In The Devil's Half Acre, Kristen Green (Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County) excavates the remarkable, long-erased story of a woman who survived slavery, built a better life for her children and ultimately converted the jail building that her enslaver operated into a Black men's seminary.
Mary Lumpkin was around 13 years old when she was forced to bear the children of her enslaver, Robert Lumpkin, who ran an infamous slave jail in Richmond, Va. Robert gave the jail to Mary in his will, and it eventually became what is now Virginia Union University. Lumpkin left behind some letters to the school but no personal papers or journals. Through examinations of property and school records in several states and mentions in other documents about the Lumpkin jail, Green painstakingly reconstructs the story of how Lumpkin kept her children from being sold away from her and arranged for them to be educated in Philadelphia. Lumpkin, claiming to be widowed, lived there with her children as a free woman through the Civil War--before then returning to Robert until his death in 1866.
Green acknowledges that we will never know the exact arrangement Mary and Robert Lumpkin made, the one that brought her back to him just before his death in 1866, when she was indisputably a free woman and which resulted in her inheritance of his real estate. But Green's research offers readers a moving, insightful picture of the families and friendships of enslaved women, those whose stories have long been erased. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library