Solomon northup descendants5/28/2023 ![]() ![]() They were visiting Oak Hall Plantation, where her father had business with the owner, Sam Haas. One summer day in 1931, her father, a planter, drove her in a flatbed truck to the nearby town of Bunkie, not far from the property once owned by Edwin Epps (the Michael Fassbender character). “There was never a time when he was not part of the conversation.” Eakin grew up near Cheneyville, Louisiana, the eldest of nine children, and discovered Northup when she was twelve. “There were five of us, and Solomon was the sixth,” Eakin’s son Frank said the other day, from his home in Texas. ![]() But it’s safe to say that without Eakin, who died in 2009, at the age of ninety, none of us would be talking about Solomon Northup, or Patsey, or the other once-forgotten souls portrayed in this year’s Best Picture.Įakin, who taught at Louisiana State University at Alexandria for twenty-five years, spent her career rescuing Northup’s memoir from obscurity. ![]() Accepting the Oscar for Best Picture on Sunday-technically, it might have been Monday at that point-Steve McQueen took a moment to thank “this amazing historian Sue Eakin,” who “gave her life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book.” It was an unusual shout-out: we’re used to seeing Harvey Weinstein or God get thanked, not historians from Louisiana. ![]()
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