Solomon Northup's Bayou Boeuf: The Geography of Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup was a free Black man from New York, kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery on the bayous of Avoyelles and Rapides parishes. His ten years of forced labor along Bayou Boeuf produced one of the most important American slave narratives ever written. The Edwin Epps House — now on the LSU Alexandria campus — is the actual structure Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him. The landscape Northup described still exists: the bayou bottoms, the cotton fields, the Creole architecture. Reading the memoir here, against the geography, is a different experience than reading it anywhere else.