In the Margins of Twelve Years a Slave

Tracing an original edition to a slaveholder from Solomon Northup’s narrative

By Mary Niall Mitchell

The McCoy family’s original 1853 edition of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave has at least five authors. There was Northup himself, of course, a free black man who provided the 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 own additions to the book. Some in pen, but most in pencil. Sorting out who wrote what, and when they wrote it, is mostly a guessing game, but a telling one even still. Northup’s account — which any 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 trials of 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 remained enslaved on Bayou Boeuf, in the central part of the state, near the town of Cheneyville, for twelve years until he was redeemed. He published Twelve Years a Slave in 1853, with the help of lawyer and aspiring writer David O. Wilson. Published just one year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it sold tens of thousands of copies in the North and in Europe. For those opposed to slavery, 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 large number of slaves in the Bayou Boeuf region. McCoy (1834–1913) merited some two pages of description in Twelve Years a Slave, all of it positive. Unlike the man who owned Northup longest and last, Edwin Epps, a master who “could have stood unmoved and seen the tongues of his poor slaves torn out by the roots,” Mary McCoy was an “angel of kindness.” The orphaned heiress of the neighboring Norwood Plantation, McCoy was “the beauty and the glory of Bayou Boeuf.” “No one is so well beloved — no one fills so large a space in the hearts of a thousand slaves, as young Madam McCoy.” She was known for staging generous Christmas feasts for her slaves, and on one such occasion, she hired Northup to play his violin.

The McCoy family’s original copy of Twelve Years a Slave probably belonged to Mary. I was able to see it thanks to her great-great-grandaughter, Caroline Helm, who came to own the volume quite by accident. After the death of her father, she inherited a large, glass-fronted mahogany secretary that once stood in the Norwood Plantation. Inside, she found the original copy of Northup’s book. The only clear mark of ownership is that of her grandson, Newton Helm (1877–1952). [Fig. 2] Caroline remembers being given a paperback copy of the book as a child, but finding the original edition was a surprise. (A few months before the movie opened, she took it to be assessed on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow in Lafayette, Louisiana. She did not know about the upcoming film and apparently neither did the experts, who said her heirloom was only worth about $100.)

http://harpers.org/blog/2014/02/in-the-margins-of-twelve-years-a-slave/