‘Yellow Wife’ takes a hard look at choices faced by enslaved mothers

A young, half-white enslaved woman must contend with horrendous decisions as she attempts to preserve what little family she has left.

In “Yellow Wife,” Sadeqa Johnson paints a world of rich details of the antebellum South. The story is told through the eyes of Pheby Brown, a biracial girl born to an enslaved mother and a white plantation owner. 

Because of her status, Pheby was sheltered as a child from much of the violence and harshness of slavery. She was taught to read, which was against the law, and to play the piano. While she lives in relative privilege for being enslaved, she knows that there is a world of freedom beyond Charles City, Virginia, and she wants it. 

Pheby dreams about a life in which she is no longer enslaved, based on a promise made by her father, Jacob, to free her when she turns 18. Her love, Essex, another enslaved person, decides to make a run North to freedom, and he implores Pheby to go with him. 

But she hangs onto the promise of emancipation, and then learns the hard way that not all promises come true. After her owner/father is seriously injured in a carriage accident, his wife – who has always been jealous of Pheby and her mother – sells Pheby off the plantation. 

Her new owner, Rubin Lapier, is the proprietor of the Jail, a holding facility for slaves in Richmond. He coerces her into a sexual relationship, and she bears his children and acts as the lady of his house. Years later, she’s reunited with Essex when he is captured and brought to the Jail; Pheby must plot to help him escape.

Johnson’s portrayal of privilege and a class system among slaves is particularly striking. It isn’t news that children fathered by a slave owner often garnered more favor in the plantation hierarchy, usually because of the color of their skin. At the end of the day, they were all still enslaved with no path to freedom. But Johnson, in showing Pheby’s early life, underscores the tragic change in circumstances that Pheby must learn to navigate.

“The Yellow Wife” doesn’t sugarcoat the realities of slavery. There is no romanticization of the relationship between enslaved persons and their owners, though that trope has been perpetuated in many novels. (It has even clouded the popular understanding of the relationship between slaveowner President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who was the mother of several of his children.)

Instead, “Yellow Wife” is unflinching in its descriptions of the violence, inhumanity, and family separations that Black women living in slavery faced, as well as the choices they made to keep their children alive. 

Johnson has no interest in softening the story to make it more palatable. As Americans continue to deal with issues of race today, “Yellow Wife” is the perfect book to help the country see, in part, how it got here.