{"id":63894,"date":"2022-05-21T21:45:37","date_gmt":"2022-05-21T21:45:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63894"},"modified":"2022-05-21T21:47:12","modified_gmt":"2022-05-21T21:47:12","slug":"a-fable-of-agency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63894","title":{"rendered":"A Fable of Agency"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Fable of Agency<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Review of Books<\/a>
\n2022-05-26<\/p>\n

Brenda Wineapple<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a>
Special Collections, University of Virginia Library<\/p>\n

Lumpkin\u2019s Jail<\/a>; engraving from A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary<\/em>, 1895<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Devil\u2019s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South\u2019s Most Notorious Slave Jail<\/em><\/a> by Kristen Green<\/a>. Seal, 332 pp., $30.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kristen Green\u2019s <\/em>The Devil\u2019s Half Acre<\/a> recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.<\/em><\/p>\n

In The Allure of the Archives<\/em> (1989), a gem of a book, the French historian Arlette Farge<\/a> talks about unearthing, insofar as it\u2019s possible, a past that\u2019s not quite past\u2014particularly in relation to the lives of women, whose histories have often been hidden, forgotten, or written over, women spoken about but whom we seldom hear speaking. Combing through the judicial archives at the Pr\u00e9fecture of Paris, Farge reads the sullen or angry answers that ordinary eighteenth-century Parisian women, some of the city\u2019s poorest and most vulnerable, give to the police who have arrested them. And she knows that to understand what they say, or don\u2019t say, we need to care and not to care: to distance ourselves with empathy while we set aside expectations and assumptions. Deciphering what\u2019s left in the archives, Farge writes, \u201centails a roaming voyage through the words of others, and a search for a language that can rescue their relevance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Piecing together stories about women who managed the uncertainties and privations of their situations is even more difficult when the women in question have been enslaved and thus forbidden even the basic rights that an eighteenth-century Parisian laundress enjoyed. That is Kristen Green\u2019s task in her impassioned The Devil\u2019s Half Acre<\/em>, which she calls \u201cthe untold story of how one woman liberated the South\u2019s most notorious slave jail<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Green is a journalist and also the author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County<\/em> (2015), a personal account of how that Virginia<\/a> county defied Brown v. Board of Education<\/em><\/a> and shut down its schools for almost five years rather than integrate them. In The Devil\u2019s Half Acre<\/em>, she recovers the life of Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman of mixed race born in 1832 who, likely by 1840, was held in bondage at Lumpkin\u2019s Jail<\/a>, a chamber of horrors located between Franklin and Broad Streets in Shockoe Bottom<\/a>, the central slave-trading quarter in Richmond, Virginia<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kristen Green\u2019s The Devil\u2019s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,5,459,8,6940,20,693,25],"tags":[33549,20536,33550,31867,14230,8406,31866,7008],"class_list":["post-63894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-usa","category-virginia","category-women","tag-brenda-wineapple","tag-kristen-green","tag-lumpkins-jail-2","tag-mary-lumpkin","tag-new-york-review-of-books","tag-richmond","tag-robert-lumpkin","tag-the-new-york-review-of-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63894"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63909,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63894\/revisions\/63909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}