12 Years a Slave · written by John Ridley and Steve McQueen · 2013

Patsey offers Solomon a stolen ring in exchange for killing her and ending her suffering; he refuses, and she warns he will one day understand that he should have freed her.

Scene 150 of 211 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act two

Patsey
Solomon

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 1:36 into a 2:22 film

The story so farBefore scene 150

After being kidnapped from New York and sold into slavery, Solomon Northup uses his skills and carefully placed trust to survive and seek a way back to his family.

Scenes 1–29
Solomon lives freely in Saratoga as a husband, father, worker, and musician.
Scenes 30–65
Kidnapped and held under the imposed name Platt, Solomon must preserve his life and identity.
Scenes 66–123
He enters plantation life under Ford, passes through Tibeats’s violence and the near-lynching, and is transferred to Epps.
Scene 124
Solomon is transferred to Epps’s plantation and placed among Patsey and the enslaved workers, opening the harsher final plantation phase.
Just before
Scene 147
Solomon returns the goods to Mistress Epps and tells her the errand went without issue.
Scene 148
Solomon hides the stolen sheet of paper inside his fiddle, treating it as his first step toward freedom.
Scene 149
During Epps’s forced dance, Mistress Epps denies Patsey a pastry, claws her face, and demands punishment; Epps takes Patsey away with his whip.
Scene 150
This scene

150INT. MASTER EPPS'S PLANTATION/SLAVE SHACK - NIGHT

We come up on the slaves who lay sleeping. All except for Patsey. She rises from her bedding, goes to a corner of the cabin and removes something from a secretive location. She then moves over to Platt.

PATSEY

Platt... Platt, you awake?

SOLOMON

I am.

PATSEY

I have a request; an act of

kindness.

Patsey displays what she took from hiding. It is a LADY'S FINGER RING.

PATSEY (CONT'D)

I secreted it from the Mistress.

SOLOMON

Return it!

PATSEY

It yours, Platt.

SOLOMON

...For what cause?

PATSEY

All I ask: end my life. Take my

body to the margin of the swamp--

Solomon looks at Patsey as though she were insane.

SOLOMON

No.

PATSEY

Take me by the throat. Hold me

low in the water until I's still

'n without life. Bury me in a

lonely place of dyin'.

SOLOMON

No! I will do no such thing.

The...the gory detail with which

you speak--

PATSEY

I thought on it long and hard.

SOLOMON

How does such despair even come to

you?

PATSEY

How can you not see it? I got no

comfort in this life; caught up

between Massa's lust 'n Mistress's

hate. If I cain't buy mercy from

yah, I'll beg it.

SOLOMON

There are others. Beg them. Why

do you consign me to eternal

damnation with such an un-Godly