“Jezebel” and Solomon: Why Patsey Is the Hero of “12 Years a Slave”

In the 1938 movie “Jezebel,” Julie Marsden, played by Bette Davis, comes out on the porch at her plantation, Halcyon. It is Louisiana, 1853, and she has told her slaves to come sing for her party. They are gathered, swaying, when she tells them that she wants a different, earthier song—“Let’s Raise a Ruckus Tonight!” As her aunt and her guest, Amy, a New Yorker, watch with stricken expressions, Julie leads the slaves in the chorus, and draws them to her until she is entwined with half a dozen black children. “Come on, sing…. Have the little Yankee join in. Gonna raise a ruckus tonight. We have such charming customs down here.” Amy turns and flees. The next morning, while the women are waiting to hear the outcome of a duel Julie provoked, Amy suddenly screams, “Are you savages, you Southerners?”

There is a scene, similar but transformed, in “12 Years a Slave,” the new movie directed by Steve McQueen and based on the memoirs of Solomon Northup. Edwin Epps, a planter, has dragged his slaves out of bed to make music and dance for him and his wife. They move like dancers in a dream, half ritual and half gloom. Northup, who plays the fiddle, might as well be Orpheus. Then Patsey, a young woman played by Lupita Nyong’o, raises and twirls her arm in a gesture whose vivacity could never be choreographed. The mistress of the plantation looks at how her husband is watching Patsey, and then reaches for a heavy crystal decanter, which, with abrupt violence, she throws at Patsey, knocking her to the ground.

“Sell her,” she tells her husband.

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