The Known World — Edward P. Jones (2003)
This novel is set in the heart of Virginia slavery, spanning roughly the two decades before the War Between the States, as that war is described by author, Edward P. Jones (and as that war was described in my textbook when I was in grade school in Alabama). As tempting as it must have been to set fire to the institution of slavery, Edward P. Jones somehow sets aside that temptation and instead simply lets the acts of sympathy, cruelty, love and brutality between slaves, free blacks, slave owners and landless whites speak for themselves.
Despite the emotional distance Jones puts between his description of events and the inherent shock of the acts themselves, the scenes just resist fading from my memory. Even a month after I completed the book, there are at least a half a dozen scenes that continue to find their way into my imagination nearly every day.
Jones’ The Known World, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, inhabits the geography of the fictional county of Manchester County in the piedmont of Virginia, the only world known to most of its inhabitants. It is a story of black and white families, interacting among themselves and with each other in the context of slavery, wealth, and skin color – all of which is driven by the fundamental fact that slaves are units of property. Yet, as much as economics and social status are measured by the inventory of black humans as property, we discover that, regardless of the economics, skin color is ultimately the dividing line of society.
At the end of the day, notwithstanding the relative wealth, skill, and education of the free and slave black population, the trump card is skin color and it is a card that can only be played by white people. In the county of Manchester, Virginia, Jones plays out a situation, apparently true, in which slaves who purchased their own freedom through incredible feats of hard work and cultivation of relationships with their white slave owners, have themselves then chosen to become slave owners. To these black slave owners, the decision to acquire slaves is a matter of economics, since slaves are the surest path to productivity.
Not only do these free blacks become slave owners, but they participate, somewhat, in the social society of other landed white slave owners. They are addressed as Master by their slaves. Some are light-skinned and make sure that their relationships and marriages occur among other light-skinned black people. Some even pass, and thereby pass out of the realm.
But, woe to all within the realm. Do we really believe that wealthy, slave-owning, educated, light-skinned black people will somehow escape their black identity? The richest white man in the county, William Robbins, loves a black woman, and compulsively lavishes his time and money on her and their two children. He buys their freedom. He protects his favorite black acquaintances (“friends” would be too foreign of a word) from mistreatment by other whites. But, ultimately, in times of stress and jealously and conflict, every white person in the county, whether William Robbins or the poorest of white trash, will identify these free blacks as n—-s and will make them suffer as such, with impunity.
Jones just presents the facts of what happens. There is little description of the interiority of the characters. He does not embellish, whether it is a master hiring a local “expert” to slice an ear off of an impertinent slave or a traveling slave trader tossing a dead black child’s body to the side of the road. Notwithstanding this detached style, the most jarring of the matter-of-fact scenes in the novel are the frequent negotiated sales of slaves, whether for $352 or for $412 plus a barrel of apples. These sales of humans occur in all manner of situations, ranging from sales on the block to spontaneous sales at a cross-roads between traveling strangers. The common feature is that these black humans are viewed exclusively as pieces of property. The fact that the seller and buyer know that the property will be separated from his or her longtime home or from family is irrelevant. The property is valued by age, health, compliance of personality, and “papers.” By papers, we mean that it is not unheard of in this world for a free black to be kidnapped and sold, and a buyer must beware of the lack of a bona fide bill of sale.
While not mentioned in this novel, there is a historical reason that wealth represented by slave properties was so high. The 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves prospectively prohibited the importing of slaves to the United States. Given the finite supply of slaves, the property value of slaves in the 1840s and 1850s was key to the accumulation of wealth pursuant to the secondary market of slave re-sales.
Although this complex, multi-generational tale is placed in a fictional county, the book is at pains to place Manchester County firmly in a non-fiction context. The counties surrounding Manchester retain their names as the real counties of Virginia. Jones occasionally leaves the fictional narrative to introduce actual historical census studies of local white and black populations and wealth. He unexpectedly steps into the 1980s to briefly describe some modern academic studies of pre-Civil War Virginia, and he briefly describes in an aside the number of 20th-century descendants of one of the pre-War slaves. The Mistad HarperCollins edition of the novel contains a wonderful interview with Edward P. Jones at the end of the book, in which Jones explains that the overtly historical contexts provided in the novel serve to “give some heft and believability to the creation of Manchester and its people.”
He jumps around in time as we see the characters develop. We see the development of Augustus, the extraordinary slave carpenter who buys his own freedom and then also buys the freedom of his wife and son. Sometimes we see him as an older free man, and sometimes as a young slave. In the interview, Jones explained that he was the “god” of the people in the book. As the creator of the characters, he “could see their first days and their last days and all that was in between…” A character might not see beyond her linear life, “but her creator could.”
The device of jumping back and forth effectively shows us the whole context of an individual at any given time, but it also results in some slack to the usual tension that drives a narrative. When this technique is combined with Jones’ tendency to understate the emotional interiority of the character, the book does not drive the reader forward with plot. The reader doesn’t quite experience the satisfaction of a swelling tension and the delivery of an ending.
I came to the works of Edward P. Jones from a column in the NY Times Book Review by A.O. Scott in August 2020, and a corresponding podcast interview with Mr. Scott and Pamela Paul. Mr. Scott is writing a series of columns in 2020 on lesser known American authors who, Scott finds, describe the social fabric in America with a different angle than the usual trusty riffs rolling off the bullet points of liberal/conservative, black/white, politically correct/incorrect literature. Edward P. Jones does not frame slavery or racism for readers to consume in the manner they may have come to expect. He presents this world on its own terms. He does not tell the readers what to think. He doesn’t judge the characters for us. Jones does not tighten the tension that typically propels a novel forward as a reader becomes invested in the fate of characters, and he instead simply lets the acts of characters speak for themselves.
The fact that some of the slave owners are themselves free blacks is a jarring twist on the consequences of slaves as property. To see how their lives and decisions play out provides but additional points of information to account for the role that inherited black skin plays in America. It is left to the readers to meet the slaves and the slave owners and determine how to respond.
Coming: a review of the two short story collections by Edward P. Jones – Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)
Bob Fall 