The Known World

This book is so great b/c of its ability to express all of the moral complexities of slavery pre-civil war. Duty, religion, morality, justice, law, success, conformity, experience……all contribute to the intricacies of slavery. The main characters revolve around Henry, who is a former slave that upholds an estate of slaves. Other characters are a God-fearing slave owner, a slave owner who falls in love with a black woman and has a child, and an educated black woman. Although rare, I had never known that blacks had owned slaves. It is masterfully written and draws you in, making you imagine what you would think and do during that time…and what you could convince yourself to believe lessening your negative reaction to the idea of slavery (or maybe just not allowing yourself to see slavery’s impact on the individual life as what it really was….crippling). While at the same time, you get a glimpse of what it must have been like to be a slave, from being a woman who is stripped down so that a white man can look at her to see if he wants to buy her and take her away from her family to being physically abused. There are contradictions and “well-meant” things that did not turn out well. This is a great book to digest and discuss. I love a historical, relational book that makes you think!! The author also writes about historical documents and events that allow you to believe it actually happened.

“Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible. Skiffington had learned from his father how much solace there was in separation God’s law from Caesar’s law. ‘Render your body unto them,’ his father had taught, ‘but know your soul belongs to God.’ As long as Skiffington and Winifred lived within the light that came from God’s law, from the Bible, nothing on earth, not even his duty as a sheriff to the Caesars, could deny them the kingdom of God. ‘We will not own slaves,’ Skiffington promised God, and he promised each morning he went to his knees to pray. Though everyone in the country saw Minerva the wedding present as their property, the Skiffingtons did not feel they owned her, not in the way whites and few blacks owned slaves” (this was written about a young girl taken by her parents that they came to own)

“Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here all the way to the death of that property. But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns round and bites you, the law will come to you still, will but it not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed you need. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter.” (Henry goes on to slap his slave right after and say “why don’t you never do what I tell you? N--, you never do. You just do what I tell you from now on.”)

“How could anyone, white or not white, think that he could hold on to his land and servants and his future if he thought himself no higher than what he owned.”

I felt that this book was important to read because it deals with a piece of American history that, like Europe's Holocaust, can never be comprehended, but should never be forgotten, either. The story is told from the less common third person omniscient point of view, which made it read more like a history book than a novel in some parts. It's hard to say which, if any, of the characters was the protagonist. This book sets itself apart from other books set in the antebellum South because the slave-owning family at the center of the tale are themselves Black. In an interview at the end of the book, the author says that he got the idea from reading a pamphlet about a Jew who joined the American Nazi party. He said it was hard to envision a member of a group that had such a strong history of oppression actually joining with the oppressors. He was further fascinated to discover that some members of his race had owned slaves and helped to oppress other Blacks in the South.

There were definitely some parts of the book that were extremely uncomfortable to read about. The message was not a pretty one, and you could tell that, unlike the fairy-tale characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin, most of Jones's characters were unlikely to see a happy ending in their lifetimes. But there were redeeming stories, and occasional glimpses into a positive future, if not for the characters themselves, for their posterity. Though not an easy read by any means, I highly recommend it to those who take an interest in this particular historical period.

What an extraordinary work! Henry Townsend, once a slave but now a free man, has his own plantation, and nearly 50 slaves. The lives of whites, free blacks and slaves are interconnected on so many levels. Layers of nuance - expectation, reality, societal roles, how people adapt and adjust, justice and especially injustice. Beautifully written!

The writing style and extensive character list requires some work on the part of the reader, but it's well worth it. It reads much like an oral history, and that means that you may go off on a tangent for a while. It certainly treats slavery from a different perspective - Black owners of slaves.

'It worried him that he could not remember their names. Maybe if he had thought of them more throughout his life. He closed eyes and took his parents in his hands and put them all about the plantation where he had last seen them, his mother in his left hand and his father in his right hand. But that did not feel right and so he put his father in his left hand and his mother in his right hand, and that felt better. He set them outside the smokehouse, which had a hole in the roof in the back. /// Stamford set his mother and father down before the cabin they had shared with another woman, and still the names did not come. He left off for a moment to touch his navel and that told him that he had once been somebody’s baby boy, been a part of a real live woman who had been with a real man. He had the navel and that was proof he had once belonged to a mother. In his mind, Stamford took up his parents again and put them in front of the master’s big house, he put them in front of the master and the mistress, he put them in front of the master’s children /// He put them in the fields, he put them in the sky, and at last he put them before the cemetery where there were no names. And that was it: his mother’s name was June, and so he opened his right hand and let her go. His father’s name did not come to him, try as he might to put him all about the plantation. Maybe God had slipped just that one time. Stamford slept, and just before dawn he awoke and said into the darkness, “Colter.”'
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A beautiful ensemble cast tells a tale of no moral binaries. Each one of these enslaved characters carries the yellowed archival heft of their lives on their shoulders in Edward P. Jones’ remarkable fictionally historic telling.
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A novel of the impassable gulf between what is enshrined in law and what is right.
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The Known World follows the Townsends, a free Black family in Virginia who enslave other Black people, and the many stories that radiate from them in an intricacy of spokes and tangles: free and enslaved Black people, the white people who enslave Black people and those who hold some conscientious objection to slavery but who prop it up nonetheless.
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5/5

