Just saw 12 years a slave

[Lydia Leftcoast]

318. In the author's note to one of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January novels

Hambly notes that the awful thing about slavery was that you were totally at the mercy of your master.

He might be relatively kind or a brute, but if he was a brute, there was nothing you could do about it. You were property, and the law was on his side, no matter what he did to you: torture, rape, mutilation. It was all OK. One doctor practiced surgical techniques on his slaves--before the days of anesthesia. There was nothing they could do about it.

If he wanted to sell you away from your family, there was nothing you could do about it.

If he wanted to sell you to anyone, there was nothing you could do about it.

No matter how hard you worked, it was almost certain that you would always be a slave. Worse still, since slavery lasted nearly over 250 years (i.e. slavery was legal for more years than it has been illegal), you worked with the knowledge that your children and grandchildren would be slaves, too.