Hybrid Book Review - The New Yorker

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The New Yorker – 11/6/2013

“Jezebel” and Solomon: Why Patsey Is the Hero of “12 Years a Slave”
By Amy Davidson

In the 1938 movie “Jezebel,” Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis, comes out on the porch at her plantation, Halcyon. It is Louisiana, 1853, and she has told her slaves to come sing for her party. They are gathered, swaying, when she tells them that she wants a different, earthier song—“Let’s Raise a Ruckus Tonight!” As her aunt and her guest, Amy, a New Yorker, watch with stricken expressions, Julie leads the slaves in the chorus, and draws them to her until she is entwined with half a dozen black children. “Come on, sing…. Have the little Yankee join in. Gonna raise a ruckus tonight. We have such charming customs down here.” Amy turns and flees. The next morning, while the women are waiting to hear the outcome of a duel Julie provoked, Amy suddenly screams, “Are you savages, you Southerners?”

There is a scene, similar but transformed, in “12 Years a Slave,” the new movie directed by Steve McQueen and based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Edwin Epps, a planter, has dragged his slaves out of bed to make music and dance for him and his wife. They move like dancers in a dream, half ritual and half gloom. Northup, who plays the fiddle, might as well be Orpheus. Then Patsey, a young woman played by Lupita Nyong’o, raises and twirls her arm in a gesture whose vivacity could never be choreographed. The mistress of the plantation looks at how her husband is watching Patsey, and then reaches for a heavy crystal decanter, which, with abrupt violence, she throws at Patsey, knocking her to the ground.

“Sell her,” she tells her husband.

Solomon Northup was a New Yorker who ended up on a series of Louisiana plantations after being kidnapped in 1841. In the movie “Jezebel,” Amy comes south because she has married Preston, a New Orleans banker who was once engaged to Julie (who is now deranged by jealousy). Amy, like Northup, is the “visitor from the North,” an archetype in films about the South. The visitor might be a carpetbagger, a Union colonel, or a Philadelphia detective. But the distance between Amy and Solomon is a measure of how radical, and powerful, “12 Years a Slave” is. The movies bear watching together, and not just because they are set in the same state and years. More than many films about American slavery—certainly more than “Gone With the Wind”—they engage with the poisoned intimacy in the relations between blacks and whites in the South. “Jezebel” does so in a way that is ultimately cowardly, not to say creepy. “12 Years a Slave” does so with a novel bravery—which is all the more striking in that it’s based on a book that’s a hundred and sixty years old. These stories were always there.

When Amy arrives at Halcyon and a slave opens the door, she looks at him and flinches, just a bit. Julie’s Aunt Belle asks if it is her first time in the South:

Amy: Yes, it’s beautiful—strange and beautiful, and a little frightening.
Aunt Belle: Frightening?
Amy: Because of its strangeness and beauty, I suppose.

“Jezebel” is a strange movie, at turns beautiful and ugly. Bette Davis, as Julie, is mesmerizing, but it’s hard to sympathize with a character who flirts by agreeing that William Lloyd Garrison should be hanged. The film was made largely for Davis, who got the role of Julie—the bad Southern belle—as a consolation for not being cast as Scarlett O’Hara, in “Gone with the Wind.” That film overshadowed “Jezebel” and, for a long time, all movies about American slavery; more recently, it has lost its grip, both because of the cartoonishness of its black characters and its tinny, dated artifice. It might have helped if Davis had played Scarlett; she might have brought a sense of the sensual rot of plantation life. “Jezebel” begins to pose one of the central questions that “12 Years a Slave” fully engages in: What does sex have to do with slavery? What does intimacy have to do with violence? In the absence of freedom, everything.

“The Story of a Woman Who was Loved … When She Should Have Been Whipped!” reads the title in the original theatrical trailer for “Jezebel.” This is not metaphorical: at least three characters suggest that Davis’s Julie would be a better hostess, niece, and woman if only someone would beat her up. Preston, her fiancé (played by Henry Fonda), almost does, charging up to her room brandishing a walking stick. But he puts it down, and almost leaves without it:

Julie: Oh Pres, you forgot your stick.
Preston: I also forgot to use it.

She proceeds to disobey and lose him to Amy. A contemporary viewer might think that she’s better off without a master who beat her. In the film, it’s a disaster.

