Yellow Wife
Great news from Simon & Schuster:
Sadqa Johnson, Yellow Wife author, doing virtual book tour:
FEB 8, 2021 / BookMarks NC / Author Event / Simon & Schuster’s Winter Book Club Social, hosted on Crowdcast / LINK
MAR 10, 2021 / Martin Luther King Library / Author Event / In conversation with Marita Golden. Will be broadcast simultaneously on their Facebook Live and YouTube page.
Yellow Wife, A Novel, by Sadeqa Johnson, Simon & Schuster 2021
I could feel myself dying, week by week. I could not eat, could not sew, did not want to be bothered with any of the children. I just stayed in my room, staring at the wall. When I did push myself up from my pillow, my hair stayed on the sheets. It dropped out by the clumps. The Jailer worried sick over me. He even had the doctor bring me opium drops, but I refused to swallow them. Mama had cautioned me against white people's medicine all my life, so I knew better.
The details of a slave's ordinary life in the years leading up to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation are hard to imagine some 160 years later because their fictionalized stories cannot be detailed easily now. For author Sadeqa Johnson to have "seen" and written their days of invention and pain is a gift to us now. So much pain, so little freedom led African humans, those who survived, to live with great stubbornness and a most effective "disguise." All of this you will see when you read Yellow Wife.
It may be that the worst slavery times were those tense stretches just before the end of it all, just before the repeal of the second Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 requiring Northern sheriffs to seize and return escaped slaves. Or it may be those times when public punishment evidenced the South's worst methods of maintaining their "property" ownership. Ms. Johnson credibly paints the picture of these static and, for slaves, most dangerous times.
In fact, the author credits a visit to the Richmond Slave Trail with starting her on this deeply emotional journey. Seventeen markers running three miles to Lumpkin's Slave jail started her thinking - "I found myself drawn to the story of Robert Lumpkin, who lived on a half acre of land with his wife and five children, where enslaved people were held, bought, beaten and sold. She found herself drawn into traces of a story and "I felt the presence of souls wanting their voices to be heard... I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on the jail."
What she learned filled out many more details of what would become Yellow Wife. Robert Lumpkin, the Jailer, was a white man whose jail was in fact a holding pen and "breaking" center where more than three hundred thousand enclaved people from 1844 until 1865 were held and punished . One prisoner in fact was a slave named Anthony Burns who had escaped from a plantation in Virginia to Boston. When he was recaptured in 1854 and held at Lumpkin's Jail for 10 days, his story became a piece of Ms. Johnson's. And there is an Ipswich connection here as well; Mary, his yellow wife - or a mixed-race woman - bore five of Lumpkin's children. After the Civil War, the author reports, Robert Lumpkin married Mary and sent two of their daughters to a finishing school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where they passed for white.
Patricia E. Moody
FORTUNE magazine "Pioneering Woman in Mfg"
IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert
A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, patriciaemoody@gmail.com