November 30, 2020
Johnson’s rich latest (after And Then There Was Me) follows a mixed-race young woman, enslaved by her father, through a series of betrayals and abuses. Pheby Brown has been promised her emancipation at 18 by her father, Jacob Bell, the white owner of a plantation in Charles City, Va. Pheby chooses to remain at the Bell plantation because of Jacob’s promise, even after her lover, Essex, escapes to the north in 1850, when she is 17. After a carriage accident kills Pheby’s mother and injures Jacob, Pheby is at the mercy of Jacob’s vindictive, mean-spirited wife, Delphina, who sells Pheby to jailer Rubin Lapier. At the jail, Pheby gives birth to Essex’s son, Monroe, and afterwards Rubin coerces Pheby to sleep with him in exchange for keeping Monroe. As the years pass, Pheby bears four of Rubin’s daughters. When Essex is captured and ends up at the jail in 1857, Pheby plots to get him and Monroe to freedom. While some scenes feel a bit melodramatic, the author brilliantly depicts Pheby’s maternal drive to create a better life for all of her children despite a series of brutally difficult compromises. Despite the occasional creaky plot turns, Johnson achieves a powerful, unflinching account of determination in the face of oppression. Agents: Cherise Fisher and Wendy Sherman, Wendy Sherman Asso.
December 15, 2020
Johnson (And Then There Was Me, 2017) follows the life of an enslaved woman, Pheby Delores Brown, born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia. She is afforded the privileges of learning to read and write and playing the piano, and the promise of freedom on her eighteenth birthday. After a sequence of unfortunate events, however Pheby is sold up north to Richmond. Her master, who owns a jail known as Devil's Half-Acre, where the enslaved are kept in inhuman living conditions and severely beaten, takes her in as his wife. Pheby has given up hope of freedom and decides to barter her companionship for a better life for her children. She also battles her conscience as she aids in the preparation of the enslaved to be sold. Johnson writes with imagery so vivid that it's impossible to look away, even during gut-wrenching moments. Readers will be engulfed in captivating suspense, rooting for the protagonist and her mischief, in hopes that it will deliver her from the evils of slavery.
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Starred review from January 1, 2021
In this emotionally wrenching pre-Civil War story, Pheby Delores Brown, born a house slave on a Virginia plantation, is the biracial child (then referred to as "high yellow") of a proud African mother and fathered by their white owner. Before her mother's dream for her of freedom and education when she came of age--as promised by her slave-owning father--can be realized, the "spoiled" 16-year-old Pheby becomes a target of the plantation owner's jealous wife, and is sent to a notorious jail where the enslaved are broken and tortured. She becomes the "yellow wife" of the disreputable white jail owner. Pheby lives in fear of her sadistic husband, and her dreams of freedom and protecting those she loves grow more desperate with the birth of each child, and the passing years.VERDICT This well-researched and intensely moving fifth novel by Johnson (And Then There Was Me) is perfect for fans of historical fiction with strong female characters such as The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom and Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Book clubs looking for #OwnVoices authors will be powerfully impressed by this story of a lesser-known aspect of the history of slavery in the American South.--Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA
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Starred review from December 15, 2020
An enslaved young woman's experiences come wrenchingly alive in this vivid historical novel. Pheby Delores Brown, the novel's narrator, was born on a Virginia plantation to its owner, Jacob Bell, and Ruth, one of the women enslaved there. As a child, Pheby was sheltered from much of the harshness of slavery, even taught to play the piano and to read, although the latter is against the law. Pheby is almost 18--the age at which Jacob has promised to free her--when the book opens in 1850. But Jacob has married a younger wife, Delphina, who resents Ruth and Pheby bitterly. When Jacob takes Ruth on a trip, Delphina sells Pheby to a slave trader. Roped into a coffle with dozens of other enslaved people for the long walk to Richmond, she is thrust into a nightmare of brutal, dehumanizing treatment. In Richmond, at a notorious slave trading center called the Jail, light-skinned, pretty Pheby is marked for sale as a "fancy girl." But Rubin Lapier, the White man who owns the Jail, claims her for himself even though she is pregnant with the son of Essex Henry, a stable hand at the Bell plantation, now a runaway. Although Richmond's White elite get their wealth from slaveholding, traders like Lapier are considered disreputable enough that White women will not marry them. Pheby becomes his "yellow wife," running his household and bearing him five children. Johnson's first-person narration gives the reader a window into the terrible burden of doubleness that Pheby carries, always performing submission to keep herself and her children safe, painfully aware that behind Lapier's usually courteous treatment of her is a ruthless sadism. As time passes, she realizes she must find a way to send her Black son, Monroe, to freedom before Lapier sells him (or worse) in some fit of anger, and her life becomes much more dangerous. Johnson is unsparing in her depiction of the physical, psychological, and spiritual damages wrought by slavery and realistic in her portrayal of the heroism of Pheby and others in resisting it--they cannot change the world, but they do what they can, and sometimes that's extraordinary. A horrifying but ultimately moving story anchored by a complex narrator.
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