The Day the Delta Intersected with “12 Years A Slave”

A few days ago I left my stale efficiency apartment in Little Rock, heading to the Delta (for the first time) for what I thought would be a routine conversation with Black folk trying to create equitable situations for communities of color. Let it be said that I have never been more wrong.

As a writer for TheVillageCelebration, I felt a certain pride and obligation to attend a conversation hosted by the magazine. Little did I know this road trip had nothing to do with neither my pride nor my obligatory sensitivities.  I am convinced the universe said, on the day of my birth, that it would be so.

Allow me to pause this thought so as to bring everyone to the same point of reference and make understandable the magnificent order in which the universe operates.

Two weekends ago with the movie, Django, still fresh on my spirit, I partook in 12 Years A Slave. The combination made for an extremely dark concoction even though the Django scars washed off as soon as Jamie Foxx stepped out of costume and off the set, but Solomon Northup’s victory over slavery neither washed off nor left me feeling clean.

The extent to which 12 Years A Slave went to let the world know that Northup was enslaved exceeded anything I can remember. The lashes from the whip sounded louder, they felt harsher (and yes, it seemed as if I could feel them) and they scared longer, so much so that I would advise against seeing the movie in the evening. The story isn’t new, but seeing it play out on the screen is jarring to the senses. It detaches one from the reality of the situation.

Which brings me back to my trip to the Delta.

As I left central Arkansas for the drive to TheVillage event and entered the bosom of the Delta, it was as if my car had been strapped to a pocket watch ticking exceedingly fast in the wrong direction.  Somehow I wound up back in 1841 between two plantations, and I was no longer detached from 12 Years A Slave.  It all seemed important: every rape, every lash and every hanging. I was standing face to the face with the fields that once held hundreds of black bodies, very similar to the fields that Northup would have worked. On this day those fields were filled with death birds. I accepted this as partial payment for the wrongs against Solomon Northup, those that were minimized to make the movie palatable for pop culture.  As I stood and gazed, I cried and noticed that plenty of trees lining the dingy roads of the Delta were dead yet I only thought of the injustice exacted upon Northup and every other black body. It struck me as poetic justice because these very trees had so much to do with the death of Blacks and now the blood they assisted in taking had poisoned the soil causing their own death.

The trip had nothing to do with my work in TheVillage, instead it had everything to do with clarity, how our history is our strength, but only if we recognize it and own it. This recognition is what I discovered at the intersection of the Delta and Solomon Northup’s 12 Years A Slave.