Writer Sadeqa Johnson was walking the Richmond Slave Trail when she came across a shocking piece of local history. She’d heard of Robert Lumpkin, a notorious figure who ran a slave jail known as the Devil’s Half Acre, where thousands of Black people were brutally tortured and mercilessly auctioned off. But Johnson hadn’t known that Lumpkin had purchased a biracial teenager named Mary and forced her to become his unofficial wife.
The discovery inspired Johnson’s latest novel, Yellow Wife, which tells the tale of 17-year-old Pheby Delores Brown. Born to an enslaved mother and a white plantation owner in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby is afforded certain privileges due to her status and light complexion—she learns how to read, write, and play the piano. Her master promises to free her when she turns 18, but her dreams are crushed when he is injured in a carriage accident, and his spiteful wife sells Pheby into prostitution at Devil’s Half Acre.
Before Pheby is auctioned off, jail owner Rubin Lapier steps in and takes her as his own slave. To protect herself and her unborn child, Pheby has no choice but to become Lapier’s “yellow wife.” Readers are pulled into Brown’s day-to-day struggles, as she is forced to run her sadistic enslaver’s household and bear his four children while surrounded by violence and death. When her first love, Essex, is captured and brought to the jail, she searches for a way to get him and their son, Monroe, to freedom.
Yellow Wife vividly details the horrors of slavery, from family separation to sexual assault, emphasizing that Pheby’s relationship with Rubin is not one of love—but of survival.
“I wanted the readers to feel up close and personal. I wanted them to experience the world as Pheby was experiencing it,” says Johnson. “I had to go beyond reading textbooks…It was important for me to read slave narratives written by enslaved people, so I could get the full scope of what it was like for them in their head and bodies—the smelling, the tasting, the touching, the feeling.”
Remarkably, Pheby does not lose her tenet for kindness and compassion, and finds great joy in motherhood, determined to do whatever it takes to protect her children.
Johnson ultimately gives readers a new perspective on the impossible choices enslaved women were forced to make on a daily basis, and Pheby’s acts of courage and resistance are a genuine source of inspiration that parallel the systemic racism and anti-Black violence that continues today.
Sadeqa Johnson will discuss Yellow Wife with moderator Beverly Colwell Adams on March 24 at 7pm.
