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

A caterpillar plague ruins Epps’s cotton; he blames the enslaved workers and lashes them in the field.

Scene 151 of 211 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act two

Epps
Treach

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 1:37 into a 2:22 film

The story so farBefore scene 151

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 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
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 151
This scene

151EXT. MASTER EPPS'S PLANTATION/FIELD - DAY

Hard times on the planation. Where previously the field in bloom was a carpet of white, it is now patchy and under grown.

The slaves move through the field picking not cotton, but rather CATERPILLARS from the plants. The caterpillars have dined on the cotton and nearly destroyed the crop.

Epps is beside himself as he looks out over his ruined field.

EPPS

It is a plague.

TREACH

Caterpillars.

EPPS

A plague! It's damn Biblical.

Two season God done sent a plague

to smite me. I am near ruination.

Why Treach? What I done that God

hate me so? Do I not preach His

word?

TREACH

The whole Bayou is suffering.

EPPS

I don't care nothin' fer the damn

Bayou. I'm sufferin'.

Epps looks among his slaves at work, his enmity growing.

EPPS (CONT'D)

It's that Godless lot. They

brought this on me. I bring 'em

God's word, and heathens they are,

they brung me God's scorn.

Crazed, Epps runs into the field, taking himself from slave to slave delivering a whipping to all he can lay his hands on.

EPPS (CONT'D)

Damn you! Damn you all! Damn

you!