Patsey's Plea: Black Women's Survival in '12 Years A Slave'

You know a performance is powerful when you’re still thinking about it weeks after seeing the film. This is the case of the Lupita Nyong’o in Steve McQueen’s film adaptation of Solomon Northrup's 12 Years A Slave. She plays Patsey, an enslaved woman whom Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) meets after being sold to Edwin Epps’ New Orleans plantation.
 

While there is little comparison between the two films, 12 Years A Slave and Django Unchained both feature enslaved black women in rare cinematic representations.

However, Twelve Years A Slave does something that Django Unchained was unable to. It portrays fully realized black women who lived during slavery, and who had voices. In Django Unchained, Kerry Washington’s character Broomhilda appears in numerous scenes, but never really says or feels anything beyond loud shrieks of pain, surprise, or fear. Her performance was intentionally limited by director Quentin Tarantino, who fashioned Django as her savior, or the only way she would escape her doomed fate.

 

There is a scene in 12 Years A Slave where Patsey, played beautifully by Nyong’o, makes an impassioned plea to sadistic plantation owner Edwin Epps that she be able to remain clean and receive soap after picking profuse amounts of cotton for him. There is a fragility and strength in her face, and a will of defiance despite his sudden brutality. There is no happy ending here. She will not ride off with Solomon on a horse as the plantation burns down.

 

Many have described Django Unchained as a love story, but after seeing the film, I wondered, “what love?” Love between Django and Dr. King Schultz? Love between Samuel L. Jackson's pathologically subservient Stephen and plantation owner Calvin Candie? These forms of love were a lot more palpable and developed than any love between Django and Broomhilda. A love story demands more of the cinematic form, and more of its characters. The relationship between Solomon and Patsey, while marred with suffering, is one of love but not the Hollywood, savior love.

 

In one scene, Patsey asks Solomon to help end her life, an act that we must see as sacred, given the endless violence and potential death she faces at the hands of people who hate her.

 

Patsey, and other black female characters in 12 Years A Slave become human because they cannot be saved. They exist in the slave economy, and they find ways to survive within their given context. I thought about Patsey for a long time after seeing 12 Years A Slave. I thought about how she collapsed when Northrup finally rides off into his freedom, and her face, bloodied by Epps’ mixture of hatred and sexual obsession. I thought about the dolls she crafted, and how she might’ve lived for the rest of her life. I want to see a movie about Patsey.

 

There is a tendency in cinema to frame historical events from a patriarchal lens, connecting them with a man’s journey to fight or survive injustice. Women may be featured, but they don’t assume the role of the “hero.” Especially within films that address black history, there’s a dearth in gender inclusion when it comes to telling these stories. But after seeing the depth and beauty of Lupita Nyong’o in this role, I am reminded that there’s a need for these stories, told from black women’s perspectives, highlighting the distinct struggles that they faced.

 

These women do not have to be portrayed as the “hero,” for that model doesn’t always fit historical periods where so many people were suffering, but they need to be prominently featured and well developed. The stories and ideas are endless. There are the more well-known figures like Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and then there are those stories and women shrouded in mystery, waiting to be explored, similar to Northrup’s 12 Years A Slave, a book many didn’t know about until the film adaptation was made.

 

As 12 Years A Slave garners more Oscar season buzz, Solomon and Patsey will find their way into the hearts and minds of many. Their struggles will be associated with the horrors of American slavery, and not merely with that of genre event or spectacle. Hopefully, this is just the beginning.

 

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Nijla Mu'min is a writer and filmmaker from the East Bay Area. Visit her website HERE.

160 Years - Looking back on slavery... Looking into my great-great-parents lives!

"12 Years a Slave", the harrowing historical feature, based on the 1853 autobiography "Twelve Years a Slave" by Solomon Northup.


Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. after being lured from Saratoga Springs, New York in 1841 and sold into slavery. He worked on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before his release.

“Slavery wasn’t as torturous as all that.” 12 YEARS A SLAVE Oct 2013

David Edelstein's review.

Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, is an even-toned but acid account of unimaginable horror: how, in 1841, a pair of traveling showmen lured him from his home and family in Saratoga Springs, New York, with the promise of fast money in return for playing the violin; how they drugged and sold him to slavers in Washington, D.C.; and how he quickly learned that assertions of his true identity only got him beaten harder. ­Northup has a roving intelligence and curiosity. He even stops to explain what cotton picking and sugar harvesting entail. His first master, Ford, was a “kind, noble, Christian man” who nonetheless “never doubted the moral right of one man holding another in subjection.” His final one, Epps, was an alcoholic and a psychopath. “He is known,” Northup writes, “as a ­‘nigger-breaker,’ distinguished for the faculty of subduing the slave … He looked upon a colored man not as a human being … but as … mere live property, no better, except in value, than his mule or dog.”

