On January 3, 1853, Northup left Epps's property and returned to his family in New York. He was the third and longest enslaver of Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. Edwin Epps was a slaveholder on a cotton plantation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.They spent a few years in New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi, before returning to the Bayou Boeuf area, where they raised five children. She graduated with a degree in sociology in 1940 and in 1941 married Paul Eakin, whom she had met at LSU. She paid a quarter to Otto Claitor, who dismissed the book as “full of lies. At Claitor’s bookstore downtown, she was overjoyed to find a copy for sale. She entered LSU in 1936 and searched for the book without success in the library’s Louisiana Room. As Eakin puts it, “The book discovered me.” She was overcome with a passion to know more about Northup, to fill in the gaps in his story. “They fixed a nice lunch, and I ate with them, but then I went back to the book,” she recalls. Ensconced in an armchair in the wide central hall, Sue sat entranced by Solomon Northup’s story. I did.”Ī few days later, an aunt dropped her at the Haas house. Haas, mother of Sam Haas, asked me if I wanted to come back to spend the day with her so I could read the book all day long. That meant giving up the book, and the disappointment must have shown in my face. “I read this book as fast as I could, but I could not finish it before the men had completed their business and Dad was ready to go home. “Never before had I seen a book written by an author actually familiar with our remote plantation country,” she writes in her introduction to the 2007 edition of the book. Sue immediately recognized such place names as Red River, Bayou Boeuf, Cheneyville, and Lecompte, and realized she was reading a tale literally set in her own back yard. Haas handed her a book-a first edition of Twelve Years a Slave. She rode along with her dad on a business call to Sam Haas (pronounced Hayes), owner of Oak Hall Plantation. (He mysteriously disappeared in 1863 no record of his death has ever been found.)Įakin discovered Northup’s book when she was twelve. Except for a small reprint edition in 1890, the book went out of print and Northup was largely forgotten. Within three months, with the help of a ghost writer, Northup had published his story.Ĭoming out shortly after the fictional Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book was hailed as a vivid account of the horrors of slavery.
That book resulted from a fortuitous set of circumstances that led to Northup’s being rescued from bondage in 1853 and returned to his wife and three children in New York.
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They lived higher than their income.”Ī self-described “bookworm” as a child, Eakin never lost her early passion for the story of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped in upstate New York in 1841, sold into slavery, shipped to New Orleans, and eventually found himself in Avoyelles Parish, where he spent ten years on the plantation of Edwin Epps, whose many cruelties are vividly described in Twelve Years a Slave. Some planters sort of wanted to be royalty. “They were very down-to-earth people,” says Eakin of her family, which raised cotton and sugar cane. Born Sue Lyles in 1918, she grew up in a large farming family on Bayou Boeuf (which she pronounces “Beff” in the local fashion). She has also written books about Rapides and Avoyelles parishes, a textbook on Louisiana, and Vanishing Louisiana, a book of historic photographs coauthored with Norman Ferachi.Įakin’s house in Bunkie is close to her birthplace between Cheneyville and Lecompte in central Louisiana. They include Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, released last year by the Center for Louisiana Studies. Her living room also holds a secretary where her books are displayed. “I chopped my living room in half to make an archives,” says Eakin, who claims she knows exactly where to find the information she needs. Which is pretty impressive when you consider that she turns ninety on December 7 and is still active, having recently published her magnum opus, about which she spoke at the Louisiana Festival of the Book in October. This nook, which Eakin calls her “archives,” holds a lifetime’s research. History books fill floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and file boxes line the floor. Nine file cabinets, both letter and legal size, block off one end of Sue Eakin’s living room. Having published the results of a lifetime of research, Sue Eakin, 90, has many other irons in the fire.
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