Yellow Wife
By Sadeqa Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 288 pages, $35.00
Award-winning Virginia novelist Sadeqa Johnson is back with her fourth novel, an absorbing story about an enslaved woman born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia. “Yellow Wife” opens in 1850 and follows Pheby Delores Brown through a coming-of-age saga of love, loss, marriage and motherhood — all of which are tangled up in the horrors of slavery. The idea for the book came to Johnson one day when her family visited the Richmond Slave Trail. The ghost of historic figure Mary Lumpkin, the mixed-race wife of a white slave trader and jailer at Devil’s Half-Acre, took hold of Johnson’s psyche and refused to let go. “At first, it was hard for me to obey the call,” Johnson writes. “I had not written about this period of American life before, but Mary, her children, and the ancestors buried on the land would…
