12 Years a Slave
by Hilton Als
The most important and emotionally accurate moment in director Steve McQueen’s Steven Spielberg-eque evocation of slavery is due to Alfre Woodard. About half way through the film, Woodard, one of our greatest actresses, sits on a verandah, her cheeks rouged, pouring tea. She is a slave married to a slave owner; she can’t remember the last time she felt the lash. (She is not “free.”) What’s important just now, though, is that she teach another black female slave, a woman involved with another white slave owner on another plantation, how to pour tea. The women crook their pinkies, thus rendering the plantation world utterly “siddity.” This is the world of Edward P. Jones in The Lost World, and Kara Walker in almost anything, and if Woodard doesn’t get a Beatrice Straight four minute but amazing Oscar for this, I’ll eat my Farina. The madness in Woodard’s eyes–she plays the scene with a profound reasonableness, and not with the “hysteria,” of a lesser actress–as the lady who is a slave teaching the European ways is so profound and such an accurate representation of the schizophrenia of CULTURAL and thus mental and sexual racism in this country that I didn’t realize I was crying until two or three scenes past that, before I noticed that Woodard was gone for good.
Pictured here: Woodard with her husband of many years at an awards ceremony. Who watches who?
