Yellow Wife. Sadeqa Johnson. 2021.
Historical fiction.
In the antebellum South, a biracial enslaved woman must barter love and freedom while surviving as the unofficial wife of Virginia’s most infamous slave jailer.
This is a story of sexual slavery, told from the perspective of a victim. It begins on a plantation but moves to its primary setting—an infamous jail in Richmond, Virginia—at about the 20 percent mark.
A topic such as this is naturally fraught and loaded with traumatic potential. Yet, somehow, Sadeqa Johnson is able to thread a difficult needle and deliver a story that reveals an horrific truth in a way that does not feel like a trauma dump.
When I consider where she could have gone, the choices she might have made to bring this story into the world, I am grateful. Like Toni Morisson’s Beloved, Johnson has chosen illumination over humiliation and created an image that no one should want to forget.
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