What a treasure this book is. I'm surprised it isn't required reading in schools. Though I didn't see the movie, that's how Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup came to my attention. Not a long book, it was written and published within months of his return to freedom and is acclaimed for the detail used to describe life for a slave, such as what they ate, where they slept, how to pick cotton. I was intrigued by juxtaposition of fancy high written English against the spoken English. And then of course there's the institution of slavery itself, hard enough for me to understand. It's interesting to see Northup try to understand the difference in culture between the north and the south, and concluding that slave-owning breeds cruelty as a learned behavior. I absolutely agree.
Some quotes from the book:
Page 23: Surely they would seek me out -- they would deliver me from thralldom. Alas! I had not then learned the measure of "man's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain.
Page 28: So we passed, handcuffed and in silence, through the streets of Washington -- through the Capital of a nation, whose theory of government, we are told, rests on the foundation of man's inalienable right, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!
Page 113: When the evidence, clear and indisputable, was laid before him that I was a free man, and as much entitled to my liberty as he -- when, on the day I left, he was informed that I had a wife and children, as dear to me as his own babes to him, he only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore me from him, and declaring he would find out the man who had forwarded the letter that disclosed the place of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in money, and would take his life.
Page 164: The influence of the iniquitous system necessarily fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.
... Brought up with such ideas -- in the notion that we stand without the pale of humanity -- no wonder the oppressors of my people are a pitiless and unrelenting race.
Page 195: I was only a "nigger" and knew my place, but felt as strongly as if I had been a white man, that it would have been an inward comfort, had I dared to have given him a parting kick.