Steve McQueen, the director of the wildly acclaimed adaptation, 12 Years a Slave, has a specialty: He likes to fix his camera on a person in extremis — starving to death in Hunger, shaming himself sexually in Shame, and now being tortured by monstrous white slavers in the South. His shots are high-toned, mythic, frieze-dried. They’re intended to induce ­claustrophobia, physical and existential. McQueen’s images have considerable power, and I’d watch his films less guardedly if I thought he were searching for something more than his characters’ reactions to extreme degradation. In this case, at least, he has found a milieu in which a feeling of entrapment should — and does — permeate every frame.
 

The painterly malignancy is unrelenting. Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) stands in prison awaiting his sale, and his white shirt glows like the central Inquisition martyr’s in Goya’s Third of May. As each new white character is introduced, we’re apt to search his or her face for a sign of compassion or empathy, only to be walloped by the general inhumanity — as Solomon is literally walloped by a hitherto avuncular-looking Paul Giamatti. The benevolent Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) only half-rises to defend his slaves’ humanity before fearfully settling back into the status quo.

But life is far worse when Solomon arrives at his final plantation: the house of Epps (Michael Fassbender) and his Gorgon of a wife (Sarah Paulson), whose overriding goal is to see her husband’s prized slave mistress, Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), suffer.

Critics have proclaimed ­Fassbender’s Epps an incredible performance, and it is — in its way. He declaims, he barnstorms, he seizes the space. He’s a predator whose moments of friendliness elicit thoughts like Gee, Grandma, what big teeth you have. ­Fassbender leaves no doubt he’d be a superb Richard III or Macbeth — or werewolf. But his high theatricality keeps him at the level of melodrama. He doesn’t solve the riddle of this terrible man. As his spouse, Paulson does something more interesting. Mistress Epps often tries to affect a mask of kindness but is thoroughly poisoned by jealousy. Punishment of the slave on whom her husband fixates becomes an addiction.

John Ridley’s screenplay has fancy period dialogue and is generally faithful to the facts, and the acting befits the high stakes. Cumberbatch gives a finely detailed portrait of a man who cannot reconcile two contradictory ideas: that slaves are human and that they are chattel. Alfre Woodard has a startling scene as a former slave who has become a “Mistress,” the common-law wife of a white man, and luxuriates in the way she has gamed the system. The movie’s low point is the appearance of co-producer Brad Pitt, cast as a golden-locked carpenter — a savior — who listens to Solomon and says, “Your story — it is amazing and in no good way.” It would have been more interesting if he’d gone against the grain and played the ­conscienceless master.
 

Ejiofor has been overdue for stardom since Dirty Pretty Things, and he’ll get it now. He’s the kind of great actor who can work in pantomime, conveying terror and anguish with the angle of his shoulders and the level of his head. At times he wears his disgust too visibly for a man who has supposedly learned to keep his head down, but the struggle to remain inside himself is vivid. McQueen builds two particularly stark images around him. In one, Solomon stands in the center of the frame with a noose around his neck, saved from death for striking an overseer but left to choke for hours on tiptoe while business goes on — and slave children play — behind him. Even more unnerving is a scene in which Epps hooks his arm around the neck of Solomon—betrayed after an attempt to post a letter to New York — with demonic intimacy.
 

I realize there’s a danger in suggesting that McQueen is guilty of overkill: that it could be taken as an attempt to say “Slavery wasn’t as torturous as all that.” The hell it wasn’t.

 From a political and humanist standpoint, there are plenty of reasons to champion 12 Years a Slave. In his book, Northup directly addresses an audience that (mind-bogglingly) still exists — the one that insists that many slaves were happy in the bosoms of their masters.

It should shame people with Confederate flags on their walls (“It’s about states’ rights!”) or Paula Deen types who harbor nostalgia for the elegance of the antebellum South. Epps reads Scripture to his slaves and lingers on a passage calling for them to be beaten “with many stripes” — proof that the Good Book can be employed in the service of manifold Evils. The movie nails all this, and it’s smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen’s directorial voice — cold, stark, deterministic — keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.

This review originally appeared in the October 21 issue of New York Magazine.