(reviewed @longbreadbooks)

Very good book. I have to admit while reading this book on slavery I felt a little ignorant. I never knew that free (former) slaves bought and owned slaves themselves. Just another thing that I did not learn in American history. This book had many characters but the characters were not overwhelming. The characters involve a man who worked hard to buy his freedom and eventually the freedom of his wife and later their child only to see their child prosper and purchase slaves for himself. The book also focuses on his slaves and their relationships. There is also the sheriff and his wife who are given a slave girl as a wedding gift even though they are against slavery they raise her and think of her as their "child" All of these stories come together in The Known World.

“But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self.  Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there.”

These are the thoughts of Mildred Townsend after she learns that her son Henry has purchased his first slave.  Her husband Augustus doesn't take time to reflect, he angrily beats his son and disowns him. 

Some books are so good that it's hard to even try to convey all of what they mean to you.  This is one of those.   It is so powerful.  It reminds me a lot of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the way it didn't let people off for merely being a "nice" slave owner or for not owning slaves or agreeing with slavery.  Jones does that here but also takes it to a new level where Black people own slaves. I had to look up if that actually happened because I wasn't sure if it was just a literary trick.  It turns out it isn't a trick, it's true.  

Uncle Tom's Cabin was written while slavery was still going on as a desperate plea to Christians to get more involved in ending it even if they lived in the north, didn't own slaves or treated their slaves well.  It was a fast-paced driving narrative that had a linear timeline of the life of Tom and others in his sphere.   The adrenalin it produced conveyed the urgency to  hasten the end of slavery.   

This book is not told in a driving linear fashion but it unfolds in a way that promotes a more reflective experience now that the era of slavery is long passed.  James jumps back and forth in time in a unique way which sometimes leaves loose ends, but I admire writers who break norms, and I got used to his unique style without a problem. 

Jone's writing is a stimulating breath of fresh air in imagination and technique.  He creates a purely fictional town that feels very real.  It seems a stretch to think any Black people owned as many slaves or became as wealthy as Henry Townsend but the point he makes is just as valid on a smaller scale.   

I was hooked on his writing from the first page with this passage:

"Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the sail and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread.  He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing.  He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover strengths and weaknesses of the field but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.  "

We should feel tied to the land but it's horrific to think of eating its dirt rather than its fruits so that your baby can survive, or to eat it because it could mean your life if you can't produce profitable crops as an overseer.  He paints a vivid picture that haunts you as you read on. 

Moses is an overseer to Henry Townsend and probably is one of the most complicated figures in the novel.  He's bewildered that a black man is able and willing to own him and other slaves but he loves it at first because Henry treats him as a friend.   Henry ends the friendship after his former master, William Robbins, discourages it.  This change in status changes both of them for the worse. 

The Townsend plantation is just one scene in this novel that shows the moral ambiguities cause by slavery.   John Skiffington, the Sheriff of the town is opposed to slavery and when given a young girl as a wedding present, he and his wife raise her like a daughter.  Like Henry and his wife Caldonia, they feel they are protectors because they treat slaves better than some others.   All the while, Skiffington's main job as Sheriff is to patrol for runaway slaves and return them to their masters who will cut off an ear or worse once they are returned 

This novel includes a long list of characters, who all have meaningful parts to show how slavery degrades the soul of anyone in it's sphere.  There are a few purely evil characters but most feel in part like victims of an abominable system. 

The multiple stories can be confusing at first.  It is not a book to take in via audio or to rush through.  It needs that pause and contemplation.  At the back of the book, there is a list of characters.  I wish I'd have known that when I started, but as always, you end up knowing them without it.  The narrative picks up about 1/3 of the way in and increasingly becomes more linear.  With this change, it also becomes more horrific.   

This novel is highly affecting.  It makes you think about the past, present, and future and how malleable the human spirit is. It shows how otherwise good people can be corrupted when those in power dehumanize others in order to keep or increase their power.

This is one of those books that despite recognizing some skillful and impressive writing, goes under the category of not-for-me. The writer cites Faulkner as one of his influences and something in Jones' style does remind me of that author, admittedly not a favorite. The Known World is set in pre-Civil War Virginia, in the fictional county of Manchester, about which Jones weaves in faux census data and snippets of history.

It begins in July of 1855 at the farm of Henry Townsend, a black man born a slave who is himself a slave owner. It's an unlikely scenario, as Jones himself admits in an interview at the end of the book, particularly since, as he alludes to in the novel, Virginia law didn't allow a freed slave to remain longer than a year in the state, and any who did were subject to being returned to slavery. However, the premise does allow Jones scope to examine the emotional, social and moral complexities of slavery, so I was willing to allow him some latitude.

