Hope Out of Darkness

In 2005, Georgia-raised sculptor Wesley Wofford received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement. His previous commissions include “The Journey to Freedom,” a nine-foot monument to abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Reviewing “Twelve Years a Slave,” Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir about being abducted and illegally sold into slavery in Louisiana, Frederick Douglass wrote, “It is a strange history, its truth far stranger than fiction.” Born in 1807, Northup lived his first 33 years as a free man in Upstate New York. He had a wife and three children. He played the violin, “the ruling passion” of his youth.

In March 1841, Northup’s musical talent intrigued two men who claimed they were hiring musicians for a circus. They lured him to Washington, D.C. After being drugged, he woke “alone, in utter darkness, and in chains,” with a new identity, that of a runaway slave named Platt Hamilton. For the next 11 years, eight months, and 26 days, he labored on cotton and sugar plantations in central Louisiana.

Northup’s story has been a feature of the Avoyelles Parish landscape for more than half a century. During that time, historic markers have identified significant locations in the life of the man who wrote one of the most singular narratives in our nation’s history, a book of loss and pain, dignity and perseverance. The Solomon Northup Trail includes signage at the following places: Bayou Boeuf, center of the region’s plantations, among them Epps, originally near Holmesville but since restored and moved to the LSUA campus in Rapides Parish. During his brutal life at the Epps Plantation, Northup began to share his story with Samuel Bass, a Canadian carpenter and abolitionist. At his own risk following the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Bass wrote letters to New York officials on Northup’s behalf. He mailed them at the Marksville Post Office, across the street from the current Avoyelles Parish Courthouse. There, on January 4, 1853, a judge declared Northup free. He then journeyed four miles north to Ludger Barbin Landing along the Red River, where he departed on a steamer for New Orleans. Sixteen days later, Northup’s story appeared on the front page of  The New York Times.

On January 4, 2026, 123 years after he regained his freedom, the Solomon Northup Committee for Commemorative Works unveiled a statue on the Avoyelles Parish Courthouse plaza. “Note that this is different from other historic sites,” says committee member Jacques Goudeau. “You’re encouraged to enter from behind. In our early meetings, we had to decide which paths of Northup’s experience we wanted to highlight. Do we want it to begin in despair, or do we want to be inspired by him? Ultimately, we knew that it had to be both.”

Approaching from behind means that the visitor first sees the base and back of Wesley Wofford’s statue, “Hope Out of Darkness.” Northup’s right leg is shackled. Beneath his bare foot are dozens of handprints, each from a descendant of enslaved people or someone connected to Northup’s story. “This detail reminds us that he didn’t do it all by himself,” Goudeau says. “He was helped all the way. The handprints are all Black, except for one. If a teacher comes here with children and asks them to identify the white handprint, they won’t be able to do it. We’re all the same.”

Melissa Howell, a New York native and direct descendent of Northup, calls the site “hallowed ground.” Here, her third great-grandfather re-earned his freedom. “Solomon’s experience of having been free, kidnapped, enslaved and living through that, becomes a story of one man who has continued to pay forward his fight for freedom. His life reflects something far greater than surviving slavery,” Howell says. “It reflects a commitment to truth, to community and to justice. Though he had been torn from his freedom, he never surrendered his humanity.”

As the visitor continues to round the statue, proceeding across nine evenly spaced engraved stones that contain passages from “Twelve Years a Slave,” the handprints give way to Northup’s full name. Witness, now, his left foot as it rises on the base, no longer bare and shackled. Instead, Northup wears a dress shoe. Above his head, in a clenched fist, he grasps a bundle of papers. “His pursuit of freedom lights the way like a torch,” Goudeau says. “He’s also now holding the shackles. The shackles are no longer holding him.”

Signage marks significant sites in the life of Solomon Northup, including Ludger Barbin Landing on the Red River. From there, Northup traveled to New Orleans after a judge in Marksville set him free.

Goudeau, a Marksville native, first read “Twelve Years a Slave” in 1997 during his summer between high school and college. He knows the history of his place. He readily provides the details, how Northup reunited with his family in New York on January 21, 1853, and how the first edition of “Twelve Years a Slave” appeared six months later. Northup gave talks about his story throughout the northeast. With members of the Underground Railroad, he aided fugitive slaves, helping others as men like Bass once helped him. “We feel this is something everyone can come here and be inspired by,” Goudeau says as he gazes up at Northup. “Note that he’s facing north,” he says. “Look at the determination in those eyes.”

Howell says, “There’s poetry in his figure and in his words, and you can see both in the plaza now. All of it is now living and breathing outside of a book.”

Location
Avoyelles Parish

Did You Know?

• Despite selling 17,000 copies in its first four months, “Twelve Years a Slave” went out of print around the turn of the 20th century, remaining so until 1968, when LSU Press published a new edition edited by Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon. Eakin grew up near Cheneyville, not far from the Epps Plantation on which Northup was enslaved. At age 12, she became fascinated with Northup’s story. When director Steve McQueen accepted the Oscar for Best Picture for the 2013 film version of “Twelve Years a Slave,” he thanked “this amazing historian Sue Eakin,” noting that she “gave her life’s work to preserving Solomon’s book.”

• Due to his description of them in “Twelve Years a Slave,” Solomon Northup’s abductors were arrested in 1854. His legal case dragged on until 1857, the year the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which ruled that Black people could not sue in federal court. Northup, however, remained an active abolitionist. He lectured throughout the Northeast, staged and performed in two plays based on his story and aided fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad.