September 13, 2015
I technically finished Northup's memoir yesterday afternoon, but my day got so busy that I couldn't get to this entry. Anyway, Northup's story was recently adapted to film, and won much critical acclaim (including the Best Picture Oscar, I think?). I'd actually never heard of it until the film came out, and didn't know it was an autobiographical work until I found it in my elibrary. I wish I had realized it sooner, as Northup's story is written with such clarity and truth.
Northup was a free black man in New York state in the 19th century. He and his wife did all right for themselves, were good citizens and hard workers with a lovely family. Northup was educated, and had connection in his part of the world. But that didn't protect him from kidnappers, who tricked him into accompanying them to Washington, where they drugged him and sold him to a slave trader.
I've read several slave narratives at this point, so unfortunately, none of the details of Northup's tale were shocking. Disheartening, yes. And Northup gives you the real deal, not beating around the bush when describing the ways that Patsey, a young woman, is victimized by their owners. The cruelest of base human emotions drive their interactions with her: lust and jealousy and pride, and Patsey is helpless against it. It is far too easy to imagine this happening to millions of other helpless people during this shameful time in our history.
Northup's perspective is especially valuable because of his lawful status as a freeman. His own father had been freed when he was young, his mother a free woman, so Soloman was never a slave until he was 30. He then had an outsiders' perspective on things. He could, for instance, call bullshit on the idea that black people are intellectually inferior. He being born free, with the ability to travel and to learn, was a stark contrast to his fellow slaves who had never known anything but cotton fields and swamps and degradation. How can intellect flourish in an environment designed to suppress it?
Northup was in Louisiana, in the bayous, where he states that treatment of slaves was harsher than anywhere else. I've read other sources that would support this. Still, he has a forgiving nature and makes a distinction between kind masters and cruel masters. I find the kind masters like Ford to be terrible hypocrites, but I'm sure that Northup much preferred Ford's ignorant but well-meaning management to Epps's drunken cruelty.
Northup got lucky and made a friend of a visiting Canadian nomad, who got in touch with Northup's New York connections. It was the son, or maybe grandson, of Northup's father's master (the one who freed him), who came to retrieve him. I found it kind of inappropriate that this Henry Northup guy didn't drop everything and go free someone he claims to call a friend, rather than wait several months to tie up some unrelated legal affairs. Like damn, don't offer to help the guy and then leave his family hanging that long. This does not affect Solomon's gratitude, but I found it messed up.
Northup attempts to have the men involved in his kidnapping prosecuted, but they all manage to get away with it. It's not difficult to imagine that they'd done this to other people, and maybe did it some more after they were acquitted. You see these other slave narratives, of getting to freedom and starting a new life of peace and freedom, but the danger wasn't truly over. Northup never was a slave before he was sucked in to that disgusting institution. And he acknowledges that he was lucky to have friends and the laws of New York to eventually get him out.
Northup was home with his family as he wrote his memoirs. He was an active abolitionist for a while, but then dropped off the radar. He was rumored to have been kidnapped again, but historians don't buy into it and neither do I. He was kidnapped in the first place because he trusted two white strangers; I highly doubt he was ever so trusting again.
No comments:
Post a Comment