Of all the injustices outlined in Northup’s narrative, one particularly brutal whipping of Patsey at the hands of her master and Northup (who was forced into the act against his will) left her near death. The description of the scene resonated with readers, and was often cited in newspaper reviews of the book at the time; it provides the devastating emotional climax of the movie 12 Years a Slave, as well. Northup’s account of Patsey’s whipping is horrifying, made even more unbearable by the circumstances that led to it. Because Mistress Epps refused to give Patsey soap for washing, she left the plantation without permission in order to borrow some from a neighbor. Master Epps was so enraged upon her return that she was immediately staked to the ground, and Northup was ordered to whip her. Obliging out of fear, he “struck her as many as 30 times” before attempting to stop, but after being forced, he “inflicted 10 or 15 blows more,” until refusing to continue, “risking the consequences.” At that point, Epps assumed the whip and continued until she was, Northup describes, “literally flayed.” Though Patsey survived the unimaginable punishment, “from that time forward,” he writes, “she was not what she had been.”

It’s heartbreaking to ponder how someone so young, who possessed such dignity under unimaginably inhuman circumstances, finally had her spirit broken in this manner. And this brings us back to Melançon’s idea that Patsey would “get the heck outta there” after emancipation, and some theories about where she may have gone. Alas, theories are almost all I have to work with—so much of constructing Patsey’s history involves small pieces of fact linked by large gaps caulked with conjecture.

The Secondhand-Newspaper AccountBrowsing the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive website, Chronicling America, I came upon perhaps the biggest discovery of my research—an 1895 clipping from the Idaho Register (a wire story from the National Tribune in Washington, D.C.) called “About the Campfire: Truthful Tales Told by the Veterans.” It detailed—under a section titled “Bayou Boeuf”—a veteran’s recollection of Northern soldiers recounting a visit to Epps’s plantation, “soon after the war.” The soldiers (and the narrator) had read Northup’s book, and were curious about the truth of the story. It’s said that they “told of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.” Misspelling aside (quite common), this is a fairly huge breakthrough as far as validating Patsey’s presence on Epps’s plantation right before emancipation. The rub: this was recounted 30 years after the fact, and it’s entirely possible that the narrator simply cracked open his copy of 12 Years a Slave so as to properly cite the names of every slave on Epps’s plantation. It’s as plausible that the soldiers simply told him they spoke with some of Northup’s fellow slaves, but didn’t name names.

The 1860 Avoyelles Parish Slave ScheduleEpps’s 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedule cites a total of 12 slaves—just four more than he owned a decade prior. There is an entry for a 34-year-old female, who could possibly be Patsey (again accounting for the license used with recording of ages on these records). No conveyance of her sale before that time exists at the Marksville courthouse, which holds all remaining records for the Avoyelles Parish area from that time.

Patsey Williams/Patsey BufordUpon emancipation, slaves had no money or means, and were often forced into a life of sharecropping. Those who left their former owners were sometimes assumed their master’s surname, if they didn't already have one (this is how Solomon’s father, Mintus Northup, received his last name, as it happens). “It depends on what they wanted,” explains Elizabeth Shown Mills, former president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and co-author of The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color. “There were times it went back to the mother’s owner, sometimes the owner of their grandparents. The premise here is that most slaves did not leave their comfort zones. They didn’t leave that neighborhood in which they grew up. And so you’re going to find them, for decades after the war, generally in that same community. Of course exceptions existed, but they were less likely to exist with females.” Her mother’s owner’s surname was Buford, though it’s likely her mother also accompanied Patsey to the Williams plantation in Louisiana. I came across one record of a “Patsy Buford” in the 1910 U.S. Census from Flat Rock, Kershaw, South Carolina. She’s listed as 80 years old (keeping with the 1830 birth date), and both of her parents are listed as having been born in South Carolina. Keeping in mind Mills’s “comfort zone” rule, it’s more likely that the 1870 U.S. Census uncovered for a 40-year-old Patsey Williams in Cheneyville (Rapides Parish) could be a lead. Also considering Mills’s enlightening point that Patsey is, in fact, a nickname for Martha, it’s easy to see how the possibilities can become endless.