The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail

The unlikely story of how a former “slave jail” in Richmond, Va., became Virginia Union University, an HBCU that “has elevated and nurtured generations of Black men and women” is chronicled in this intriguing if speculative history. Journalist Green (Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County) spotlights Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who inherited the jail property from her owner (and the father of her five children) after the Civil War and rented it out as a school for freedmen. Drawing on census records, Federal Writer’s Project oral histories, and archaeological research, Green fills in the gaps in Lumpkin’s biography with details about the brutal conditions at Lumpkin’s Jail, which held captured runaways as well as men and women about to be shipped to plantations in the Lower South, and the experiences of other enslaved women who were forced to bear their owners’ children. Though frequent passages imagining what Mary Lumpkin “likely” did, or how she “probably” felt, add up to a less than satisfying record of her life, Green packs the narrative with vivid details about 19th-century Richmond, the domestic slave trade, and the history of Black education in America. This is a valiant and thought-provoking attempt to rescue a life lost to history. (Apr.)