Book Review: The Devil's Half Acre - Kristen Green

 

I received an e-ARC version of this book from NetGalley and the publisher.

“The Devil’s Half Acre” is by Kristen Green. It’s a non-fiction story about the part Richmond, Virginia had in the role of slavery. Yes, my summary differs from the publisher’s summary, but - let me be honest - this is a difficult book for me to review!

If I could give a rating based upon the amount of historical research Ms. Green did for this book, I would - and it would be a very high five stars. She lists an extensive amount of articles and books she used for background material. She also consulted genealogical records to track movement - so, she did a great job of due diligence. However, because so little is known about Mary Lumpkin, while she’s a common thread in this story, so much is guesswork about her life. There are some facts however - she was an enslaved woman (at the time a young teenager) forced to bear children of Robert Lumpkin, who owned and ran Lumpkin’s Jail in Richmond, VA. Mary outlived Robert Lumpkin and she inherited the land Lumpkin’s Jail had been on (Robert died after the Civil War ended) and, she offered the land and buildings up to become a school, eventually becoming Virginia Union University.

For me, sadly, where the overall book falls short is in the overall structure of the book. For instance, a lot of time is spent at the beginning with the author discussing her word choices and why she made those choices. There are ways to do this that don’t take nearly 30 pages to explain to the reader. Because so little is known about Mary Lumpkin, the author uses a lot of qualifiers “maybe Mary Lumpkin did this,” “Maybe Mary Lumpkin and Person_name discussed this,” and the etc. So much is unknown - including why she left Virginia and moved to Ohio (the author makes some guesses - but I would’ve preferred a straight “Mary moved there and lived with PersonX, but there’s no documentation saying why she made that choice.”). Mary is always referred to as “Mary Lumpkin,” which I found a bit awkward to read after a number of pages. Yes, that’s a stylistic choice, but since Mary seemed to be the only Mary in the book, it became annoying. The author had a message to convey with this book - and she delivers it, but at times for me it became mired down in political correctness, “these people good, these people bad,” and leaps in time (example: beginning a discussion occurring in 1840, then including historical information from the 1790s, then jumping to the 1930s before returning to the 1850s) that made it difficult to always keep track of what was happening when.

As a side note, if you have read the historical fiction book "The Yellow Wife," by Sadeqa Johnson, the main character, Pheby Brown, is based upon Mary Lumpkin.