I wanted to share this absolutely amazing assessment of the movie, “12 Years A Slave” with my readers. I have had my own ambivalence about seeing the movie. I try not to be an emotional cutter and movies about slavery tend to affect me so deeply that I am immobilized for longer periods than I choose to be. I consider myself a student of African American history, yet, there is such a difference when you observe the oppression from a book or a class versus a movie. I think there is so much residual guilt for those of us who did not live through that time. Could we have endured slavery with the same grace, strength and courage as our ancestors.? Perhaps there lies the pain…
“Joyce is right about history being a nightmare –but it may be the nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” –James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village.”
If you follow me through social media you know I’m used to visiting plantation landscapes and dressing in the type of clothing enslaved people would wear. I’ve cooked the enslaved way in many states across the former Confederacy and Border states. I’ve picked cotton and worked in tobacco fields. I’ve been in rice and sugarcane fields in the Lowcountry and Lower Mississippi Valley dodging teenaged gators and poisonous snakes. Plantations blind with darkness don’t scare me and I almost take comfort from the spirits that have surrounded me. I have been in their presence—for real—and the ancestors have been both welcoming…
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Egos & Buffaloes 