New Release: YELLOW WIFE

In her first outing in historical fiction, a veteran author brings a little-known piece of history into stark, unflinching relief.

Yellow Wife

Sadeqa Johnson

Simon & Schuster

288 pp.

Readers often wonder where authors initially find the germ of the idea for their books, curious to know what caused the spark. Sadeqa Johnson has won acclaim for her three contemporary novels that highlight the challenges of modern-day relationships, but it is Yellow Wife, Johnson’s highly anticipated first historical novel, that offers an exceptional origin story.

After moving to Richmond, Virginia, the author spent a day with friends and family walking the three-mile Slave Trail that follows the James River. Along the path from the ship docks to Lumpkin’s slave jail, the trail markers offered tantalizing bits of the story of notorious slave trader and jailer Robert Lumpkin and his wife, a former slave named Mary. Johnson felt an urgency to know more, and her research brought forth the story of Pheby Delores Brown, the first-person narrator of Yellow Wife.

Pheby is the daughter of Ruth, the Bell Plantation’s seamstress and medicine woman, and Master Jacob, the owner of the Virginia plantation—and of Pheby and Ruth. Jacob’s late sister Sally doted on Pheby and taught her to read and play piano, and Jacob has promised Ruth to free Pheby on her eighteenth birthday and send her to school in the north.

Unfortunately, Jacob’s young wife sees these women as a personal affront, and her fury is the catalyst for the horrors that befall Pheby, from putting Pheby’s sweetheart Essex into mortal danger, to allowing Ruth to die from neglect after an accident, to finally selling Pheby to a slave trader who marches her and other shackled captives down to The Devil’s Half Acre, the Lapier Jail. When she refuses to cooperate during her auction, Pheby is pulled from the block by the jailer himself, Rubin Lapier, which starts her on the path to becoming his “yellow wife”.

Johnson’s research unearthed Richmond’s small community of slave jailers, men who, as rich as they were, nonetheless had trouble convincing respectable society women to marry them. Thus, they selected light-complexioned women from among those who passed through the prison gates to serve as their concubines; over time, these women often helped to run their husbands’ businesses and were the mothers of their children.

The author does not flinch from depicting the violence and depravity of the universe that Pheby and her fellow slaves inhabit, but she also ensures that her characters are not one-dimensional heroes or villains. Lapier—the Jailer, as Pheby thinks of him—is savagely sadistic in meting out punishment, but also willing to woo her, taking an almost courtly approach in his attempts to win her over.

When it becomes obvious that she is pregnant—a result of her lone assignation with Essex before she engineered his escape from Bell’s Plantation—the Jailer moves her into her own room in his house. Once her son Monroe is born, she understands that she must do whatever is necessary to protect him. Having learned the story of another Richmond slave jailer’s “yellow wife,” Pheby negotiates the terms of her acquiescence to the Jailer’s desire: she alone will serve as the prison’s mistress, and he will never separate her from her son.

Seeing through Pheby’s eyes and hearing her thoughts, we are able to grasp her blind spots and understand the things she either cannot or will not allow herself to consider.

Her role at the jail is to prepare attractive young girls to be sold as “fancy girls,” purchased to be hired out as prostitutes or to serve as their buyers’ own personal sexual attendants. Pheby outfits a room on the prison property with dresses and accessories to ready the girls, and takes pride in doing this job well. She feels that she is doing all she can for them by praying with them and capturing their stories in her hidden diary. The day that one of the cannier girls spits in her face and tells her she’s lost her soul, Pheby feels a passing twinge of guilt and shame, but is unwilling to take a hard look at her own culpability. She feels more lasting concern over a jar of rouge the girl ruins.

Pheby has made this bargain for the sake of her son, but the children she bears the Jailer—four girls and a boy who doesn’t survive—pull her ever farther away from Monroe, who understands better than Pheby his place in the world. The Jailer dotes on his daughters while putting Monroe to work in the stables. When Pheby tries to correct his speech, saying, “People will judge you on the way that you speak,” Monroe knows that is only too true. He reminds her that a Black boy who talks like whites is asking for trouble. “Silver-head man did not like me speaking like white folk. Showed me a man with his cheek gone and told me to watch my uppity ways.”

It is only when she learns that Essex—who has made a name for himself in Boston among abolitionists as one who escaped slavery—has been kidnapped under the Fugitive Slave Act and is to be brought to the Lapier prison, that Pheby finally finds the courage to take action.

In her afterward, Johnson describes how closely her story mirrors the one she was able to piece together from the historical record, down to the famous escaped slave who is kidnapped and brought to Richmond to serve as a warning to other would-be escapees.

The coda to this story is that Mary Lumpkin, the model for Pheby, eventually leased the prison land left to her by Robert to a seminary school for freed slaves that later became Virginia Union University, a historically Black college.

Yellow Wife is the product of the serendipitous alchemy of a talented storyteller uncovering a story that longs to be told. It is a story worth hearing.

Tags: historical fiction