Sadeqa Johnson, the internationally best-selling author of four novels, recipient of the National Book Club Award, the Phillis Wheatley Award, and the USA Best Book Award for best fiction, yet again establishes her quintessence in time’s remembrance, with her latest release “Yellow Wife”. The book, originally published on 12 January 2021 by Simon & Schuster, is a coming-of-age, historical fiction that assures and reassures an unabridged immersion into a world of emotions, expressions, and exuberance. Called “wholly engrossing” by New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Grissom, this harrowing tale follows an enslaved woman forced to barter love and freedom while living in the most infamous slave jail in Virginia.
A thought-provoking page-turner, the novel delineates a most difficult time- the slave era. There is pain and tragedy, but also great joy, in this powerfully vivid narration.
The story begins in the 1850s, wherein, Johnson’s protagonist Pheby Delores Brown is 17 and is a resident at the Bell Plantation, Charles City, Virginia. Pheby is mulatto, with a “yellow complexion” and graceful wavy hair, a charmer that appeals to many eyes and admirers, particularly white slave masters.
She and her mother, Ruth, a well-known healer, are inseparable, and Jacob Bell, the plantation owner, treated them “exceptionally” in wake of nothing but her mother’s rape by Master Jacob and her subsequent forced sexual experiences with him. Ruth, restrained from any alternative but to obey his orders, leverages against his lust the commitment to release Pheby free on her 18th birthday.
Pheby was shielded from much of the horrors of slavery as a child. Miss Sally, Master Jacob’s late sister, in her favoritism toward Pheby taught her to play the piano, read and write, and against the laws of slavery, expounded on her multifarious skills and abilities. At 17, concurrently anticipating her freedom, she falls in love with Essex Henry, an imprisoned young man with his escape plans. But things don’t pan out as planned, not even close.
Contrary to the ideal life she envisaged with the love of her life, she is unexpectedly shoved into the abyss of slavery at the infamous Devil’s Half Acre, a jail in Richmond, Virginia, by Jacob’s younger wife, Delphina, who bitterly resented Ruth and Pheby. She was driven from the only home she had ever known into a nightmare of brutality, torture, and profound misery. And that marked the beginning of the end. The overwhelming, stimulating, and extraordinary journey of a woman.
As Pheby is confronted by unexpected deaths, betrayal, and senseless cruelty, she ripes, evolves, and thrives. She is forced to traverse catastrophes, from the whims of Missus Delphina, Master Jacob’s spiteful wife, to the ruthless plantation overseer Snitch, or the unpleasant driver named Reade, and eventually Devil’s Half Acre’s owner, Rubin Lapier, or as Pheby calls him — the Jailer.
The story is heartbreaking, and Johnson doesn’t shy away from the horrors bestowed upon the enslaved. Through her intricately developed characters, embracing a diverse and conclusive spectrum of emotions and experiences, the author devises an authentic countenance of slavery in the world of literature.
Although Pheby Delores Brown is a fictitious character, she was inspired by a real-life woman, Mary Lumpkin, Robert Lumpkin’s enslaved concubine. He was a notorious white slave trader who owned and ran Devil’s Half Acre, a real place that was part of a slave-trading facility Lumpkin established in 1840 and comprised a guesthouse, bar, and auction block. From 1844 until 1865, the jail was an infamous holding facility and “breaking centre” for more than 300,000 enslaved individuals, according to Johnson’s author’s note.
The book not only provokes inspiration through Pheby’s unparalleled strength, resilience, courage, and determination, consistently and unwaveringly apparent throughout the course of the novel, and that too in correspondence with her compassion and care for the “fancy women”, but also bespeaks of transcendence, subtly yet boldly visible in the eyes of Pheby, in the joy and delight she seeks and attains through her children. From her ruination to her ulterior rejuvenation, the character invigorates the senses for the moment and beyond.
At the very core, the concealed tenderness of unconditional motherhood, also expresses itself in Ruth’s sacrifices and protection for her child, notwithstanding how she was born.
The book, encompassing the tenacious survival of a woman in the face of death, misery, and uncommon turmoil, is just rightly paced, with an excellent amalgamation of the heart and mind. Accurately researched and well-structured with a lucid depiction of violence and a lot more, it stirs you just where it should. In all certainty, it is a horrifying yet riveting tale, that promises disbelief and deep involvement throughout, and ultimately indispensable contentment.
