The Devil's Half Acre

Prologue

THE COBBLESTONE STREETS OF DOWNTOWN RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, gently slope to a low-lying area where a dark history is hidden.

One of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, Shockoe Bottom, is marked by throbbing nightclubs, an advertising agency, and a smattering of cafés, hotels, and restaurants. Tobacco warehouses perched on the James River are now stylish lofts, occupied by graduate students and young professionals. Interstate 95 roars over the neighborhood, and Amtrak rails run alongside the highway, picking up and dropping off passengers at the historic Main Street Station. The neighborhood retains remnants of a bygone era. Old advertisements painted on the sides of brick buildings give it a certain charm. Cluttered with parking lots and potholed streets, the neighborhood also feels abandoned and unloved, forgotten.

Tucked on the edge of Shockoe Bottom, a lush green field near a freeway ramp seems out of place in the urban landscape. It is not just a field, however, but a reclaimed African burial ground. Crossing under the freeway, a visitor finds more history, delivered up on a dull brown sign: Lumpkin’s Slave Jail Archaeological Study Site. Three historic markers outline its significance.

This trio of metal signs next to a freeway, hemmed in by parking lots, is how the story of one of the most important chapters of the domestic slave trade in America is told. This is how the life of Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who survived life inside the brutal jail, is shared.

This is exactly the way to tell a story so that no one will hear it.

In the mid-1800s, when Richmond was a hub of the domestic slave trade—the second-biggest in the South, after New Orleans—Shockoe Bottom was of ominous significance. Located down a hill from St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry uttered his famous words “Give me liberty or give me death,” neighborhood businesses catered to the slave trade and to the people who relied on it. There were hotels where buyers could stay, taverns where they could have a drink and a meal, and stables where they could park their horses. Cobblers in the neighborhood fixed visiting enslavers’ shoes, and tailors made clothing for enslaved people to wear when they were put up for sale. Blacksmiths fixed horseshoes for enslavers who had traveled long distances to buy enslaved people, and there were repair shops for their wagons. The neighborhood had auction houses for selling enslaved people and gallows for executing criminals. It was also home to a collection of slave jails that housed thousands of enslaved people, among them a girl named Mary Lumpkin.

One of two million girls and women enslaved in the American South in the decades before the Civil War, Mary Lumpkin’s life was woven through with brutality and trauma, with family separation and abuse. But hers is also a story of resistance—and survival.

Described as “nearly white” and “fair faced,” she may have been the multiracial child of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, one of his relatives, or a white overseer. Sold away as a young girl, probably from one or both of her parents, Mary Lumpkin was purchased by the slave trader Robert Lumpkin, a violent white man twenty-seven years her senior. When she was about thirteen, she was forced to have his children. She lived in his slave jail, where he imprisoned thousands of enslaved people over decades in the business. Some were held there before sale, and others were held after sale. Nearly all were to be shipped away to the Lower South.

In this wretched place, Mary Lumpkin managed to educate her children and find a path to freedom. After the Civil War, she inherited the jail when Robert Lumpkin died and bequeathed the property to her. Two years later, she helped a white Baptist missionary turn the “Devil’s Half Acre”—a greatly feared place where countless enslaved people had long suffered—into “God’s Half Acre,” a school where dreams could be realized. The same grounds where enslaved people were imprisoned and beaten became the cornerstone for one of America’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU). Virginia Union University is still in existence today.

“Virginia Union… was born in the bosom of Lumpkin’s Jail,” said W. Franklyn Richardson, chairman of the university’s board and an alumnus. “The place we were sold into slavery becomes the place we are released into intellectual freedom.”

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the school, founded as Richmond Theological School for Freedmen, provided Black students with an education. For more than 150 years, it has elevated and nurtured generations of Black men and women, helping them to realize their potential. It has shaped civic, education, and business leaders and developed activists who worked to desegregate whites-only lunch counters in Richmond department stores.

It is also one of the rare historically Black colleges and universities in America that can tie its origins to a Black woman.

“For Virginia Union to have a forming story rooted in Black woman-ness… it’s a story of its own,” said Virginia Union president Hakim J. Lucas.

Yet, for many years, Mary Lumpkin was invisible, even at the school she had played a role in forming. When Lumpkin’s Jail was demolished and covered with fill dirt, her story went with it.

I first learned of Mary Lumpkin in 2011, soon after moving to Richmond. As a reporter at the local newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, I had been assigned to write about an African burial ground for free and enslaved Black people in Shockoe Bottom. A parking lot was believed to have been built over the bodies of hundreds of Black Americans buried between 1750 and 1816. Activists for years had called for the removal of a state-owned parking lot so that they could reclaim the burial ground.

