Twelve Years a Slave

About the book

Solomon Northup recounts how an offer of employment took him away from his life in New York and into kidnapping, sale, and forced labour in Louisiana. His narrative records the practical organisation of slavery alongside its violence: journeys, transactions, work routines, restrictions on movement, and the constant danger of asserting an identity that others have chosen to suppress. Individual encounters reveal different temperaments without obscuring the power that ownership confers. Northup's attention to skills, places, and daily procedures makes the account especially concrete. The effort to communicate with people who could establish his freedom supplies an urgent continuing concern. Published after his recovery, the narrative asks readers to confront a system through the experience of a person whose legal status offered no protection against its operation.

• Freedom and identity
• Enslavement
• Testimony

Why read it

For a detailed personal account that joins the violence of enslavement to the everyday procedures sustaining it.

Autobiographical narrative · English text