She eventually dies of a broken heart and body worn out from toil. Ford, cannot tolerate her overwhelming sadness. In the narrative, Solomon describes Eliza’s fall from domestic to field slave - because her new mistress, Mrs. Solomon befriends and tries to comfort Eliza, but there is no comfort for her. Eliza had believed that her sexual relationship with her owner, which resulted in the birth of her youngest child, would protect her family from sale, since he had promised to free all of them.Įliza mourns her losses bitterly throughout the early part of Northup’s saga and, as well, in McQueen’s film. He first meet Eliza, a concubine with two children, who epitomizes the loss so many enslaved women and their young endured as a result of sale and separation. slave pen, he takes note of the women around him, providing his reader with detailed accounts of their personal histories - their marital status and their children, their physical attributes, particular skills, and personalities. Nonetheless, Northup’s autobiography offers the historian of slavery and Southern women a rich palette of Southern slave and female life - some of it captured remarkably well in McQueen’s film version.įrom the first day that Solomon is enslaved in a Washington, D.C. His views of the women he encountered in the South perhaps were shaped more by the thirty-three years he had lived free in the North, than the twelve he labored as a slave in Louisiana. He brought these lenses of free manhood, Christianity, middle class status and intelligence to the terrifying scenario of slavery he endured. On morning in March 1841, in Saratoga Springs, New York, when Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton approached Solomon Northup as part of an elaborate scheme to kidnap and sell him as a slave, their target was about thirty-three, a literate, urban, Christian husband and father of three, a skilled craftsman, inventor, and musician. Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (which Northup dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose own character “Eliza” was the most famous iconic slave woman of the era) certainly made it possible for a Northern audience to accept the details of rampant sexual abuse and forced concubinage detailed, for example, in Louisa Picquet’s Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Slave Life and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, both published in 1861. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, True stories of the inability of enslaved women to maintain the gendered conventions of the day - domesticity, sexual purity, and maternal sacrifice - because of their status as physical and sexual laborers who could not be legally married or have parental control over their children, abound in published accounts from the late antebellum era. Published descriptions of the plight of enslaved women, of course, made for an important abolitionist device intended to gain sympathy for their cause. Indeed, one of the aspects of Northup’s autobiography that convinced director McQueen to adapt it to film was the Northrup's depiction of slave women in his lengthy account. It is, without a doubt, one of the best depictions of antebellum slave life put to film and, along with, Haile Gerima’s 1993 masterwork Sankofa, Stan Lathan’s 1987 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the indomitable classic Roots of 1977, and Gabriel Ranger’s 2010 I Am Slave, the story of the contemporary enslavement of Mende Nazer, 12 Years a Slave presents some of the most compelling, and soon to be iconic, images of slave women on celluloid. The film has received much early critical acclaim, and rightfully so. and sold as a slave in Louisiana, is the focus of the new film 12 Years a Slave, directed by British filmmaker Steve McQueen and based on Northup’s 1853 published autobiographical account. The ordeal of Solomon Northup, a free man of color from New York who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C.
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