A slave becomes her own saviour
The Yellow Wife
Sadeqa Johnson
Simon & Schuster
Through the eyes of a character with uncommon access and compassion, Sadeqa Johnson's novel The Yellow Wife (Simon & Schuster) evokes a vision of one woman's tenacious survival of antebellum cruelty and objectification.
The daughter of an enslaved healer and seamstress and her white master, Pheby Delores Brown grows up in a kind of in-between state.
“Problem with being high yella,” an enslaved woman tells Pheby after her father's wife slaps her, “that handprint gonna be on your face all day long.”
Though she labours on the plantation, her father secretly encourages her education and assures her she'll be freed on her 18th birthday.
Disregarding that promise, her father's wife sells her out of spite. Pheby is marched to a faraway slave jail, where her new master, Rubin Lapier, torments her, making her his favoured companion, mistress of his slave auction house and brothel, mother to his children and bearer of his abuse.
Pheby soon learns to fear Lapier, a dread she suffers for the rest of her time on his compound, known as “the Devil's Half Acre.”
She frequently uses her imagination to escape her desolation. She relates events as they happen to her but only inconsistently anchors them in the details, dialogue or personal emotions that would give Pheby's character texture and singularity.
As Pheby settles into life under Lapier's brutal surveillance, her point of view becomes a more essential window to the story.
She witnesses the jail's institutional horrors, and her unique position enables her to engage in acts of defiance — it is these acts that most illuminate Pheby's particular care and resourcefulness.
“It was time for me to become my own saviour,” she realizes. “My days as a girl were gone.”
The high wire Pheby balances on provides the novel's keenest tension, but its potential is sometimes lost among underserved narrative threads and plot points that don't pay off.
Ultimately, Johnson's author's note may be the most fascinating chapter of all: a description of the true stories that inspired the novel.