Yellow Wife

Pheby Delores Brown is born on a Virginia plantation in the 1850s, the daughter of an enslaved woman and the plantation master, and she grows up promised her freedom on her eighteenth birthday. Instead she is betrayed and sold to the Devil's Half Acre, a Richmond jail that traffics in enslaved people. There the jailer, drawn to her light complexion, forces her to become his mistress and the manager of his household. Pheby bears his children and uses the narrow influence she gains to shield her family and to keep a hidden ledger of the names and stories of the people who pass through the jail and never come out. Loosely based on the real Lumpkin's Jail, the novel follows one woman's calculated fight to protect what she loves.