Ultimately it was the style that defeated me. His book is non-linear and meandering, jumping back and forth through time and different characters, and with touches of magical realism. I think particularly in a novel treating of such a dark subject, it was fatal that I never settled in or was grounded by my sympathy with any one character (and in fact almost every character was repellant in some way), and reading this became more and more a slog, particularly since I found the prose style less than graceful. It's the kind of book where--and right from the first sentence--you have to read and read again trying to parse the meaning.

When Toni Morrison began her research for "Beloved," she discovered a trove of ghastly instruments. She knew, of course, that slaves were routinely whipped, starved, raped, and hanged, but the existence of specially forged tools was a surprise: metal bits forced down the throat, iron masks locked across the face, spiked collars clasped around the neck. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel reintroduced those horrors into the national memory and did much to demonstrate that the cruelties of slavery extended far beyond hard labor and physical deprivation.

"The Known World," by Edward Jones, reclaims another peculiarity of American slavery and in the process illustrates yet again that we can't under- estimate its perverse contortions of the human spirit. Bizarre as it sounds, in Louisiana, Virginia, and South Carolina, a small number of free blacks owned their own plantations - and their own slaves. It was a precarious arrangement, to be sure. Blacks who were freed or managed to buy their own freedom had little incentive to tarry in the South. The laws governing their status and their right to hold property were ambiguous and easy for any white person to shred.

Jones uses this fragile situation as the setting for a novel about a group of black and white Virginians who tried - sometimes nobly, often viciously - to maintain their world in the face of inevitable collapse. To the extent that Morrison spun a surreal tale of American slavery into mythic proportions, Jones has carved a companion series of stark anecdotes into national legends. In a measured voice that never rises to reflect the agonies and absurdities he describes, he moves back and forth through decades and across state lines, assembling an apparently random collection of brief scenes that gradually fuse into a stunning portrait of moral confusion.

The story revolves around Henry Townsend, a black man who, with the indulgence of his former owner, managed to buy his own farm and his own slaves - eventually 29 adults and a collection of children. Henry's parents, who labored tirelessly to free him as a child, are horrified by his participation in the flesh market, but Henry is ambitious, and, what's more, he learned from his master that "once you own even one, you will never be alone." As a protection against loneliness and a way to wealth, Henry can't imagine anything more successful, and he's convinced he can be "a better master than any white man he had ever known." Indeed, he attains that dubious goal, creating a plantation with forced labor that's largely free of physical beatings, but it's an insidious gentility that only camouflages the humiliations of Southern slavery.

Nevertheless, his untimely death frightens most of his slaves, who know just how delicate their relative comfort is. Only the brooding overseer, Moses, the first slave Henry ever bought, sees his master's demise as an opportunity - not for freedom, but for taking his place. Indeed, what interests Jones most in this complex novel is the way slavery distorts judgment, not just of those who oppress, but of those who are oppressed.

Henry's widow, Caldonia, quickly decides against freeing "her legacy," choosing instead to maintain the plantation in the spirit of Henry's gentle example. "Her husband had done the best he could," she thinks, "and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact." Occasionally, a child is worked to death or a pregnant woman labors in the field till she miscarries, but Caldonia sheds sincere tears, comforts the parents, and considers whether she should buy insurance against further losses of her property.

As a single woman with a large business to run, she's encouraged by a collection of family and friends, other free blacks, some of whom own their own slaves, too. One of the most troubling is Fern, Caldonia's prim teacher of literature and etiquette. Together, they keep the irony of their position well buried, while socializing in a kind of racial terrarium maintained by William Robbins, the county's wealthiest white farmer. Estranged from his own wife but protected by his political power, he loves a black woman in town and openly adores his two mulatto children. The Townsend plantation with its little coterie of free slave-owning blacks gives his favorites a place to play and refine themselves.

In one of several shifts to the late 19th century, a Canadian historian interviews Fern, Caldonia's teacher, about those days on the plantation. "All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do," she says without any hint of guilt or remorse. "We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did." Jones uses that same tone of historical distance throughout, a tone that amplifies the grotesque mingling of affection and cruelty that infected these people, black and white.

In the center of this moral kaleidoscope stands the sheriff, John Skiffington, an earnest Christian, dedicated to the objective application of law and convinced that "the law always cares" for everyone equally. It's a doomed endeavor, of course, but as Caldonia's plantation begins to collapse, Skiffington fails to realize that the legal system he's sworn to uphold is not objective and that he cannot remain clean within it.

The scrambled collection of events and characters makes this a difficult story to enter, but that structure eventually accounts for much of the novel's evocative power. Jones has a kind of biblical style that suggests whole lives in a few stark details from a perspective that's alternately microscopic and telescopic. It's a technique that resists our efforts to keep these events in some unrecoverable past. The troubling implications of his story leach in through hairline cracks all over the twin shells of antebellum nostalgia and Northern piety. Every time Caldonia cheerfully reminds her friends, "We are all worthy of one another," the legacy of slavery sounds more complex and unresolved.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0814/p1...