12 Years A Slave Blog #3

Violence played a vicious role throughout the slave society. The ways that slaves are led to violence are by being tortured and/or killed by white slave owners. The forms of violence are being lashed, being lynched, being shot, etc. In the movie 12 Years a Slave, Solomon as well as Patsey and a few others got lashed by a whip of Master Epps', simply because they didn't either obey his orders or didn't work enough. Epps didn't like Solomon in the first place which set the tone for the rest of the days. No one died from Solomon's group but Pastey was critically hurt after being lashed by Solomon under Master Epps' orders. Having a slave beat another slave was also common back then because owners would be too tired to do so. 

Solomon almost killed by hanging

12 Years A Slave Blog #2

Genders within slaves shapes their experiences in many ways. Men who are slaves typically do most of the hard work and are in harsh conditions. On the other hand, women who were slaves served more like maids of the owners' house because they can clean and do house work more capably than men. Therefore, sometimes women slaves would end up being either raped or becoming a wife due to the fact that many slave owners took those actions. In the movie 12 Years a Slave, men as well as Solomon were working out in the fields in harsh conditions and had high expectations among Master Epps. While they worked, a women slave got the most cotton out of anyone in the group, This made Epps like here more and later on in the film, he basically has sex with her and she ends up having a baby. The gender norm back in the was: men do the hard work, women do the cleaning work.

Pastey, a slave woman

12 Years A Slave Blog #1

Changes in ownership of slaves affects slaves with both their living and working conditions in several ways. There are instances where a group of slaves have a nice owner as opposed to a mean owner and vice versa. Nice owners usually give more opportunities to their slaves and treat them better while mean owners just treat their slaves horribly. In the movie 12 Years A Slave, Solomon Northup is a slave for Master Ford who is a great and caring owner. His living and working conditions are fair and he supports him. Later, after having a fight with Tibits, Master Ford can no longer keep Solomon and transfers him to Master Epps. This master is a mean slave owner and treats his slaves as well as Solomon very poorly, up to the point where you'll get beaten. Solomon having Epps as a Master totally changed the way he did things. He had to pick more cotton every day and the working conditions were harsh. 

Solomon's mean owner: Master Epps