‘12 Years’ speaks, sells volumes
On Sunday, March 2, director Steve McQueen could be clutching a handful of Oscars for “12 Years a Slave,” his searing film about a free Black man kidnapped into slavery before the Civil War.
Yet he’s equally excited that his best-picture nominee has helped make Solomon Northup’s memoir — the basis for the film — a best-selling book. And now the British filmmaker is working with Penguin Books to encourage secondary schools to teach Northrup’s narrative, which was first published in 1853.
“This story so important. It was lost for 150 years. How is that possible?” asks McQueen, who is nominated for best director. “I’m just so happy that the public has embraced the movie and the book.”
“12 Years a Slave” is No. 14 on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list, sitting in the top 20 with other movie tie-in editions including “Divergent,” “The Monuments Men” and “The Book Thief.”
But those are contemporary titles, some already huge bestsellers before a movie version was even in the works. “12 Years a Slave” has come out of virtual obscurity to climb bestseller lists.
Interestingly, the book sold well in its own time. In surprisingly accessible prose for a 19th-century narrative, Northup describes how he was lured from New York to Washington in 1841 and then sold into slavery. He endured horrific conditions on Louisiana plantations — until he was saved by friends from the North. But for whatever reason, “12 Years a Slave,” unlike Frederick Douglass’ classic slave narrative, seemed to fade into history.
“This is a book nobody was really aware of, except scholars in the field, which is being introduced to the country,” says John Siciliano, executive editor of Penguin Books, publisher of the movie tie-in paperback (it features star Chiwetel Ejiofor on the jacket).
Siciliano says Penguin has sold more than 150,000 copies both digitally and in print. (Adding to overall sales: the book is in the public domain, so there are low-priced versions of the e-book available from different publishers. Various print versions also are available.)
Penguin first published “12 Years” in 2012, with a different jacket, as part of its AfricanAmerican Classics series. Then Siciliano was surprised by a call from Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company, with news of a forthcoming movie adaptation.
Penguin released the movie tie-in paperback in September, with a first printing of 30,000 copies, and a new foreword by McQueen.
Since the movie nabbed nine Oscar nominations, Penguin has seen “huge reorders from bookstores” and new orders from mass retailers including Target and Costco, Siciliano says.
Now Penguin is working with McQueen and Plan B to reach out to secondary schools and curriculum developers across the USA (and in Britain) “to put the book in their hands,” Siciliano says. Penguin has commissioned a teachers’ guide, to be ready in March.
McQueen likens Northup’s book to “Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl,” the seminal Holocaust memoir read by generations of schoolchildren.
“I live in Amsterdam, and Anne Frank is all around us,” says McQueen, who read Frank’s diary when he was about 14 in school in London.
Northup’s story, he says, will appeal to young people because “it’s so accessible, it’s readable, it’s so engaging.”
“Solomon, like Anne Frank, is talking directly to us.”
At least two teachers who have recently taught “12 Years a Slave” agree it belongs in secondary schools.
“I do think it’s an awesome book for 11th-graders, even 12th-graders,” says Anne Kauth, who teaches literature at Saratoga Springs High School in Saratoga, N.Y., where Northup lived before he was kidnapped.
Last year, several of Kauth’s seniors read the book for a group project. Kauth says she “wanted students to learn more about the North and slavery, about some of the awful stuff that was going on here.”
In the South, the book also is being read by high-school students.
Aisha Booth-Horton, a social studies teacher at the Quality Education school, an AfricanAmerican-owned charter school in Winston-Salem, N.C., introduced it to her 11th-graders last fall. They were studying slavery as part of American history.
She says that at first students were angry at what Solomon endured, but she encouraged them to see the positives in his fight for freedom.
Soon, she says, they were “creating a 21st-century version of Solomon,” seeing him as “part President Obama, a little bit Mandela and some Muhammad Ali.”
Booth-Horton, who is Black, says the book is “controversial” and “hard,” but it should be taught in schools. She thinks the Penguin teachers’ guide is important.
“Any hard story should be told,” she says, “but told under guided hands.”