The Use of Description in 12 Years A Slave

In my new series, I am posting all my critical work from graduate school. I had never done literary critique before my MFA so you can see me improve with each one!

12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northrup he uses distinct descriptions to create the story of his experiences. Despite the use of personal narrative and the use of long paragraphs, it is the descriptions that create the environment of the story. Northrup uses a  distinctive style that includes deep description and detail.  The effect creates more than just the personal narrative of his capture and servitude, the overall environment of where he was taken, and what he experienced. It adds an element to the story, making it all the more real. As a style, it serves as a master class in first-person description quality. 

When he is captured, he takes great pain to describe the various slave pens he is kept in on his way to the deep south. As a personal narrative, this description level is unlike other material.

In Washington, he takes time to describe the slave pen of Burch in Washington. After his beating for claiming he was free, he says of the conditions there, “By this time, I had become stiff and sore; my body was covered with blisters, and it was with great pain and difficulty that I could move. From the window, I could observe nothing but the roof resting on the adjacent wall. At night I laid down upon the damp, hard floor without any pillow or covering whatever.” (pg. 18) He also takes time to describe how he was shackled by his wrist and ankle. 

On board the ship Orleans, he describes the hold and even his first attempt at freedom in the greatest detail, “Should the attack be so sudden and successful as to prevent assistance, the hatch was to remain barred down; otherwise, the salves were to be called up and in the crowd, and hurry, and confusion of the time, we resolved to regain our liberty or lose our lives. I was then to assume the unaccustomed place of the pilot and steering northward, we trusted that some lucky wind might bear us to the soil of freedom.” He also describes hiding under a small boat to effectuate this attempt at mutiny and how he tested his ability to hide under it. Overall, this gives a literary effect of being right there. The reader can visualize all sorts of detail. (pg. 22)

In New Orleans, he doesn’t shy away from this description when smallpox breaks out among the enslaved people he takes time to describe the hospital, “….driven to the hospital–a large white marble building standing on the outskirts of the city. Harry and I were placed in a room in one of the upper stories.”(pg. 33)

There are moments when Northrup breaks away from his thoughts of his family and freedom and instead becomes almost an anthropologist. He spends a great deal of time describing the forests of the Bayou of his first master and also the local native tribe who appeared to have also been living nearby in some huts, “The whole country about Red River is low and marshy. The Pine Woods, as they are called are comparatively upland with frequent small intervals, however, running through them. This upland is covered with numerous trees–the white oak, the chincopin, resembling chestnut, but principally the yellow pine.” (pg. 36) “They live in simple huts, ten of twelve feet square, constructed of pine poles and covered with bark. They subsist principally on the flesh of the deer, the coon, and opossum, all of which are plenty in these woods.” He also reports of the local Chicasaw tribe that, “They worshiped the Great Spirit, loved whisky, and were happy.” 

After his experience of the slave pen and sale in New Orleans, where not only does he describe his own experience of being sold yet again and having his name changed but also the experiences of Eliza having her children ripped away from her by sale, he also describes the country where he eventually ends up. In this passage, he sees Texas long-horn cattle for the first time, “Some of them were marked to branded, the rest appeared to be in their wild and untamed state. They are much smaller than northern breeds, and the peculiarity about them that most attracted my attention was their horns. They stand out from the sides of the head precisely straight like two iron spikes.” Even in the natural world, he takes time to give us rich detail of the country of the first plantation he worked on, “The space was entirely surrounded by woods and covered with a carpet of rich, rank verdure. It was a quiet, lonely, pleasant place–literally a green spot in the wilderness. It was the residence of my master, William Ford.” (pg. 37)

There is also an aspect of the description that extends to his internal dialogue with himself about his family and his children. Early in the dialogue, his first thoughts are of his wife and children in Saratoga. On the first night in the slave pen, he dreams of them in vivid detail. As the narrative goes on, these descriptions begin to give way to the horrors he suffers, being nearly hanged, escaping through a swamp, fighting with an unjust overseer, or comforting Eliza, who consistently mourns her children. He admits that she “Now she was but a thin shadow of her former self. Her face had become ghastly haggard, and the once straight and active form was bowed down as if bearing the weight of a hundred years.” (pg. 61) Just a paragraph later, she died of a broken heart on the floor of a slave cabin. 

Solomon Northrup does a great service of creating wonderful descriptions to describe the horrors of his 12 years of suffering as a slave. He bounces between anthropology, reportage, and real emotion to create the narrative of his unjust enslavement.