Pheby Delores Brown, the biracial daughter of an enslaved medicine woman and the master of a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, is raised in unusual privilege — taught piano, taught to read against the law, and promised freedom and a Northern education on her eighteenth birthday. The promise dies with the master: his widow sells her, and Pheby lands in Richmond's Devil's Half Acre, the infamous slave jail of the trader Rubin Lapier, where the enslaved are broken, tortured, and sold daily. There she survives as the jailer's unwilling "wife," bearing his children while working to protect them — and the son she had with Essex Henry, the enslaved man she loved and lost. Johnson's author's note grounds the fiction in the historical record of the real jail and of Mary Lumpkin, the enslaved woman at its center. The novel was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the Christian Science Monitor.
Author: Sadeqa Johnson · Original publisher: Simon & Schuster (New York), 2021
