in no way mitigates our instruction in how human ingenuity had institutionalized subjugation and devised ever-so-demonic means of enforcement. And the means were indeed demonic: on the very eve of emancipation we had gone the whole nine yards, with baroque convolutions of law and a systematic dehumanization that was almost elegant in its design. Once humans are viewed as economic means to an end, there is no stopping.It has been a full month since I read "Twelve Years a Slave" and I told myself that there were already enough good reviews, that Amazon didn't need mine. But I needed to write this, if only to mark a truly significant event in my reading life. Being fully human is not a given, and I'd like to think I became a little more human from reading this. Solomon Northup was a man of great courage and character, though he wouldn't have said so; it's his humanity that is the soul of this book, and one from which we can still learn.A note on this edition: there were many typos, and no notes. (I bought this cheap edition to fill out a shopping basket to get free shipping, if truth be told) But it didn't matter. What is here is enough.
