Yellow Wife: A Novel by Sadeqa Johnson
These little nuggets of history that we don’t really talk about. We go to school, we learn all these facts….but we don’t learn these personal stories that become [the foundation for] historical fiction that we all love; and then we understand so much more of what’s going on….If history was taught differently in school with stories like this one, everybody would have so much more of a recollection of it and have so much more feeling about it. Author Interview
Expert writers do not always go looking for stories. Stories find them. For instance, the seed for George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo was sown when on a visit to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown his wife’s cousin told him that a grief-stricken President Lincoln visited the crypt at the cemetery where his young son Willie was temporarily interred and that it was believed that he had actually held the boy’s embalmed body in his arms [Study Guide]. Sadeqa Johnson’s inspiration for Yellow Wife, her first historical novel, published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster, began a few years ago with a family visit to the Richmond Slave Trail. The trail led them to an area once called “The Devil’s Half Acre.”
“By the middle of the 1840s, the importation of human chattel from Africa had been outlawed and domestic slave trading had replaced international in supplying forced labor. New Orleans, a shipping port and Richmond, a central city on the east coast, became the hubs for the transfer, sale, and exchange of enslaved peoples from the various locations throughout the United States.” The Lumpkin’s Slave Jail Site/Devil’s Half Acre
The Devil’s Half Acre was just one of over sixty sites in Richmond in which countless men, women, and children were imprisoned and then auctioned off to the highest bidder. On this small piece of land located in one of the lowest parts of Richmond, Shockoe Bottom, stood a jail in which slaves were held before they were sold, a tavern where the sales took place, and the home where the owner of the jail and “bully” slave trader Robert Lumpkin lived with his biracial wife Mary. Sadeqa Johnson became fascinated with Mary Lumpkin’s life and her research led to the creation of Yellow Wife and its protagonist, Pheby Delores Brown.
To get every detail right, Sadeqa Johnson visited plantations, scoured newspaper articles at the Library of Virginia, and read books that were written by people who were enslaved. She had a Ph.D. student in African American studies read the novel before publication to make sure she selected the correct word choices and that the book felt as authentic as possible. The author states: “The fiction is born from the facts. I use what I learned about the people, places, and things and then let my imagination do the rest. I trusted my intuition, and even though I outline I let my characters lead the way” (Interview: Sadeqa Johnson). The details about Pheby, the other slave traders’ “wives,” and the education of their children up North are all inspired by real people and events. The author provides a partial list of resources she used while writing Yellow Wife in her Author’s Note.
The plot of Yellow Wife follows the life of Pheby Delores Brown. Born on the Bell Plantation in Charles City, Virginia around 1835, her mother Ruth is the plantation’s traditional healer and her father the plantation owner, Master Jacob. Her life for the most part is more pampered and sheltered than other slaves on the plantation as described in the passage below.
I remembered the time Miss Sally had taken me with her on a carriage ride to Williamsburg. She and Mama fawned over my dress and hair until I did not recognize myself in the looking glass. When we arrived at the first shop, the shoemaker referred to me as Miss Sally’s beautiful daughter, and she did not correct him. Nor did she right the seamstress at the dress shop, or the woman who served us tea. The memory made me smile, as I missed my teacher dearly. [p. 9]
There was so much to appreciate and savor while reading this novel. The author’s writing is both exquisitely and heartbreakingly detailed. In this selection Pheby describes a memory that provides the reader with insight into her relationship with her mother.
Mama believed that the full moon was the most fertile night of the month, and that everything she touched held God’s power. Each full moon, she dragged me out in the middle of the night with her to hunt for roots, plants, seedlings, and rare blossoms to use for healing. I did not understand why God’s power could not be found during daylight hours, and as I trudged behind her the March cold overwhelmed me. Even my thick wool shawl was no match against the country freeze.
Fear of the woods made my feet clumsy, and I tripped over fallen sticks, scratched my shins on the spikey brush, and bumped my head on low-hanging branches. Mama, on the other hand, moved with skill and confidence, like the earth parted a path and presented the way for her. Even in the dark, she knew where to stop for herbs and how to avoid the dangerous ones. We had only a small lantern to guide us, and when I asked how she knew where things grew, she responded, “My gut be my light.”
We slipped through the thicket, past the drafty cabins where the field hands slept on pallets stuffed with hay and husk. I heard dry coughs and a low whine from a hungry baby. Farther down toward the James River, we travelled through the clearing where we met on Sundays for church. Then over the hill along the side of the cemetery, peppered with sticks to honor our dead. As we traveled deeper into the woods of the plantation, the thick forest blocked the light of the moon. I could hear the growls and grunts of unseen animals and fretted over running into hungry raccoons or red foxes, or stepping on a poisonous snake, I tried to clear the worry from my mind as the land flattened out, but then something pricked my ankle. Before I could call out, Mama stopped suddenly and reached for my hand.
“This here is a black walnut tree. Grow deep in the woods, so you gotta know where to look. Cure for most everything. Ever unsure, come seek this tree.” [pp. 3,4]
In another selection, Pheby describes life on Bell Plantation.
Every morning Missus Delphina rose before first light. Up even before the overseer, Snitch, blew “de risen’ horn.” She liked to take what she called her constitutional —- a stroll down to the garden, over to the dairy house, and then out to the fields. By the time Master woke up, she had already gotten a report on the crops from Snitch and written it all down in Master’s ledger. Those who worked up at the house had to be up before she was, of course. Rachel, now dead, would stand at the ready with her work dress. While Lovie clutched a tray of morning tea. Aunt Hope toiled away in the kitchen, with smoke blowing high from the chimney carrying the promise of the day’s meal. Essex groomed the horses, and even Mama and I sat at the loom spinning diligently in case Missus popped in on her way to the garden. [p. 21]
The Master has promised Pheby that on her 18th birthday, he will give her the emancipation documents that will set her free. When this does not happen, the plot takes a sudden, shocking turn and the story becomes one of survival. Moments of horror are interspersed with the routines of everyday life as described in my final selection from this outstanding novel.
The First African Baptist Church sat a few blocks away, at the corner of College and Broad. As we made our way, hundreds of Negroes filed into the street headed toward the church. The women’s bonnets framed their beautiful faces and the men dressed neatly. The church stretched in a rectangular shape with its long side facing Broad Street. The foyer was dimly lit, and I could smell the smoke of frankincense and myrrh. Inside the sanctuary there was a wide center aisle with royal-blue carpet. Straightaway I noticed the men moved to sit on the left side and women to the right. All the children congregated together in side galleries. In the front pews, upper-class whites, dressed in the latest fashions, sat together, with additional white men stationed in the corners of the room and along the back wall, watching. Negroes could not gather, not even n broad daylight to hear the word of God, without being watched. [p. 136]
For more information about Mary Lumpkin, read, The Enslaved Woman Who Liberated a Slave Jail and Transformed It into an HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) by Kristen Green, author of The Devil’s Half Acre. For more information on Robert Lumpkin’s slave jail, read The Smithsonian Magazine’s March 2009 article, Digging Up the Past at a Richmond Jail by Abigail Tucker. For an interview with the author, watch Sadeqa Johnson: Yellow Wife – Author Interview.
