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4.23 AVERAGE
4.23 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racial slurs, Slavery, Violence
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
This is the most important book I have ever read on the subject of American slavery. Not just because it is a clearly written first person account, but because Solomon Northup was a free man, a Northerner like myself, who grew up in a part of the U.S. where slavery was anathema. Even more personal for me was the fact that Solomon was from upstate New York and had lived in Saratoga Springs - a town I have visited, and where I have family history- before he was kidnapped.
Being able to envision Solomon’s home territory, reading about his life as a husband, father, family man, working on Lake Champlain and the New York canals…. all of this brought home to me the reality and quality of his life as a free man, a real person with a life. A life that mattered. The account of his kidnapping, the stark and unembroidered descriptions of the men who conspired to rob him of his freedom, out of sheer greed - it makes for a shocking and terrifying narrative. The terror is rooted in the verifiable truth of every word of Solomon’s story.
(I have been reading in parallel “Solomon Northup: the Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave”, by David Fiske et Al. The authors of this book have painstakingly retraced every step and every moment of Northup’s narrative, and have verified every particle of it.)
Northup does not add much in the way of the maudlin sentimentality we tend to associate with 19th century travelogues. This is no pleasure trip down memory lane. It’s a searing trauma, burned into his memory over the course of 11 years, 8 months, and 26 days. Days of beatings, curses, torture, humiliation, physical deprivation, and near-death experiences, endured over year upon year, with almost no hope of relief. All experienced by a man who grew up north of Albany, and had never expected to travel south of the Mason-Dixon Line, much less spend more than a decade of his life picking cotton on a Louisiana plantation. This fact is brought home to the reader repeatedly: the constant sense of the wrongness of Northup’s enslavement, within the broader context of the wrongness of enslavement generally. Even his brief wistful mention of the absence of apples in the otherwise fertile South, hits hard; just as he could never forget who he was and where he was from, neither can we.
Perhaps the most chilling and horrible moment I experienced reading Twelve Years a Slave was towards the end, when Northup commented upon the eldest son of his enslaver, a tween boy who had taken to imitating his father. The descriptions of this kid avidly learning to whip the enslaved adults bent over in his family’s cotton field, while his proud father watched and grinned….. Just be prepared as best you can.
Moments like these explain how it is possible that our country still continues its racist practices and ideologies. It’s been 172 years since Solomon Northup and his enslaved companions experienced brutal exploitation for the sole purpose of enriching a group of avaricious and talentless sociopaths (yes, you heard me). Ending slavery didn’t end the mindset of those who believed themselves entitled to the free labor of African Americans, and who believed fervently in white supremacy. It simply hardened itself into a kernel of spite and grievance which, handed down from generation to generation, continues to poison us all. The Confederacy may have been defeated in battle, but its practitioners passed down their beliefs to their children and grandchildren; their hate-filled pathology wormed its way into the brains of their offspring and lives on, fattening itself upon spite and violence even today.
Our only remedy is to be reminded of the truth, to know what has really gone on in our country, no matter how hard it is to read and to reckon with. A wise person once said that the truth will set us free, and truer words have never been said. Solomon Northup wrote down the truth of his experiences, so that these deeds will never be forgotten: neither the deeds of those who exploited him, nor the deeds of those who worked to return him to freedom, and to prosecute his kidnappers. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to face and know all of these truths, to better understand who we are, where we’ve come from, and the struggle that remains. This isn’t over; trauma’s echoes still ripple among us, and it is left to each generation to reckon with our history, to read and understand, and to act justly and with empathy.
Being able to envision Solomon’s home territory, reading about his life as a husband, father, family man, working on Lake Champlain and the New York canals…. all of this brought home to me the reality and quality of his life as a free man, a real person with a life. A life that mattered. The account of his kidnapping, the stark and unembroidered descriptions of the men who conspired to rob him of his freedom, out of sheer greed - it makes for a shocking and terrifying narrative. The terror is rooted in the verifiable truth of every word of Solomon’s story.
(I have been reading in parallel “Solomon Northup: the Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave”, by David Fiske et Al. The authors of this book have painstakingly retraced every step and every moment of Northup’s narrative, and have verified every particle of it.)
Northup does not add much in the way of the maudlin sentimentality we tend to associate with 19th century travelogues. This is no pleasure trip down memory lane. It’s a searing trauma, burned into his memory over the course of 11 years, 8 months, and 26 days. Days of beatings, curses, torture, humiliation, physical deprivation, and near-death experiences, endured over year upon year, with almost no hope of relief. All experienced by a man who grew up north of Albany, and had never expected to travel south of the Mason-Dixon Line, much less spend more than a decade of his life picking cotton on a Louisiana plantation. This fact is brought home to the reader repeatedly: the constant sense of the wrongness of Northup’s enslavement, within the broader context of the wrongness of enslavement generally. Even his brief wistful mention of the absence of apples in the otherwise fertile South, hits hard; just as he could never forget who he was and where he was from, neither can we.
Perhaps the most chilling and horrible moment I experienced reading Twelve Years a Slave was towards the end, when Northup commented upon the eldest son of his enslaver, a tween boy who had taken to imitating his father. The descriptions of this kid avidly learning to whip the enslaved adults bent over in his family’s cotton field, while his proud father watched and grinned….. Just be prepared as best you can.
Moments like these explain how it is possible that our country still continues its racist practices and ideologies. It’s been 172 years since Solomon Northup and his enslaved companions experienced brutal exploitation for the sole purpose of enriching a group of avaricious and talentless sociopaths (yes, you heard me). Ending slavery didn’t end the mindset of those who believed themselves entitled to the free labor of African Americans, and who believed fervently in white supremacy. It simply hardened itself into a kernel of spite and grievance which, handed down from generation to generation, continues to poison us all. The Confederacy may have been defeated in battle, but its practitioners passed down their beliefs to their children and grandchildren; their hate-filled pathology wormed its way into the brains of their offspring and lives on, fattening itself upon spite and violence even today.
Our only remedy is to be reminded of the truth, to know what has really gone on in our country, no matter how hard it is to read and to reckon with. A wise person once said that the truth will set us free, and truer words have never been said. Solomon Northup wrote down the truth of his experiences, so that these deeds will never be forgotten: neither the deeds of those who exploited him, nor the deeds of those who worked to return him to freedom, and to prosecute his kidnappers. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to face and know all of these truths, to better understand who we are, where we’ve come from, and the struggle that remains. This isn’t over; trauma’s echoes still ripple among us, and it is left to each generation to reckon with our history, to read and understand, and to act justly and with empathy.
Really nice writing style, especially compared to other 1850s sort of writing. Very approachable, but with exceptional vocabulary.
This was required reading for my Louisiana history class in college, but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history.
For the history surrounding it, it’s actually pretty PG in its telling. I want to recognize the selfish side in me by wishing to have perspectives from his family about his time gone and returning. It is worth reading.
I should stop reading slave narratives I do not like them. I think they serve as historical documents but we are way past the need to “learn” that slavery was awful and evil. If you need a book to teach you that you should probably just die idk.
challenging
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
One of the few books to make me cry irl