What is the problem with Julie? According to Preston, it is that too many people listen to what she says. The ones we see doing so in the movie are, mostly, slaves. She talks to one slave, a child, about breaking horses by making them fear her. Mastery has made Julie forget how to obey; Preston, who is a banker and not a planter, has forgotten how to subdue someone wild. It is a twisted expression of the view that slavery messed up relations between men and women. One of the central arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery corrupted family relations, though they were often too delicate to say what that meant. “12 Years a Slave,” meanwhile, is not shy about that.

“In other situations—in a different society from that which exists on the shores of Bayou Boeuf, she would have been pronounced an elegant and fascinating woman,” Solomon Northup wrote in his memoir, describing Mrs. Epps, the planter’s wife. (The words could as easily apply to Julie.) Patsey, the young slave, was the victim of “a licentious master and a jealous mistress”; she was subject to sexual assaults from Mr. Epps, and violent ones from his wife, of whom Northup writes:

The pride of the haughty woman was aroused; the blood of the fiery southern boiled at the sight of Patsey, and nothing less than trampling out the life of the helpless bondwoman would satisfy her.

Amy, the visitor from New York, has a glimpse of this. But by the end of “Jezebel,” she has surrendered. Preston is stricken with yellow fever and about to be taken to a quarantined island; Amy wants to be there to nurse him. Julie persuades her to let her go instead:

Amy, do you know the Creole words for fever powder, for food and water, or how to talk to a sullen, overworked black boy and make him fear you and help you?

When Amy says she’ll risk it, Julie continues:

If you knew the horror of that place…. They’ll put Pres in an open shed with a hundred others! … You must keep the living from him and the dead. Be there by him with your body between him and death.

Then the stretcher-bearers arrive—two black men, directed by a white one. Amy looks at the black men’s backs as they walk up the stairs, and, after saying a few words about love, she tells Julie that the spot is hers. The bodies are too much for this visitor from the North. She never seems to get her mind around the idea of living in a house with black people, let alone lying in an open shed. Her failure—and the movie’s—resembles that of the wider country at the time that “Jezebel” came out, and for decades afterward. The South is granted its supposedly immutable strangeness.

In “12 Years a Slave” Solomon talks with two other captives, also free men, in the boat in which his kidnappers are carrying him down the river. They tell each other that they can’t count on those who have been born slaves: their spirit has been taken out of them. The rest of the movie is pretty much dedicated to proving that proposition wrong. In the simplest sense, Solomon is an unusual visitor in that he is a free black man: at an earlier point in our history, white moviegoers would have been given a guide to understand him. What’s more revolutionary is the way that we, and Solomon, learn that slavery is not just a legal and moral abomination. It is one that is and was unsustainable without constant, utterly violent coercion.

Solomon is beaten and threatened with death from the moment of his capture. But he learns the true terms of this arrangement from Patsey, “the Queen of the Fields,” as Epps, the planter, calls her; she picks five hundred pounds of cotton a day, when Solomon cannot manage two hundred. She does not do it out of loyalty, but, as with the dance, it is a living delight in her own quickness. In his book, Solomon makes this point about the real Patsey, and the movie conveys it in a quick, beautiful scene of her making corn-husk dolls, her fingers flying. Epps rapes her, and he beats her. He makes Solomon lash her. She is whipped when she should be loved. The scene in which she is stripped naked, tied to a tree, and has welts torn in her back is the most painful in the movie (and true to the book, in which Northup writes that she was “literally flayed”). She is not defeated—and, because neither he nor the camera looks away from her torn-up body, something in Solomon is saved.

Patsey is not portrayed tragically, but heroically. Her honor is perfectly intact. “12 Years a Slave” has been discussed in terms of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and other works, but if it has an animating text it may be Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. “I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well,” Truth said at the Women’s Convention, in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, a year when Patsey was working in the cotton fields.

What has provoked Patsey’s most brutal beating is her visit to another plantation to borrow a bar of soap. “I will be clean,” she tells Epps—for herself, not for him. She hasn’t been defeated. “It is a mistaken opinion that prevails in some quarters that the slave does not understand the term—does not comprehend the idea of freedom,” Northup writes, in describing the aftermath of the violence. “Patsey’s life, especially after her whipping, was one long dream of liberty. Far away, to her fancy an immeasurable distance, she knew there was a land of freedom.” After lashing Patsey, Solomon breaks his fiddle, and seems to hear, for the first time, what the slaves are singing—a spiritual led by an older black woman, not a young white Southern belle. He joins in.