The film 12 Years a Slave is directed by Steve McQueen, who based this narrative on Solomon Northup’s autobiographical experience. The film exposes the brutality of slavery and the dehumanizing repercussions of human subjugation. Initially, the film was created entirely different from the 1853 classic narrative until its producers discovered Northup’s narrative and the importance of historical documents in relation to this film.

This film depicts Solomon Northup, an African American man who is now a free citizen in New York, during his years of slavery. Northup is approached by two men who persuade him to be sold into slavery by promising him a lucrative career. The two men’s motives, on the other hand, are to make money by selling him. Northup had a wife and two children and was a free man in New York. The injustices he confronts after realizing that all he is now to White folks is a black man on a plantation are horrifying. While McQueen’s adaptation of Twelve Years a Slave is essentially accurate to Northup’s original story, it overlooks some of the more uncomfortable subjects that surround slave history.

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Reflections on Slavery in "12 Years a Slave": Unveiling the Horrors

A Historical Dive into Slavery’s Origins and Structure

Such a justification has resulted in a ‘chain of silence’ about slavery, or the obscurity of enslaved people as historical subjects, which has been exacerbated by the continuance of racism. Chapter four of the book, in the 2013 publication, addresses the slave system. Tobacco and cotton could be developed by farmers with the assistance of a few farm workers. The local people had been wiped out due to the first European settlers. So, farmers were brought from Europe while on the British islands; these farmers were indentured servants and sentenced prisoners.

Indentured servants are women and men who consented to work for a given number of years for a fixed wage, their board, and the cost of their voyage out to the islands. Sentenced prisoners could be transported to the plantations for a given amount of terms rather than being killed or imprisoned. This framework did not supply enough labor as the tobacco farms became sugar plantations. Sugar required a huge number of workers.

The Portuguese had been utilizing enslaved Africans to grow sugar in the Madeira Islands since 1460. Africa was nearer to the Caribbean than Europe was. African atmosphere was similar to the Caribbean. Europeans claimed that the ‘uncivilized’ Africans were not human. This kind of reasoning enabled the inhumanity of slavery to be dismissed. Therefore, Africa appeared to be the obvious place for labor for the sugar plantations.

Hierarchy and Work in the Plantations

There was a strict ‘social order’ on the plantations. The white owner was at the highest of the social structure. Under the white owner are other white employees, for example, bookkeepers and overseers. Among the black slaves, carpenters or sugar boilers were above ordinary field slaves. The head of the field slaves were women and men called ‘drivers,’ whose job was to keep the field slaves working diligently by using the whip if necessary.

Those slaves who worked in the house were thought to be of a higher status than field slaves. It would be a horrible punishment for a house servant to be put to do field work due to the lighter obligations in the house. There was an order based on skin tones. The darkest slaves normally had the hardest job/work. The light-skinned slaves, frequently the offspring of the owner or manager by a slave woman, were given better jobs or kept as house servants or trained for a job. A few slaves worked in towns. However, the majority worked on plantations for 12 hours or more a day.

Plantation work requires numerous hands. Sugar, particularly, was a labor-intensive job, and everybody was required to work, including kids and old slaves. Work on a plantation relied upon harvest development. For instance, the process of sugar required different skills from those needed for tobacco and rice. There were skilled jobs that Africans did: such as blacksmiths, sugared boilers, carpenters, etc. These jobs generally went to men.

Women, for the most, did the hands-on work. However, some worked as house slaves. Frequently, men were brought from Africa as slaves compared to women, but some plantation owners favored women as the ‘harder laborers.’ Sometimes women outnumbered the men, which meant that they had to do all the heavy fieldwork, such as digging and cutting. Moreover, ‘marriages between slaves were demoralized although many slaves formed connections and had children’.

Frequently the relationship was wit