Control Review: 12 Years A Slave

I, Dalton Lewis, read a book.

It’s called 12 Years a Slave.

It’s by Solomon Northup.

He was a slave for twelve years.

Let’s be honest for a second. This is a wonderful book about living through the worst hell that a person can live through and finding a way out the other end. I was impressed by the intelligent nature of Solomon’s writing and description of his life’s events. This is a good book, and short, too. Everyone should read this book.

Solomon is an intellectual free black man from the north who gets sick when traveling to Washington, DC. He finds himself taken and kidnapped by a terrifying man who enslaves him and pretends that he is not a free man — pretends that he is a slave. This man holds him for several days and then takes him down south and sells him and gives him a new name and does not allow him to use his real name.

He works for a time chopping lumber for a slaver who is nice, as far as slavers go, who teaches them the Bible. Still — Solomon emphasizes that almost all slavers tend towards the ill will when given power over their slaves, and that his experience with slavery was a terrible one.

Then he is sold to another man, an odious one, and he is asked to help with carpentry. He is wrongfully to be whipped by a weak and small and petty white man, so he beats this white man to a pulp and tries to run away.

This leads to a series of terrible circumstances which play out like a horror story with one minor change: they actually happened.

Solomon’s description of the work he had to do is harrowing. Working the cotton fields is a terrible thing for a person to have to do — and he had to do other work around the cotton fields because he wasn’t any good at the cotton fields. If one doesn’t get two hundred pounds of cotton in a day one is not a dutiful slave and gets beaten. Solomon couldn’t do two hundred pounds and needed other work, carpentry and other tasks, like moving things from one area to another.

The eventual master for the majority of the time was a vile and terrible Edwin Epps. Epps was a drinker, a rapist, and a racist who tortured his slaves when he drank — which was frequently. Solomon had to try to survive impossible situations with this monster mistreating him and the other slaves of the plantation.

This book reminded me of a horror story. It reads like a good horror story in that the main character endures terrible hardships that one cannot imagine and must continue to fight on despite all of the problems he is facing. It has rape, murder, and all the worst character traits one can find in people. I find it fascinating that such an honorable person as Solomon Northup can be so mistreated for so long by such idiots and monsters as Epps and his like. It boggles the mind how villains can hurt wonderful people who are their betters.

So many recent comic book movies are milquetoast. They are boring slogs without any real bad guy — without any real villain who is a bad guy who deserves to be stopped. Well, this book is a real, nonfiction book, an autobiographical account, and its villains are better than virtually all of the recent Marvel villains.

Many recent writers could read this to learn how to develop a world more effectively. This writer — Solomon Northup — creates a sense of place and setting for the reader, with a plantation and its surroundings becoming a place we see in our minds and understand and believe. We feel this place because it is described so well. Many contemporary writers don’t do this.

In summary — if you want to read a real-life horror story about the worst in people, read this book. Highly recommended.

Thanks, and take care, friends.