Director Steve McQueen, Adepero Oduye and Chiwetel Ejiofor talk on the set of '12 Years a Slave.' / Jaap Buitendijk
Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a free black man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in '12 Years a Slave.' / Jaap Buitendijk
It was hard to watch.
It is harder to teach.
But a diverse group I assembled to watch and discuss “12 Years a Slave,” the powerful new film about a free black man kidnapped and sold into slavery, said if America is to know itself, then the black experience in America must be taught as a part of American history, alongside the World Wars, Vietnam and the New Deal.
Like those events, slavery helped define and shape this country. But stories like that of Solomon Northup, the main character in the film that opened Friday, are being lost on new generations. And thus, a conversation about a movie became a conversation about a country and diversity and loss.
“The compelling thing is it’s true,” said Jay McNally, 61, an Ann Arbor-based writer and political consultant. “So many of us have never heard these stories before.”
He quoted conservative social critic and historian Russell Kirk, saying, “The timeless truths will have to be retold to every new generation.”
Galen Pauling, 43, a Southfield children’s book publisher and graphic designer, was as concerned about justice as education.
“Sometimes history, over time, gets lost. It gets forgotten,” said Pauling. “It’s about creating that time line that can never be broken, so we don’t forget where we’ve come from and what has happened and why it’s so important for injustice on this level to not happen again.”
Pauling thought that shame might dictate future conversations. But with each passing decade, season, century, any real connection with slavery for many white Americans has passed.
“I think that’s a common belief that we wish this hadn’t happened,” said Ken Droz, former communications manager for the Michigan Film Office. “It’s a shameful chapter, but we can’t deny that it happened.”
For centuries, America has mostly dodged debate about reparations for slavery. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reported that during the history of the transatlantic slave trade, from 1525 to 1866, 10.7 million Africans survived the journey to North America, the Caribbean and South America, based on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. About 450,000 wound up in America, either directly or through the Caribbean, Gates learned.
That number, though smaller than many people believed, still strikes home because those unwilling immigrants are the ancestors of people now being asked to forget slavery, to “get over it.”
“I carry that deeply, as if it were a part of my DNA,” said Karen Batchelor, a 60-year-old life coach and genealogist who lives in Oakland County. “So for someone to say, ‘Get over it’ ... I can’t even explain how that is impossible, and it’s insanity.”
British director Steve McQueen’s film recounts the total brutality of slavery with graphic scenes of rape, whippings and lynchings, and subtle moments that take your breath away. He also shows in detail a plantation owner’s fixation with and persistent rape of a young black girl named Patsy.
For Karen Batchelor and her sister, Paula, the history told during “12 Years a Slave” wasn’t distant or abstract. It was personal.
“This isn’t just history — and I think that’s the real concern that I have — this is our history,” said Karen Batchelor. “I didn’t need to watch this movie to know about this. ... I heard about this at the dinner table when I was growing up.
“My grandmother’s grandmother was a slave and in a situation very much like Patsy’s actually,” Batchelor said. “And we heard about what happened. We heard about how the mistress hated her. I have a copy of the bill of sale when my great-great grandfather bought my great-great grandmother and their kids from his father’s estate, and so we knew this. It wasn’t in the history books. ... We learned it though family, and people talked about it.”
When one looks at a film like “12 Years” and realizes that it is a retelling of horror rather than a horror film, it is hard to stomach. Everyone in slavery was someone’s ancestor. To ignore it, get over it, forget it, is to forget family.
The film, and slavery itself, raise inevitable comparisons to the Holocaust in how they both altered the world and how generations lived for years after.
“It was unbearable to watch a lot of that,” said Edie Rubin, a 65-year-old retired Detroit Public Schools social worker. “And my concern is … that the people that most need to see this, that most need to learn from it, won’t come to it. ... There’s a group of people that don’t know enough to even know that they’re ignorant and that they should be learning more.”
The group did face one hard question, among many, that makes slavery hardest to teach: Do continued efforts to examine the worst of America’s racial history make it more difficult for black and white people to get along?
“I grew up in Detroit until 1968, and it bothers me today that the social economic divide is perpetuating separation,” said Wayne Lusky, a 56-year-old Southfield insurance agent. “Here it is 45 years later, and there’s money bringing up the past for individuals who use this for their own financial gain.”
Eddie Rubin, Edie’s 26-year-old son and a film producer, said young people like him think that over-fascination with race makes it harder to ignore.
“Something I’ve noticed in my growing up was an over-sensitized version to the place where it was almost a step backwards,” said the younger Rubin, who lives in West Bloomfield. “I’m white. You’re black. We’re great friends, human beings, real people. And that’s what matters. While I don’t agree that you should stop telling the stories, overtalking means you point out the differences.”
It helps, Galen Pauling said, when races celebrate progress.
“It’s about showing how far we’ve come,” he said. “That’s what you’re celebrating when you write about the first black person or first woman to do something.”
McNally saw that as no different than other races celebrating firsts.
“Remember Carl Yastrzemski. He was a Polish guy, and he played for some team in Boston. I remember he scored something big ...”
“The Triple Crown,” Droz said.
“In the ’70s,” McNally said.
“1967. It was a cloudy week,” Droz said.
“I remember all the headlines were this Polish guy had done this thing, and what struck me ... I was in high school and I went to school with a whole bunch of Polish kids. ... They came from farms and wound up on assembly lines and had a hard life and for Yastrzemski to come out of that tradition and achieve this, it was a wonderful thing! I think there’s a tendency for us, too often, to diminish that.”
Batchelor echoed a refrain heard most from the group, something I’ve advocated in this column for years: that black history shouldn’t be diminished by relegating its study to a single month out of 12. It should be taught as an integral part of American history.
That may be the true lesson of “12 Years a Slave:” There is celebration in survival. But there also is celebration in not forgetting.
Perhaps Solomon Northup is looking down, marveling that, 160 years later, people are talking about his journey, keeping the story alive.