Steve McQueen's recent film ''12 Years a Slave'' is a disturbing, powerful portrayal of slavery in the United States. Professor of Afro-American Studies Henry Louis Gates Jr., served as a consultant on the film and has declared its historical accuracy. In terms of its faithfulness to the original book, it is quite accurate. But its portrayal of Northup's life as a free man of color in upstate New York is not only historically inaccurate, it also perpetrates the idea that slavery was the only thing standing in the way of equality for people of color in the 19th century.
Northup is portrayed as a gentleman. He wears a lavender velvet coat and, in one scene, a top hat. His wife and children have starched bonnets and fancy hoop skirts. They live in a beautiful brick house on a neat clean street. The house is full of fine-crafted furniture, a dining table and chairs, armoires, clocks, curtains. Few white people were living in this state of upper-middle-class luxury in 1830s Saratoga County, which had, after all, a rural economy.
And what does Northup do that he can keep his family in such a state of luxury and dignity? He's a fiddler! Not a banker or a manufacturer, but a fiddler. It is intimated that his wife also serves as a servant at a nearby household. So a dual fiddler/house-servant income is what affords such luxury. The children seem not to work at all.
Northup is portrayed as an equal with the shopkeeper who will eventually come and rescue him from the Louisiana plantation. In real antebellum life, white people did not consider black people to be their equal. Social interactions were dictated by social hierarchies and blacks were at the bottom of that hierarchy. Northup would have been more obsequious. The shopkeeper might have called Northup "boy." In the real story, it wasn't the shopkeeper who rescued Northup, but the son of Northup's father's former master, Henry B. Northup, who still felt a sense of paternalistic responsibility. Northup's name, so important in his account, is the name of his father's master. There is no sense in the film that slavery in New York ended only a decade before the film's action.
I hate being the type of historian who looks for obscure historical inaccuracies to prove her superior historical knowledge, but I believe these particular inaccuracies reinforce at least two persistent myths that undergird continuing forms of inequality in the United States.
First, portraying Northup as a dignified upper-middle class gentleman erases the impact white supremacy and racism had on free people of color in the North. The film's portrayal of the free Northup says, essentially, that if it wasn't for slavery, there would have been equality for all. People of color were doing just fine up North.
Second, it equates freedom with a very present-day conception of middle-class living, as if one is only really free when he or she has a spacious house, a family, fine clothes, and an abundance of goods. It is a consumerist vision of freedom, refined and enshrined in the mid-20th century, when New Deal policies were directed to making this middle class utopia a reality for all (although blacks were largely excluded from these policies until the late 1960s). But many people — artists, writers, feminists, gays, '60s era radicals — have found this particular version of freedom stultifying and conformist.
The film could have portrayed Northup living in the humble dignity his state of freedom actually afforded him. This would have been a truer portrayal of the humanity that people of color carved out of their tenuous state of freedom in a nation that oppressed them whether they were slaves or "free."
Jennifer Delton is a professor of history at Skidmore College. Her most recent book is, "Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made America Liberal," published this fall by Cambridge University Press.