In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave

Close Reading — February 27, 2014, 5:25 pm

In the Margins of Twelve Years a SlaveTracing an original edition of Solomon Northup’s narrative to aslaveholderBy Mary Niall Mitchell

Harper’s Magazine http://harpers.org/print/?pid=246387

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Figure 1 — Title page and portrait of Solomon Northup from the McCoy family’s original 1853 edition of Twelve Years aSlave. All photographs © Mary Niall Mitchell. Courtesy of Caroline Helm

he McCoy family’s original 1853 edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave hasat least five authors. There was Northup himself, of course, a free black man who providedthe details of his illegal enslavement in the Deep South, and his white editor and

amanuensis, David O. Wilson. Beyond the two principals, at least three others made their ownadditions to the book. Some in pen, but most in pencil. Sorting out who wrote what, and whenthey wrote it, is mostly a guessing game, but a telling one even still. Northup’s account — whichany reader knows was bloody and brutal at times — inspired unexpected kinds of reflection.

The story, familiar to those who have seen Steve McQueen’s film adaptation, begins with the trialsof Solomon Northup himself, who, while living with his wife and children in Saratoga, New York,was lured away on false pretenses and sold into slavery in Louisiana in 1841. Northup remainedenslaved on Bayou Boeuf, in the central part of the state, near the town of Cheneyville, for twelveyears until he was redeemed. He published Twelve Years a Slave in 1853, with the help of lawyerand aspiring writer David O. Wilson. Published just one year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UncleTom’s Cabin, it sold tens of thousands of copies in the North and in Europe. For those opposed toslavery, Northup’s account of its brutalities affirmed what Stowe had illustrated through fiction.[Fig. 1]

Mary McCoy, the matriarch of the McCoy family, was not an abolitionist. She owned a largenumber of slaves in the Bayou Boeuf region. McCoy (1834–1913) merited some two pages ofdescription in Twelve Years a Slave, all of it positive. Unlike the man who owned Northup longestand last, Edwin Epps, a master who “could have stood unmoved and seen the tongues of his poorslaves torn out by the roots,” Mary McCoy was an “angel of kindness.” The orphaned heiress ofthe neighboring Norwood Plantation, McCoy was “the beauty and the glory of Bayou Boeuf.” “Noone is so well beloved — no one fills so large a space in the hearts of a thousand slaves, as youngMadam McCoy.” She was known for staging generous Christmas feasts for her slaves, and on onesuch occasion, she hired Northup to play his violin.

The McCoy family’s originalcopy of Twelve Years a Slaveprobably belonged to Mary. Iwas able to see it thanks to hergreat-great-grandaughter,Caroline Helm, who came toown the volume quite byaccident. After the death of herfather, she inherited a large,glass-fronted mahogany

T


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Figure 2

secretary that once stood in theNorwood Plantation. Inside, shefound the original copy ofNorthup’s book. The only clearmark of ownership is that of hergrandson, Newton Helm(1877–1952). [Fig. 2] Carolineremembers being given apaperback copy of the book as achild, but finding the originaledition was a surprise. (A fewmonths before the movie opened, she took it to be assessed on the PBS series Antiques Roadshowin Lafayette, Louisiana. She did not know about the upcoming film and apparently neither did theexperts, who said her heirloom was only worth about $100.)

The book’s front pages and text have been annotated and re-annotated over the years, in pencil,then blue ink, then red. [Figs. 3-4] The markings point to a fascinating irony: despite the brutalityTwelve Years a Slave described, the narrative of Solomon Northup was endearing to readers in theDeep South as well as the North, albeit for very different reasons.


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Figure 5

Figures 3 and 4

For most northern readers, Northup’s story cut to the heart of the struggle over slavery in 1850sAmerica and pointed to the dangers it posed for American liberty. But for the McCoy family, itsgreatest appeal was Northup’s vivid depictions of the Bayou Boeuf community in which he wasenslaved, and especially the glowing picture he left behind of Mary.

We might owe the first revival of Northup’s story in part to his recollections of this “beauty” of thebayou. Mary McCoy’s descendants loaned their edition to a family friend enrolled in a historycourse at Louisiana State University–New Orleans (now the University of New Orleans) in themid-1960s. The student took it to her professor, Joseph Logsdon, who read it and decided it shouldbe reprinted. Logsdon and another professor, Sue Eakin, co-edited the first modern reprint of thebook, published in 1968.