Doing research for that story, I read about the nearby Lumpkin’s Jail. In 2008, a team of archaeologists had gone looking for remnants of the slave jail compound, which was demolished in 1888. Overlaying old photos and maps, archaeologist Matthew Laird pinpointed the spot where he thought Robert Lumpkin’s business had been located—now another parking lot in the shadow of Interstate 95. For eighteen weeks, his team searched for the jail’s foundation by gently scraping away layers of earth in an excavation pit. In the course of its work, the team discovered hand-painted English china, an eyeglass lens, leather and fabric, and a piece of a child’s doll. The archaeologists located the remains of a kitchen, a cobblestone courtyard, and a retaining wall that separated the upper part of the complex from the jail below. Then, during the last weeks of the dig, they uncovered the foundation of the jail down the hill eight feet from the rest of the Lumpkin compound and some fifteen feet below today’s surface level. The history had been right there all along.

Years after the dig was completed and the burial ground had been reclaimed, I found myself thinking not just about Lumpkin’s Jail and its role in American history but about the formidable woman who lived there with her enslaver, Robert Lumpkin. Mary Lumpkin had ministered to enslaved people imprisoned at the jail, and later she had made space for Black men and women to be educated. I wanted to learn more about her life and to understand why her story hadn’t been told. I knew Mary Lumpkin did not simply find freedom but seized it—for her children and herself. It seemed to me to be an essential American story of a woman who had accomplished something incredible. With my experience working as a journalist and writing about Virginia history, I felt I would be able to research and write it.

A narrative about the erasure of women—and enslaved women in particular—unfolded before me. Mary Lumpkin’s story had not been told for the same reason so many Black women’s stories have not been told in this country. White men have historically told the stories. They were the ones who were educated, who managed the businesses, and who filed the court records. As the record keepers, they determined whose stories would endure the test of time and whose would vanish. By eliminating the stories of Black women—and those of Black men and children as well—white men preserved their positions of power, ensuring that a white supremacist society would continue.

Even the most detail-oriented plantation owners omitted enslaved people’s names from plantation records or referred to them by only their first names, revealing the intentional nature of such omissions. Government records did not require full names, so when enslavers filled out shipping records for enslaved people they sent to the Lower South, they often provided only first names. The US census did not collect names of enslaved people for many years. Instead, census takers denoted them with a simple slash mark and recorded only their age and gender. This made it nearly impossible for enslaved people to find each other after separation by sale and, later, for descendants to trace their lineage. These gaps in the historical record also prevent historians and descendants from learning the details of enslaved people’s lives, including Mary Lumpkin’s.

Few enslaved people left the kinds of documents that historians use to trace and tell white people’s stories. Though Mary Lumpkin was literate, she did not leave journals or personal papers—none, anyway, that I could locate. “People who are free have the ability to give their papers to someone specific. Enslaved people didn’t have that privilege,” said Niya Bates, the former public historian at Monticello.

Even wealthy white people had trouble preserving fragile papers. Important records put in a box and buried would quickly deteriorate. Enslaved people, many of whom could not read or write, did not typically have papers. If they did, their papers rarely survived. Only precious items like hair clips could be saved, passed down from one family member to the next. Moved around frequently as they were bought and sold, enslaved people’s impermanent living conditions made it “very hard to keep track of personal belongings,” Bates said.

Most enslaved people kept everything in their minds—“the only diary in which the records of their marriages, births and deaths were registered,” wrote Henry Clay Bruce, who was born enslaved in Virginia. Oral histories were their primary means for preserving stories.

A handful of letters that Mary Lumpkin wrote to the administrators of the school now known as Virginia Union University were preserved. These letters and the court testimony she gave on behalf of a friend are the only records in her own voice. I couldn’t find any documents that show where Mary Lumpkin was born or who her parents were.

Historians have had to rely on the records created by their oppressors in order to reconstruct the lives of Black men and women. But such records were unavailable for Mary Lumpkin, as only a few pages of a ledger book from Robert Lumpkin’s renowned slave jail operation were preserved. While his will instructed that his assets be distributed to Mary Lumpkin, and then later to their children, other documents that might have revealed more about the relationship—and more about his role in the slave trade—were either lost or destroyed, perhaps intentionally.

To flesh out Mary Lumpkin’s story, I went to a Richmond courthouse, where crinkling, 150-year-old court cases were still tied in “red tape”—the ribbon that has become synonymous with government bureaucracy. I went to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a tiny seaside town, and sat in the town museum and town library, flipping through records for the school her daughters attended. Poring over old property records in a Philadelphia basement, I discovered that Mary Lumpkin had purchased a home in her own name. I visited the hillside cemetery where she was buried in New Richmond, Ohio, and learned about the abolitionist roots of the community on the banks of the Ohio River. An outline of a life began to emerge that seemed to be defined as much by the freedom that Mary Lumpkin forged in her late twenties as by her enslavement.

