Opinion

Hollywood comes to terms with slavery

'12 Years a Slave' shows brutality of institution but misses complicity of American society as a whole

November 17, 2013 6:00AM ET

by Daniel Levinson Wilk

12 YEARS A SLAVE, second from left: Chiwetel Ejiofor; second from right: Quvenzhane Wallis; photo by Jaap Buitendijk

Fox Searchlight / Everett Collection

Hollywood is finally coming to terms with slavery. For the first half of the 20th century, popular movies depicted happy slaves who loved their masters and mistresses. After performing such a role in "Gone With the Wind," Hattie McDaniel was rewarded with an Academy Award for best supporting actress. Subsequent decades offered movies with white protagonists fighting slavery ("Glory," "Amistad") and many movies about the Civil War that ignored slavery altogether. Last year's "Django Unchained" looked more unflinchingly at the master-slave relationship, but it too placed a white man at the center of the fight for liberation and revenge, and elements of parody undercut the seriousness of its message. In this year's "12 Years a Slave," a major motion picture finally tells the story of slavery in sober, graphic detail. It is aesthetic without aestheticizing violence. And it places the experience of the slaves themselves firmly at the center of the story.

And yet something is still missing — the complicity of the rest of American society. "12 Years a Slave" shows Saratoga, N.Y., as a community free of racism; in fact, the last slaves in New York state were emancipated only 14 years before the story begins. Washington, D.C., is presented as a place where white and black men dined together in fancy restaurants without reproach. The role of most Americans in supporting slavery — the federal government, local authorities, Northern representatives of the cotton trade, the banking and shipping and insurance industries, consumers who relied on the products of slavery, etc., etc. — is ignored.

The greatest missed opportunity in "12 Years a Slave" involves the deep, multifaceted relationship between slavery and the early American hotel industry. This involves, first of all, a misrepresentation of the career of the protagonist, Solomon Northup. The movie gives the impression that Northup earned enough as a musician in Saratoga to support his wife and children in style. This was not the case; as his autobiography makes clear, he and his wife lived and worked in Saratoga's United States Hotel during its busy season. This omission is significant, and not just because it suggests a higher income and status for Northup. The movie does show him drugged and kidnapped in a Washington, D.C., hotel, but this is just one of many roles that hotels historically played in battles over slavery.

Taverns and hotels relied on slave labor. The famous freedwoman and abolitionist lecturer Sojourner Truth slaved for two different tavern keepers in upstate New York. Her first memory as a child was of the "hotel" cellar where she slept with other slaves on a little straw laid out to cover puddles and stinking mud. Down south, William Wells Brown also worked in a hotel, which he described in a slave narrative published in Boston in 1847. His master whipped his slaves, slashed them and "smoked" them — forcing them to inhale the harsh smoke of burning tobacco stems. Guests who witnessed such punishments rarely complained.

Even the most powerful friends usually could not protect black waiters from fugitive hunters.

Slaves sometimes used hotels as stops on the Underground Railroad to freedom. Illiterate Ellen Craft's light skin allowed her to pose as a white man traveling with a slave (really her husband, William), her arm in a sling so she could beg off when asked to sign a hotel register. The Crafts told their story in an 1860 slave narrative. Likewise, Henry Bibb's 1849 narrative describes how he ran away, posed as a white man to ask a hotel desk clerk for the schedule of arriving steamboats, and then slipped back into blackness as he trailed a group of whites onto a ship, carrying an empty trunk on his shoulder.

But more slaves missed the opportunities for escape that hotels offered. Northup wrote that while he worked at the United States Hotel, he counseled many slaves traveling through the North with their masters to run away. Though tempted by freedom, each one feared reprisal and chose to remain in bondage. A scene in "12 Years a Slave" echoes this dilemma — a slave wanders into a store in Saratoga where Northup and his family are shopping, gives Northup a meaningful look and then is called back out into the street by his master. The scene is so subtle that many moviegoers probably miss its significance.

Once north, Harriet Tubman and other escaped slaves found work in hotels, and fugitive hunters came looking for them there. Jerry Van Horn, a waiter at Irving House in New York, learned that bounty hunters were coming with a warrant and fled for Canada. At the Monongahela House in Pittsburgh, two slave catchers tried to abduct a waiter; black workers from neighboring hotels rushed to the scene, beat the white men and drove them off. In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., fugitive hunters entered the Phoenix Hotel during the breakfast rush looking for a waiter named Bill. They clubbed him, chased him from the hotel into a river, and shot him in the head but did not kill him. A crowd of breakfast diners followed them out and began to cry "shame," forcing the men back, and Bill escaped.

These were the exceptions; even the most powerful friends usually could not protect black waiters. In 1848, a waiter in a Washington, D.C., boardinghouse inhabited by several congressmen was gagged and put in irons as his wife looked on, and sent down to the slave market of New Orleans. On the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio offered a resolution asking for an investigation, stating that such kidnappings had become common in Washington "and are extremely painful to many of the members of this House, as well as in themselves inhuman." Giddings was among the staunchest opponents of slavery in Congress, and had already been censured by his fellow congressmen for violating the "gag rule" against anti-slavery petitions in the House. On the motion of Rep. John Gayle of Alabama, Gidding's resolution was tabled by a vote of 94 to 88, and Congress never took it up again.

In a little over two hours, "12 Years a Slave" cannot outline the role that all American institutions played in sustaining slavery: government, industry, church, press, families that taught children to accept the enslavement of other human beings. By ignoring Solomon Northup's career as a hotel worker, though, the movie misses an easy opportunity to allude to that complicity.

Daniel Levinson Wilk is an associate professor of American history at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.