If there is a poetics of marginalia, as the historian H.J. Jackson has proposed — with the bestannotations being clear, economical, and engaged with the text — there is also a peculiar politicsto the scribbler’s genre. The artful and at times ardent elaboration found in its margins and otheronce-blank spaces are hard to anchor precisely in place and time, yet the annotators’ desire toleave a mark on Northup’s story is palpable.

Some of the marks hint at a lifein New York, before the bookreached central Louisiana. Inthe back, in very faint pencil onone of the end papers, “BurntHills, Saratoga Co., N.Y” iswritten at an angle, suggestingthat it may have been the book’spoint of origin. [Fig. 5] BurntHills is near where Northup andhis family lived before hiskidnapping and just outside theSaratoga county seat whereNorthup’s kidnappers faced trialafter Northup’s redemptionfrom slavery. Near that, written in a different hand, is the date “Sept. 22, 1866,” which may have


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marked the book’s arrival in Bayou Boeuf.

Figure 6

More enchanting is the artwork on the front paste-down, inside the cover, which will look familiarto anyone who has encountered such doodles in Victorian-era diaries. [Fig. 6]. The pictures thatframe the words “Solomon New York” — eagle’s wings, the American shield, the U.S. flag, anddecorative leaves and vines — suggest they may have been drawn at the time of the Civil War,when such designs appeared on everything from postcards to sheet music. Or perhaps they weredrawn even later, during the 1876 Centennial, when patriotic symbols were again in vogue.Regardless, the illustrations evoke the patriotic significance of Northup’s tale: the man whoendured twelve years of unlawful slavery, bonded with the defense of the Union from such crimes.

The author of the laterinscriptions was the wife ofMary McCoy’s grandson,Newton Helm. [Fig. 7]Sometime in the 1920s or ’30s,Corine Helm delineated on theblank front pages MaryMcCoy’s three marriages andthe children each produced.Later, with blue ballpoint, sheadded her own cheekycommentary. McCoy’s firsthusband, Dr. Dewitt RhodesM.D. “never worked” andneither did his married son


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Figure 7John; the second husband,Austin Burgess was “invalid for5 yrs.” Corine’s husband wasthe offspring of a child from McCoy’s third marriage, to a Methodist preacher named SilasCooper, about whom no comments were made aside from his vocation.

Along the bottom of the first page, she wrote in pencil “Inherited all land + slaves fromGrandfather John Dunwoody” with “Mary McCoy” and a red arrow written above it. Helm alsomade a point of underlining, in blue, all of the parts in the book about McCoy’s benevolencetowards her slaves, including his description of the abundant Christmas feast: “roast turkey, pig,chicken, duck, all kinds of meat, baked, boiled, and broiled formed a line the whole length of theextended table. . . . The young mistress walked around the table, smiling and saying a kind word toeach one, and seemed to enjoy the scene exceedingly.” [Fig. 8] In red ink, she marked referencesto the cruelties of Edwin Epps, Northup’s longest owner and another neighbor, Jim Burns, the only“greater savage on Bayou Boeuf.” [Fig. 9]

Did Corine Helm gloss over herfamily’s history ofslaveholding? No. Was herengagement with Northup’swords one-sided? Surely. AsH.J. Jackson points out,marginalia is less like aconversation with the authorthan like someone screaming atthe television set. But what isintriguing is that she feltcompelled to make her marksbetween the covers of a slavenarrative, a genre many peoplein the early twentieth century,including historians, foundhighly suspect, if not entirelyfabricated. By the latenineteenth century, Northup’snarrative was no longer in print,and the testimonies of formerslaves had been omitted fromnew interpretations of the CivilWar. With slavery left by thewayside, commemorations of


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Figures 8 and 9

the war were by the 1920sbeing rendered as a bitter fightbetween brothers — whitebrothers — that ultimatelyrestored the Union.

For Helm, however, the truth of Northup’s story was never in doubt. Nor was it for several otherfamilies in the Cheneyville community who kept copies of Twelve Years a Slave in their libraries,where it served as a narrative snapshot of their neighborhood and its inhabitants before the CivilWar. At least here, in Northup’s telling, their history had been recorded. Which brings us to asecond irony of the McCoy tome, one Solomon Northup might have appreciated: it is a placewhere we find slaveholders, not the people they enslaved, confined to the margins, struggling to beheard and hoping to be remembered.

Mary Niall Mitchell is Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History, Ethel & Herman MidloChair in New Orleans Studies, and Associate Professor at the University of New Orleans.

© 2014 Harper’s Magazine.


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In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave

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