Kristen Green - The Devils Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the Souths Most Notorious Slave Jail

From the moment I first learned of Mary Lumpkin, I knew her story needed to be told. She had suffered unspeakable hardships as an enslaved woman, but had also accomplished incredible feats, helping to free her girls and playing a role in founding a school that improved the lives of generations of Black Americans.

But telling her story would be challenging. When I started looking in 2014 for clues about her life, I did not uncover much. Yet I was committed to finding a way to write about her. Niya Bates, who worked as a public historian at Thomas Jeffersons Monticello, was reassuring. She told me that even without a paper trail, we can still learn quite a lot of information about enslaved people.

Bates had helped to bring into the light Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who had at least six of Jeffersons children. If we look harder at the evidence, we can put together a narrative of who she was as a person, as a mother, as a daughter, she told me.

I spent years collecting tiny tidbits of information about Mary Lumpkins pastan entry in the US census, a listing in a city directory, a mention in a book. Over time I compiled more: her testimony in a court case, a will naming her and her children as beneficiaries, her burial record. I used genealogical research to trace her children and grandchildren, and I attempted to map her life from these scraps of knowledge.

I also spent years reading and thinking about the world that Mary Lumpkin inhabited. Eventually, I saw her on the pages I turnedin the stories of enslaved children sold away from their parents, of girls who learned to read and write, of girls who did not have enough to eat, of girls forced to have children with their enslavers. I could see her in women negotiating for freedom for their children and themselves. I envisioned her as I read about Black abolitionists, property and business owners, leaders of slave revolts. I pictured her laughing with friends, hugging her children, walking freely in a city of her choosing.

Over time Mary Lumpkin emerged from the shadows. As I wrote, I used the research I had conducted to imagine the spaces where she dwelled and fill the gaps in her story. Historians Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross suggest that such imagining is a way to correct the erasure, and that is what I have tried to do.

In the time I have worked to excavate her history, the American conversation about slavery has begun to change, if ever so slightly. The New York Times s 1619 Project has worked to reframe the history of slavery, emphasizing the contributions of enslaved people in forming the new country and building on the work scholars have done for years to educate Americans. In the aftermath of George Floyds murder in Minneapolis, the Black Lives Matter movement has raised awareness of police brutality and racially motivated violence against Black Americans, revealing a past that had been rendered invisible, buried by white supremacists.