As I traced her movements, I discovered that in her role as the mother of Robert Lumpkin’s children she was part of a community of girls and women, hidden from view, who were chosen as sexual partners by slave traders and forced to bear their children. These women probably managed their enslaver’s household and operated some part of the business of running a slave jail. As witnesses to the slave traders’ violence and participants in the system of slavery, they were in some ways separated from other enslaved people. Yet choices were not theirs to make. They were unfree, and their lives were a paradox.

These enslaved women may have encouraged each other to seek more independence and assert themselves in the slave jails and in their relationships with the fathers of their children. Perhaps they supported each other in their quests to educate themselves and their children, and they may have bolstered each other’s attempts to move their children out of slavery. Maybe they shared not only tactics for enduring their lives of enslavement but also methods for seeking better lives.

Mary Lumpkin forged such friendships and connections, first as an enslaved woman in the Richmond slave trade district where the slave jails and slave markets were located, and then as a free person in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and, later, New Richmond. Her relationships with other enslaved women, including Lucy Ann Cheatham Hagan, Corinna Hinton Omohundro, and Ann Banks Davis, may have helped protect her in her interactions with Robert Lumpkin and must have made her daily life easier to bear.

In her relationship with Robert Lumpkin, Mary Lumpkin exercised her agency and limited authority, finding a way out of enslavement. She told him he could do with her what he wanted but required that the children be freed. She demanded that he give her money so that she could free them. She showed empathy and concern for other enslaved people who were tortured and held captive in Lumpkin’s Jail. She was highly mobile, seeking out opportunities in new places, and she would eventually make a home for herself in three American cities and a village. Not only did Mary Lumpkin ensure that her children were educated, but she helped make education available to newly free Black men in the aftermath of the Civil War and, subsequently, to generations of Black Americans.

Why, then, don’t we know her story?

While women’s stories have rarely been preserved throughout history, silence surrounds the lives of enslaved women because of what scholars call “triple constraints” or “triple invisibility.” Being Black, female, and poor, enslaved women were devalued and forgotten, in spite of evidence of their leadership, resistance, and survival of monumental hardships. The institution of slavery relied on their bodies, yet their contributions were not recognized. They were exploited in every way.

Throughout American history, Black women have been marginalized or excluded from national narratives. They are rarely given credit for their role as abolitionists. Their attempts during the suffragist movement to improve their own lives were blocked, and their contributions to the civil rights movement were overlooked. Even today, after the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Rekia Boyd, and Atatiana Jefferson at the hands of police, they are left out of the prevailing narrative about state violence against Black people.

The stories of enslaved women have traditionally been lumped together and presented as one monolithic tale, rather than as distinct stories of hardships and triumphs. But “slavery was not just one enormous act of oppression against a nameless, interchangeable mass of people,” writes the historian Annette Gordon-Reed. “It was millions of separate assassinations and attempted assassinations of individual spirits carried out over centuries.” And yet, Gordon-Reed acknowledges, “We will always know little or nothing about the vast majority of enslaved women and the scores of them who suffered rape.”

Traditionally, only the stories of the most exceptional women and their narratives of triumph have broken through. The only enslaved woman many Americans know about is Harriet Tubman, who not only fled her enslaver but returned to the South to help other enslaved people find freedom too. More recently, the story of Ona Judge, who fled her enslaver George Washington and was never caught, came to light. But her story is not yet widely known.

There are so many others whose stories need to be told. Female enslavement was more complex and varied than has been portrayed in the limited narratives to which Americans have been exposed. There are women like Harriet Jacobs, who hid in the attic of her grandmother’s home for nearly seven years while her children played below in order to escape the threat of sexual abuse by her enslaver. Jacobs was the first woman to author a narrative of escaping enslavement in the United States. Louisa Picquet, sold away from her mother and brother at age thirteen, was forced to have the children of her enslaver. After she was freed at his death, she raised funds to purchase her mother’s freedom. Reverend Hiram Mattison, an abolitionist pastor, helped her to tell her story in a question-and-answer format. Both books were published in 1861.

Telling only the stories of those who escaped slavery left out the stories of most enslaved women’s lives. Many felt that they could not run away because they had family obligations and children they would not leave. “Apparently many women concluded that permanent escape was impossible or undesirable,” writes the historian Stephanie M. H. Camp.

Instead, they fled temporarily when violence became too great to withstand. They fought back to avoid abuse, and they protested beatings. When they could not avoid rape, they attempted their own birth control and chewed cotton root to abort pregnancies. In despair and defiance, some took the lives of their own infants rather than see them grow up enslaved. A few killed their enslavers. Others slit their own throats, cut off their own hands, jumped from windows. They rescued other enslaved people, and they led slave revolts—stories that are only now coming to light.

They resisted in quiet ways too, using their agency to secure better jobs in enslavers’ households, to get education for their children, to provide their families with some security and extra food. Because historians for generations have limited the scope of storytelling about Black women to those who are better documented and those deemed exceptional, the lives of women like Mary Lumpkin have not been explored, resulting in their omission from the history books.