What makes Solomon Northrup a painfully effective avatar through which the modern viewer can experience slavery is that, like almost all of us, he was not born into it. A free man of color living in New York, he takes a job as a musician that takes him to Washington, D.C. There he is drugged, chained, and sold.
I can’t say I’ve ever met someone in real life who was an actual slave. I’ve met hostages and prisoners of war. I’ve met victims of rape and abuse. I’ve seen in most a certain kind of post-traumatic shock affect–a guardedness, a deep sorrow that is something more noble than self-pity (though some have that), more deep and palpable than emotional scarring. One thing that life has taken from them, never to return, is the easy confidence that such soul-smothering experiences only happen to other people — that something in our heritage, our make up, our relationship with a higher power, makes us immune. I saw bits of that affect in the final scenes of 12 Years a Slave, and I deeply appreciated the film’s attempts (successful in my case) to make the viewer feel compassion for the victims and not just hatred towards the oppressors. Even those who survive pay too great a price.
For the American slave, his or her descendants, and those of us born into a world scarred by the flames of race hatred that threaten to consume us still, Christianity must tragically be something less than an unambiguous comfort. There are good people of faith, to be sure, but how many does it take to undo the damage of a single whip wielded by one who claims to rule by the favor of God?
“There’s no such thing as sin,” Epps insists as he first whips Patsy and then commands Solomon to do so more brutally than his own seared conscience will allow. Is it possible to make an historically and intellectually honest film about slavery that does not reluctantly come to the same conclusion? Can one see the depths of total depravity that God will allow us to descend and still believe that “sin” and “salvation” are more than just words?
In a single scene where Solomon stands at first aloof and indignant from a choir of singers and gradually succumbs to the need to add his own anguished voice to their song, Chiwetel Ejiofor’s face conveys more about the fundamental, anti-Christian wrongness of slavery than any sermon could.
Father forgive us, for we know not what we do. — Kenneth R. Morefield (2025)
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