The great voyage of Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery has long ago entered our national mind and bloodstream to flourish as both a creation myth and a national epic. Recently, I was shocked into awareness as I discovered the details page by page. But stuff happens, and our early history offers many such appalling stories, including one which many of us have bypassed, ignored or been unable to extract from its distracting narrative environment. If Solomon Northrup’s original chronicle weren’t so specific and persuasive, we might be inclined to skepticism concerning both the mercurial nature of our species and the victim’s strength of character. In the film, a free black man living in a community where he has no expectations of abduction is seized and enslaved, then must struggle for over a decade to maintain his spirit until he can be identified, freed again and allowed to return to his family and life as he had once known it. Recent attention to the fine McQueen/Ridley “12 Years a Slave” invites us to consider the harrowing instability of even the most personal elements of our existence.
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