Yellow Wife(82)

Yours truly,

Mrs. Hester Francine Bell Dillingham





Author’s Note



This book is a work of fiction and all the characters are from my imagination, intuition, and alignment with Spirit. It was inspired by the story of Mary Lumpkin and Lumpkin’s jail in Richmond, Virginia. I first discovered Mary Lumpkin in the spring of 2016 by accident. My family had just moved to the Richmond area less than a year prior. Close family friends came for a visit, and in looking for an activity that both the kids and adults could enjoy, my husband suggested we take a walk along the Richmond Slave Trail. The trail, unveiled in 2011, had seventeen markers running nearly three miles from the Manchester Docks to Lumpkin’s slave jail. We started along the James River, giving the children a chance to read the markers aloud. While listening to them read the marker for Lumpkin’s jail, 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, in a complex that was said to reek of the most offensive odors. I live on three-fourths of an acre, and could not stop wondering what the conditions were like for his wife raising children. As we continued along the trail, I discovered that Robert Lumpkin’s wife was a former slave named Mary. Knowing that interracial marriages were illegal in the 1800s, I assumed that Robert was black. My mind started racing. How could a black man be the biggest slave trader in Richmond?

The kids grew tired of walking along the river so we got back into the car and skipped ahead on the trail, driving to the original site of Lumpkin’s jail and African burial ground. The energy around the jail was both eerie and surreal; I felt the presence of souls wanting their voices to be heard. It was like the ancestors had latched their spirits into my skin and followed me home. I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on the jail. I learned that Robert Lumpkin was, in fact, a white man and that Lumpkin’s jail was a notorious holding pen and “breaking” center for more than three hundred thousand enslaved people from 1844 until 1865. Lumpkin was so well known for his cruelty to blacks that the jail was known as the Devil’s Half Acre and he as the Bully Trader.

My curiosity led me to Anthony Burns, the most publicized prisoner ever detained at Lumpkin’s jail, who had escaped from a plantation in Virginia to freedom in Boston. Burns was recaptured in 1854 under the federal Fugitive Slave Act and kept at Lumpkin’s jail for 120 days, very similarly to the way I wrote it in the story. His one relief was a hymnal, secretly given to him by Lumpkin’s slave concubine/wife, Mary, who had taken pity on Burns.

After stumbling upon this piece of history, I could not stop thinking about Mary. What was life like for her and her children? How did she live on the Half Acre, both witnessing and assisting in the business that profited from fellow enslaved people? Did she actually love Robert and adapt easily to being mistress of the property, or had she operated simply from a place of survival?

In my research, Mary was described as an enslaved mixed-race woman who had arrived at the jail as a child. She would birth five of Lumpkin’s children. It was said that he treated her and her children as family. He formally emancipated Mary after the Civil War, married her, and sent two of their daughters to a finishing school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, where they passed for white. In Lumpkin’s will, he left all of his property and money to his “yellow wife.” She, in turn, leased the land to Dr. Nathaniel Colver, who used it as a seminary school for the freed slaves. This school would later become the historically black college Virginia Union University.

Online, I scoured plantation ledgers for the names that I used in the book as my way of paying homage to the ancestors. I also used real people who were operating in the slave trade in Richmond during that time, including Silas Omohundro, Hector Davis, and David Pulliam, who were all major in the Richmond slave trade along with their mulatto wives, Helen, Anne, and of course Corrina Hinton, who dazzled me with her beauty, charm, and head for business from the start of my research.

I studied pictures on websites and visited several plantations, including Green Hill plantation, Greenway plantation, Shirley plantation, Prestwould plantation, and Burroughs plantation in Virginia. I read several books in preparation for writing Yellow Wife, including Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom by Calvin Schermerhorn; Back of the Big House by John Michael Vlach; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese; A History of the Richmond’s Theological Seminary, with Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Work Among the Colored People of the South by Charles Henry Corey; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass; Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave by Charles Ball, which lent me the whipping scene of Essex with the hot pepper bath and the recounting of the fancy girl telling Pheby about “the punishment of the pump.” I also read The Known World by Edward P. Jones; Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade by Maurie D. McInnis; The Richmond Slave Trade: The Economic Backbone of the Old Dominion by Jack Trammell and Alphine W. Jefferson; and many online periodicals.





Acknowledgments



It is by the Grace of God that I moved to Virginia on His word and discovered the story of Mary Lumpkin. I am grateful for every step of this journey. Imani, Monique, Kaya, and Xola Moody, thank you for embarking upon the Richmond Slave Trail with us where the nugget of this story was planted. To my lovely family and friends, I appreciate you all. My father, Tyrone Murray, for reading every page with gusto and pride. My mother, Nancy Murray, for your unwavering love, and Francine Murray for your support. My wonderful in-laws, Paula Johnson, Glenn Johnson Sr., and Pacita Perera for lovingly cheering me on. My favorite sibs: Tauja, Nadiyah, and Talib Murray for always having my back, and my cousin Elisa Garbett for sharing Vinnie Brown with me along with our family tree. To all the Belles, with a special thanks to Claudia and Anne for being my guiding light, and Ashkira for allowing me to return the favor. To my early readers who urged me to keep writing this story: Mary Patterson of the Little Bookshop; Robin Farmer, Samantha Willis, and Toni Bonita. To Kimbilio and all my fellows. All the book clubs and readers who still love good fiction and spread the word for authors like me.