Slave No More

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson is a stunning novel inspired by the true story of Mary Lumpkin, a Black woman who, after the American Civil War, turned a slave jail into a university for freed slaves in Virginia. With exceptional story-telling finesse, Johnson tells Mary’s tale through Pheby Delores Brown, a fictionalized character.

Pheby is 17 when Yellow Wife opens. The utter richness of her first-person narrative transports readers to Charles City, Virginia in 1850, where she lives on the Bell Plantation with her mother, Ruth, a healer who knows “the old ways.”

Early on, readers understand that the owner of the plantation, Master Jacob Bell, is Pheby’s biological father. Working as a seamstress is Ruth’s main function on the plantation, but she has long been “favored” by Master Jacob. Though he is kind to Ruth and Pheby, his and Ruth’s sexual and personal relationship remains that of master and slave.

Pheby is described in the book as so light-skinned she could pass for white, “high yella,” says Lovie, the Black woman in charge of the main house. Master Jacob has granted Ruth and Pheby unwritten status among the slave population. He has also promised to send Pheby north to go to school when she turns 18. Pheby is literate. Master Jacob’s sister, deceased by the time the story begins, taught her how to read and write, along with how to play the piano.

Yet Pheby is a slave nonetheless and can’t wait to go north, where she believes she will at last escape the yoke and humiliation of plantation life. Her dream enables her to endure the difficulties she faces on a daily basis. However, when Master Jacob suddenly assigns her to house duties, everything changes for Pheby. Instead of sewing with her mother in the quiet of their slave cabin, Pheby will now serve the mistress of the house.

Unlike Master Jacob, Missus Delphina Bell hates Ruth and Pheby. She knows about her husband’s decades-long liaison with Ruth, and she knows about Pheby’s true parentage. Under her strict hand, Pheby goes from being relatively protected under her mother’s wing to serving at the hands of a scorned wife. When Master Jacob leaves for an extended trip and takes Ruth with him, Pheby is left in a vulnerable situation. She relies on the love of Essex, a fellow slave with whom she’s having a romantic relationship.

In a tragic turn of events, Ruth and Master Jacob die from injuries sustained in a carriage accident on their travels, throwing Pheby’s plans of going north to school in question. Essex also faces dangerous scrutiny now that the master is dead for reasons I won’t say here. I don’t want to spoil the story for you. What I will say is this: the changes in Pheby’s and Essex’s circumstances force actions that affect them for the rest of their lives. Missus Delphina sells Pheby, stealing from her all hope of going north to school, and landing her at a place called The Devil’s Half Acre.

Admittedly, it was hard to find hope or joy in Yellow Wife. It is, after all, a novel that exposes the horrors of slavery. Sadeqa Johnson takes readers to dark places. The sharpness of her prose is intense at times, painting a world that is consistently grim. Reading about the animalistic cruelty slaves endured at the hand of slave owners and handlers produced in me a visceral reaction.

However, a desire to know more about slave life in America, to peel it back, to go deeper into what I thought I knew and discover what I didn’t compelled me to keep turning the page. I am glad I did. As noted by The Christian Science Monitor on the back cover of my copy of the book, “As Americans continue to deal with issues of race today, Yellow Wife is the perfect book to help the country see, in part, how it got here.” I believe the book fulfills this important purpose and more.

“As Americans continue to deal with issues of race today, Yellow Wife is the perfect book to help the country see, in part, how it got here.” -The Christian Science Monitor

(Trigger warning: the “n” word is used occasionally in its historical context in the novel.)

So, Who was Mary Lumpkin?

Sadly, very little is known about Mary Lumpkin, the woman on whom Pheby is based. What researchers know is that she was a multiracial child born a slave in 1832. She had exceptionally light skin and was sold to Robert Lumpkin, a violent man 27 years her senior and the owner of the notorious slave jail known as The Devil’s Half Acre in Richmond, Virginia. At approximately 13 years of age, she was pregnant with his child. She is said to have told Lumpkin that he could do with her what he wished, but her children, she insisted, must be free.

Mary Lumpkin would give birth to five of Robert’s children, mothering and educating them. Just prior to the Civil War, Robert allowed her and their children to move to Pennsylvania, a free state. According to Sadeqa Johnson’s author’s notes, Mary and Robert married. When Robert died in 1866, he left the slave jail and all of his property to Mary.

Two years after Robert’s death, Mary and a Baptist minister renamed The Devil’s Half Acre to God’s Half Acre and converted it to a school for Black students. The school would eventually become Virginia Union University. The college is still in operation and is one of the few Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) whose origin is linked to a Black woman.

Virginia Union University today

Photo credit: VUU website

Mary Lumpkin died at 73 years of age in 1905 after having lived in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and New Richmond, Ohio.

I urge you to read Yellow Wife, which you can purchase at my affiliate link on Bookshop.org. Sadeqa Johnson captures plantation life in stark ways, including relaying basic tasks, routines, and, of course, hierarchies. But it is the depth of the character’s emotions that sets this story apart from other slave narratives. On the surface, the plot may sound like one you’ve read before, but I can assure you, it’s not. Johnson’s characters speak the language of slaves and of sorrow. Of pain. Of injustice. The story reveals layers of truth about slavery that Americans must acknowledge, must never forget.

A quote in the opening pages of Yellow Wife by William Wilberforce, a British reformer who helped bring an end to the slave trade in England, sums it up best: “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you didn’t know.”

“You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you didn’t know.” -William Wilberforce

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Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here.

N.J. Mastro

Postscript: In 2022, journalist Kristen Green published Mary Lumpkin’s story in The Devils Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail.

Green’s article in a Smithsonian magazine special report online entitled “The Enslaved Woman Who Liberated a Slave Jail and Transformed It Into an HBCU” provided the biographical information about Mary Lumpkin for this post.