12 Years A Slave Book Analysis

The movie 12 Years a Slave based on a true story written by John Ridley and directed by Steve McQueen III shows the ugly truth about America's early sin during 1841 through 1853. The movie was centered around a free African American male named Solomon Northup from Saratoga Springs, New York. Solomon live in New York with his wife and two children, he took care of his family by working as a violinist. Him being a great violinist got him a job opportunity in Washington D.C by two white men but sadly he didn't work that job that long. The two white men drugged, kidnapped and took him to a slave pen where he would be shipped to New Orleans with other African Americans. He would be transferred to Georgia and giving a new identity as Platt and start
This particular part in the movie will show you the cold hearted white men of the south. Along with Northup there was a mother named Eliza and her two kids that was getting sold but the sad thing about them being sold was that they were getting separated from each other. The mother cried and begged not to get separated from her two kids but being taught in class I knew that the mother would not be with her kids again. African Americans were not considered as human beings and white southerners just seen them as property, so being sold and separated from your family would happen all the time and no sympathy was giving to the families. In the book Voices of Freedom, it goes into detail about this part of the movie where Eliza begs and cries for her son and it sates " Then Eliza ran to him; embraced him passionately; kissed him again and again; told him to remember her-all the while her tears falling in the boy's face like rain. Freeman damned her, calling her a blubbering, bawling wench, and ordered her to go to her place, and behave herself; and be somebody. He swore he wouldn't stand such stuff but a little
In the movie it shows a couple of scenes where the slave master would preach to the slaves what would happen if they disobey them and he said you would get beat and things of that nature and most slaves would obey them because the readings of the Bible. This is where I get confused about certain things in the Bible because what God would allow his people to be kidnapped, treated like animals and beaten or killed? I think slave owners would twist the words of the bible to put fear in slaves' heart and so they won't rebel. In the text Voices of Freedom, it talks about how white southerners would use the Bible as an argument to make slavery an okay thing. It states " White southerners developed an elaborate set of arguments defending slavery in the period before the Civil War. They insisted that slaves were better off than free laborers in the North and that blacks were inherently liable to lapse into "barbarism" if freed from supervision of paternalistic whites. One pillar of proslavery thought was the idea that the institution was sanctioned by the Bible." Eric Foner, Voices of Freedom, pp.