My wife and I went to 12 Years a Slave the weekend after the Oscar Nominations were announced. Primarily the timing resulted from the difficulty of getting to a theater together. But we worked it out, babysitter and all. The Best Picture nomination it had received probably didn’t hurt in spurring us to make it happen. We saw it in the multiplex in Oakdale, MN, a first-tier suburb west of St. Paul, on a small screen. The show was sold-out, a pleasant surprise. The heat was too high, and everyone was uncomfortable.

This is not a review. Suffice it to say that Steve McQueen, John Ridley, Chiwetl Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o have made an excellent and important film, though not perfect by any means.

But this is not a review it is a personal reaction. Do we need another personal response from a White American Male to a story about slavery? I don’t know. But the story of stories is tied intimately to the audiences who experience them. This movie is not about me. But it is about us. It is about our nation and our history. And our nation and our history cannot be divided from slavery.

So this is what I felt after seeing 12 Years a Slave: ashamed. Ashamed that I did not know this story.

Why didn’t I know the story of Solomon Northup? This was my first response to the film and I felt shame at this. I felt embarrassed. That I had failed my country because I failed to know the story of this American man born free and sold to bondage. This was a hard response, and unexpected.

I suppose this response is less about the man, Solomon Northup, and more about the fact that, at the end of the day, I don’t know anything about slavery. I know the history of the US Civil War. Quite well. The battles and the players and the rivers. I’ve read Shelby Foote and can fill an encyclopedia with Civil War proper nouns. I ‘ve read about Lincoln and Grant and Lee. I know Frederick Douglass, the operational mechanics of the Underground Railroad. I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I know the story of the 1st Minnesota Volunteers. I know about Jim Crow and Reconstruction and the history that followed the end of slavery by that name. I know these things because I care about history and my country and where it has come from.

What I now realize is not on this list: slavery.

As the long, harrowing experience of 12 Years a Slave progresses through the story of Solomon Northup, I found myself moved by the film but not shaken. I thought: this is beautifully made, these actors are tremendous, this violence is necessary to heart of the subject matter. My response was cinematic, but not personal. I was not altered.

But as the conclusion comes to bear there is an unusual moment that breaks one of the cardinal rule of film-making and releases upon the audience all that has been building in the previous two hours. And as I looked Solomon Northup in the eye I found myself, suddenly, indicted, complicit, and ashamed. Ashamed that I did not know this story, or any story like it. Ashamed to realize I do not know the stories of American slavery; in fact I do not really know anything about slavery. How is it possible I do not know any such story?

It occurred to me that the story of slavery can in part be understood as the loss of stories. What did slavery do but take millions of stories, individual lives to be lived and known, and erase them from the record? Slavery makes its war upon the individual human story.

Yet here was the story of a man enslaved that I could have known but did not. No one taught it to me, and I did not seek it out. I did not even know to seek it out. I am sure that many individual stories remain, despite the best attempt of slavery to see them lost. But I do not know them; I imagine in this I am not alone. The realization that, at any time in the past 30 plus years I could have learned this story and did not, means something.

If I do not know the stories that I can know, I have not begun to grasp the story of our country, or understand the magnitude of the millions of stories that I cannot know because of slavery. I’m going to change that.