(Credit: Handout) Photo by (Credit: Handout)įrom these sobering visits, lasting friendships have formed. Article content Vera Jackson-Williams, founder of the Solomon Northup Foundation, stands outside the Avoyelles Parish courthouse in Marksville, Louisiana. “You go back into the fields where they actually would’ve been taking care of the crops … I felt their spirit still there,” says Vera Jackson Williams, Northup’s great-great-great granddaughter in Maryland and founder of the Solomon Northup Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to preserving his legacy. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Just outside the town of Bunkie, there’s a dirt road that takes visitors past a derelict church and across a weather-worn wooden bridge to the edge of a sugarcane field - the former site of a plantation once owned by Edwin Epps, a savage man who, according to Northup’s autobiography, whipped his slaves just to hear them “screech and scream.” They’ve made pilgrimages to Northup’s hometown in New York state, Bass’s homestead in rural Ontario, and to the place where Northup spent the bulk of his time in slavery - here in central Louisiana’s Avoyelles Parish, a region steeped in French-colonial history and surrounded by sweeping farmland, meandering bayous and moss-hanging shade trees. Outside the glare of the Hollywood spotlight, a loose network of history buffs and descendants of Northup and Bass have heeded that call. “If that starts a conversation, wonderful,” he said. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receiptīy that he meant he hoped the movie, which won the Academy Award for best picture, would inspire researchers to keep digging for new information.
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