Twelve Shades.. of Shame…
“Twelve… Years…
A… Slave“…
Rather…
Twelve…. shades…
Of… shame…
How…
Did human psyche… dip into the depths of its…. pathological disintegration…
Why…
Was such demeanment… humiliation… and chilling cruelty… inflicted upon fellow humans…
The much praised 2013 period drama… an adaptation of the 1853 memoir by Soloman Northup… “Twelve Years a Slave“… was imposed upon us on the small screen… “la télé“…
We had to watch the horrors which we… until recently… tried diligently to ignore…
However… watching the story unfold the mind boggles at the punishing injustices delivered upon fellow men and women… simply for being black…
Quelle.. horreur…
Yes… black…
Mercilessly beaten… thrashed… humiliated… living in terror of the white man… their “master”…
Reluctantly… we watched…
Grudgingly… we suffered…
Feeling the searing pain… the “slaves” had to endure… while “justice”… looked the other way…
No one… heard…
The thrashing of the whip… carving lines of blood… on the back of the young black girl…
Who was also… constantly battered and raped…
“Kill… me”…
She… begged…
“What’s the point… of living…?”
“Twelve Years a Slave“… was written by the central figure in this human tragedy…
Solomon Northup… a New-York born free African-American… a gentleman with means… who was kidnapped in Washington D.C. in 1841…
Unbelievable but true… he was sold into slavery to work on plantations in Louisiana…
Drugged, subjected to lynching… he was bundled off to the South where he became a “slave” to the white “masters”… who’s treatment of this man was less than human…
Intolerable… unbearable…
Agonizing…
We lived… his anguish…
We palpated… his pain…
The white “masters”… erred…
They were… flawed…
Could black people ever… forgive their atrocities…
Only with the abolishment of slavery… could they liberate themselves from the shackles of their “masters”… gain their freedom… and learn to forgive their torturers…
Years of toil and sorrow passed before our enslaved man… was saved from the horrors on the white man’s plantations…
Twelve… Years…
A… Slave…
Twelve… shades…
Of… shame…
Inflicted on a black man who… kept his dignity all through his ordeal and gained freedom…
A… beautiful man…
A… soul…
Divine…
a.