Author Kristen Green (Photo by Julia Righetti)
For a long while Mary Lumpkin's name was on the fringes of Richmond history, in part because so little had surfaced about her life, how she survived enslavement and bore five children for her enslaver, Robert Lumpkin. Until now.
Richmond author Kristen Green’s “The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated The South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail,” (Seal Press, 352 pages, $30), is the result of a seven-year odyssey spent unearthing the life of Mary Lumpkin. Green details the intimate connection to Richmond slave trader Robert Lumpkin’s Shockoe slave pens. She speaks in person about the book as part of the Library of Virginia’s Carole Weinstein Author Series at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 14. The presentations are free to the public, but registration is required. The event will also be livestreamed on the library's Facebook and YouTube pages.
Green’s undertaking began shortly after completing her memoir and history, “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,” concerning the Virginia municipality that refused to integrate its schools.
Lumpkin’s life arc is impressive. She moves from enslaved concubine of Robert Lumpkin and mother of their five children, for whom she gains liberty and education, to living free in New Richmond, Ohio, among abolitionists and other formerly enslaved women. In between, a chance meeting with Lumpkin and a minister on Broad Street initiated what evolved into today’s Virginia Union University.
Image courtesy Seal Press
Richmond magazine: What constituted some of the personal surprises you didn’t anticipate in the process of researching and writing “The Devil’s Half-Acre?”
Kristen Green: I encountered different surprises along the way. A big-picture surprise was how common it was for enslavers to abuse women in their care. I obviously knew this happened, but, perhaps naively, not the extent to which that sexual abuse was normalized within the slave system.
Another surprise came from tracking down Mary Lumpkin’s descendants, who knew little or nothing about their ancestor. A whole line of her family lived as white for generations. Her story was forgotten, erased.
The effort by enslaved women to gain their freedom doesn’t fit into the masculine Heroic Escape Narrative — running through woods, avoiding capture by trudging through marshes and creeks — because these women didn’t want to leave their children behind. They needed to find other ways to get themselves and their children out. Mary Lumpkin told Robert Lumpkin that she didn’t care what he did to her, but the children needed their freedom, and this a decade before the Civil War. And she accomplished that.
RM: At the center of this complex narrative is a relationship, however we can describe it, of Mary and Robert Lumpkin, and their five children. Robert Lumpkin is a brutal opportunist, yet he and Mary have their intertwined lives that we can’t well discern.
Green: Well, I certainly don’t romanticize their relationship. There are many spaces in the book where the reader can determine for themselves what that looked like. Mary Lumpkin did the best she could to survive. He can love his children and still be a brutal, evil man. People are complex. I don’t give him much credit.
RM: Mary Lumpkin is often kind of half in the frame or in the shadows. Yet we see her, for example, interacting somehow with recaptured former slave Anthony Burns in Lumpkin’s Jail, although we don’t know what they said. We know that through a random encounter she met the abolitionist minister Nathaniel Colver, who needed a place to educate Black students. It’s as though that history wants us to see her, but not too much.
Green: I wanted to find out more about her, and I hope that this book will cause more information to emerge. We have to commit to revealing the stories of enslaved women even if we don’t know everything about them. Enslaved people couldn’t keep diaries. Most of them weren’t able to send letters, as whites could, making a greater challenge in piecing elements together. This means coming up with a new way of telling these stories with what we know.
Now you have Tiya Miles’ “All That She Carried,” which is a beautiful book, and “Never Caught,” by Erica Dunbar, about Ona Judge, who escaped from George and Martha Washington. These are giving us stories that were buried. In Mary Lumpkin’s case, where are the records of Robert Lumpkin’s slave jail transactions, or where is the record of Mary’s sale to him? Were they deliberately destroyed or simply lost to time? I’ve become comfortable with the gaps. It’s vital to tell her story, and those like hers.
That encounter with Colver is important because that underscores how in post-Civil War Richmond, and really across the South at the time, white property owners didn't want to rent to Blacks, and they didn't want Blacks to receive education. So this minister is desperate to find a place to set up a school. And so Mary Lumpkin, who then owns the former slave jail, offers to rent that space for the education of free people.
RM: You write about the possibility of Richmond going from a hub of slave trading to a hub of truth-telling in Shockoe. That chapter remains to be written.
Green: The story is unfinished and resounds down to our time, with Black Lives Matter and greater awareness, but now that we’ve taken down the Confederate statues, are we going to tell the true story? That this isn’t Black history, or Black women’s history, it’s everybody’s history. People need to understand why this is the case. Some people don't want this history taught, that it's upsetting to white people, which I think is a huge mistake. This is about the stuff that hasn't been told, and correcting the outright lies — the myth of the benign slave owner — that I and many others grew up with.
In Richmond we can relate this history through some kind of museum and respect the history. Richmond is in a unique position in that we have one of the few remaining physical slave jail remnants. I think the only in the country. This is where Mary Lumpkin walked, and where so many of those who were held for their sale. We can not only preserve this site, but create a living, breathing space for memorial.
