Edward P. Jones: "The Known World"

Edward P. Jones's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes its readers to antebellum Virginia and to fictional Manchester County, in which a former slave, Henry Townsend, becomes an owner of his own plantation and 33 slaves. His first and oldest slave, Moses, an overseer and major character in this incredibly populous panoramic novel, is also one of the many points of view (or voices heard) in The Known World.

The following passage neatly introduces the issue which Jones's book takes under scrutiny: Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

The novel thus delves in a very perplexing problem of black people, well familiar with the slave-owner's whip, buying other black people and treating them with similar cruelty, as does Henry Townsend. Bought out of slavery by his father, who decided to never own a person, Henry is more loyal to his former owner than to the father. Though he originally plans to treat his slaves better than white people do, his ex-master, William Robbins, persuades him to change his mind as follows:

Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . 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 around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. Immediately after he hears this humiliating sermon, Henry hits Moses on the face and sends him to live in a shed.

This whole episode is told in flashback though, as in the novel Henry dies first and his young wife Caldonia runs the plantation with huge help from Moses. Despite her efforts, the plantation comes undone: slaves run away one by one, they start fighting among themselves and the work is not done properly and on time. The degeneration of the Townsends' plantation seems to be the linking motif of the otherwise very fragmentary novel, which presents a range of minor characters' stories. The inclusion of so many characters turns the book into a picaresque novel of an episodic structure and roguish characters: no one here is absolutely positive and no one, even the most influential white citizen of the county - Robbins - is absolutely negative. Moses himself is a living example of what slavery does to people: separated from the woman who he said was his "family", Moses later mistreats his wife and son. Moreover, seeing that a black man can be freed and become a slave owner, he intends to take his master's place by romancing with widow Caldonia. Finally, he persuades his wife to run away with the child and abuses the power which he has as an overseer by sending a pregnant woman to hard work in the field, which results in miscarriage.

Apart from the issue of black people's owning other black people, the novel uncovers some other facts concerning the reality of life under slavery, the most eye-opening to me being the practice of selling free black people into slavery again by so called slave "speculators". Now the burlesque ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and Tom free Jim, who is already freed by his owner, does not seem so entertaining at all: you might need to free a freed slave again and again. Moreover, another conclusion can be drawn at this juncture: namely that once a person becomes a slave, they will always remain slaves.

The most interesting episode, however, is connected with the character of Alice Night, a woman who "was kicked in the head by a mule" and became crazy. She wanders alone at night singing funny songs and talking nonsense to strangers. When she succeeds in running away from slavery, she becomes an artist and has her own art gallery. The story of Alice Night is the most poignant commentary on the debilitating effects of slavery on both owners and the owned. Though not even close to the power of Toni Morrison's Beloved (but then, what is?), Jones's novel is definitely worth giving it a try.