Sadeqa Johnson will read from her book “Yellow Wife” in a Zoom event Jan. 13 at 7 p.m. $5.50 for ticket only, $30.50 for ticket and a copy of “Yellow Wife.” (Photo by Mary Brown)
Sadeqa Johnson’s newest release, “Yellow Wife,” contains the addictive storylines and compelling, relatable characters readers have come to expect from the award-winning author. Johnson’s three other books — “Love in a Carry-on Bag,” “And Then There Was Me” and “Second House From the Corner” — are all contemporary romances, while “Yellow Wife” is historical fiction set in the pre-Civil War era. “It is completely and utterly a departure from anything I’ve done before,” Johnson says.
Several years ago, Johnson was entertaining friends from New Jersey, the state where she’d been living before moving to Midlothian months earlier. The two families explored the Richmond Slave Trail, with their children reading the markers aloud as they walked. When they read about Mary Lumpkin, the Black wife of white jailer Robert Lumpkin, Johnson was intrigued. She imagined Mary raising five kids alongside her husband, “this man who was cruel and horrible to slaves,” Johnson says. “I couldn’t let the story go.”
The friends drove to the site of Lumpkin’s Slave Jail (aka the Devil’s Half Acre) in Shockoe Bottom, near the historic African burial grounds. There, Johnson says, “this feeling came over all of us to the point where the kids were dancing, … and it was this big moment of us connecting.”
Johnson began researching the Lumpkins. She found very little information on Mary, but she kept searching, driven to better understand the experiences of a slave jailer’s wife. Although she has always loved reading historical fiction, Johnson didn’t expect that her research would lead to a book. “I honestly didn’t feel qualified to write historical fiction,” she says.
Johnson kept researching, though. “What I read made the hairs on my arms stand up,” she says. When a friend asked what she was working on, Johnson told her about the project but expressed doubts, telling her friend, “It just scares me. I don’t feel like I can do it.”
Her friend’s advice? “The project that scares you most is the project you are supposed to take on next.”
Johnson committed to writing a story based on Mary Lumpkin and spent the summer immersed in the antebellum era, taking her kids to nearby plantations and reading books written by enslaved Africans.
A theme emerged from Johnson’s extensive research: Throughout history, women have had to endure and overcome. “I love thinking about women and how strong they have to be and all they have to overcome and do for their families,” she says.
With this in mind, Johnson created Pheby, the protagonist who is forced to leave the Charles City plantation where the medicine woman’s daughter had been taken under the wing of the master’s sister. Pheby unexpectedly finds herself in Richmond at the Devil’s Half Acre and must outwit her jailer.
Johnson based Pheby loosely on Mary Lumpkin, weaving together what little she knew of the woman with stories of other real-life figures, particularly other jailers’ wives. “I used these women’s stories to create who I thought Mary Lumpkin was.”
Though Johnson initially felt daunted by writing historical fiction, once she committed, the words flowed.
“I feel like the ancestors chose me to write this story,” Johnson says. “In writing historical fiction, I discovered a love I never knew I had.”
