American slavery was not ended by an individual’s revenge; it was ended by a war of unprecedented mass casualty, fought initially by people who had no intention of abolishing anything, and no single person’s courage or violence affected the outcome by a measurable amount. The Price of Ownership and Ignorance, and the Squandering of Freedom in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained.
They ride away. The image is dark and the horizon is not visible, and there is nowhere in the United States of America in 1858 for these two people to arrive. Their freedom papers are pieces of paper, drawn up under coercion, signed by a man who is dead, witnessed by a lawyer who is dead, describing a transaction conducted at a property that no longer exists. Any sheriff between here and the Ohio River can decline to read them. The film gives them the night. It has no capacity to give them the morning, and it does not pretend otherwise.
And they carry, both of them, on their faces, the one document in the film that cannot be forged, burned, purchased, produced at an opportune moment, contested by a better lawyer, or blown up: the letter branded into the cheek, which says runaway, and which will say it in every town they enter for the rest of their lives. The bill of sale is ash. The plantation ledgers are ash. The house that held the records of what was decided about them is a smoking foundation with a man in it. The United States has just lost its copy of the file.
They are riding into the dark carrying the original.
