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100 three KiNG cottoN The Cotton Plant and Southern Slavery everyone in avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, agreed that Platt Epps had no peer when it came to playing the fiddle . No one else could make the instrument sing as well as the “Ole Bull of Bayou Boeuf.” At balls, feasts, and festivals, his fleet bow and nimble fingers called forth tunes that moved people to dance. Whether “Jump Jim Crow,” “Katy Hill,” “Pumpkin Pie,” “Old Joe Clark,” or the “Virginia Reel,” his hands worked magic on wood and horsehair and gut. Always people clamored for more, and in gratitude they filled his pockets with coin. Platt Epps had no more appreciative an audience than the children of Holmesville. Whenever he passed through town, they surrounded him and begged him to play. Sitting on his mule, he sent the notes into the humid southern air and across the eardrums of his delighted little listeners.1 But if Platt Epps’s gifted hands and their agile digits made the sweetest music, those same appendages failed him when he took up an equally important although dreadfully onerous task. Try as he might, he could not pick cotton as dexterously as he could play the fiddle. The hands that flew over the strings turned clumsy and leaden when they reached for the bolls. The fastest pickers walked between the rows and plucked with both hands, demonstrating a “natural knack” for the job. In one motion, each hand grabbed a boll, or pod, extracted its fluffy white fiber, and put it in a sack. But Platt could not keep pace. Not only did he need both hands for each boll, but the sack that hung from his neck swung clumsily from side to side, breaking branches and killing green bolls not yet ripe enough to pick. As often as not, Platt dropped KiNG cottoN 101 the precious fiber into the dirt before he got it into the sack. Something in his bones, muscles, sinews, and nerves prevented him from picking with greater speed and coordination. As Platt concluded, “I was evidently not designed for that kind of labor.”2 The consequences of his inept body materialized when he toted his basket of cotton to the gin house and dropped it on the scale. Each time the load was drastically underweight, often by more than half. Rather than the standard two hundred pounds, it might total ninety-five. Edwin Epps, the master, at first forgave Platt because he was an inexperienced “raw hand.” But when practice yielded no improvement, curses and the crack of a whip followed. Stripped, lying face down on the ground, Platt absorbed the master’s rage, lash after lash striping his buttocks, shoulders, and back. Platt, the master bellowed, you are a damned disgrace—you are not fit to associate with a cotton-picking nigger!3 Still Platt did not improve, and the disgusted master finally gave up and ordered him to work on other tasks. Eventually, he went back to the cotton field, but for now he hauled baskets to the gin house, cut and hauled wood, and, at the insistence of Edwin Epps, played his fiddle. Perhaps once a week the master returned, drunk and devilish, from a day’s spree in Holmesville. Assembling his exhausted laborers “in the large room of the great house,” he ordered them to dance. “Dance, you damned niggers, dance,” he shouted, whip in hand, as Platt struck up a tune. And then Epps joined in, “his portly form mingling with those of his dusky slaves, moving rapidly through all the mazes of the dance.” Dance, niggers, dance! On some occasions they did not stop until late at night.4 Platt dreamed of escaping his nightmare. He prayed that God would deliver him from the tyrannical master, and he waited for an opportunity to escape. Often his hopes crumbled in the face of circumstances that he could not control , and he feared that he would live out his days in his Louisiana prison. When despair settled in, he took solace in his fiddle. At night in his rude cabin or on the bayou bank on a Sunday afternoon, its gentle “song of peace” carried him back to a place where his hands did not pick cotton, where loving arms encircled him, and where he was not the slave Platt Epps but someone else entirely: the husband, father, farmer, carpenter, fiddler, and free man Solomon Northup.5 The story of Platt Epps–Solomon Northup reveals in intimate...

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