The Known World

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, is a book about slavery in the antebellum south, which is, admittedly, not a new topic—it’s been done before, and done well. But I can tell you, this is not like anything you have read before. It’s not a conventional depiction and indictment of slavery, although it is both a depiction and an indictment—it’s just not conventional. Not in any way. It’s mind-blowing. So amazing I don’t even know where to begin talking about it. You know what, don’t even bother reading this post, just go get the book. Go now, in fact. Go to wherever you get books and head straight for the J’s. You have to read this book. Everyone has to read it. Seriously.

Well then, sisters, if you’re still here, you must be asking what is so amazing. I guess a place to start is the place itself: a plantation in Manchester County, Va., owned by Henry Townsend, who was bought out of slavery by his father Augustus only to become a slave-owner himself, to his parents’ horror. The book begins as Henry lies on his deathbed at the age of 31. Jones then takes us back to the boy's youth as a groom and slave to William Robbins, a white slave owner who runs his plantation (and the county, really) with a hardnosed business sense and also is deeply in love with his black mistress. From there the story moves on to what happens after Henry dies, and I won’t give away any more plot.

The crux of the book, the point that is driven home again and again, is that slavery poisons and contaminates everyone who participates in it, and it perverts the notions of justice, humanity, morality, law, love, family, God—basically everything. Even those who don’t participate directly are tainted by it, still often complicit in it. Most are compromised, one way or another; I say most because there are a couple of beautiful beautiful characters who transcend the inevitable horrors and humiliations, whose goodness, in the end, outshines the terrible injustice. Anyway this is a book that, to quote one reviewer, takes the measure of slavery's punishments.

So what is so amazing?

Wonderful details. Jones is said to have done little or no research, just worked off what was in his head (apparently a voracious reader), but you get a very clear sense of what day-to-day life was like for slaves and their masters alike. The details he includes are extremely affecting. As well there are these almost mythical, supernatural scenes that will blow your mind (the opening scene with Moses in the forest, a transformative scene with Stamford and the crows), and what makes these scenes so phenomenal is the amazing details. (Yes, I will continue to use the word "amazing" until you are so sick of it you beg me to find a thesaurus. Because this book is a.ma.zing.)

Incredible emotional impact. The author’s voice is modest and unassuming, his sentences usually economical and restrained, yet smoldering under the surface of his understated words is a quiet indignation. What’s amazing (you see? I can't help myself) is how even though his style is so unobtrusive, he packs a huge emotional punch, page after page. I cried like a baby at the end, no kidding—like a baby who is heartbroken and amazed and moved beyond words by the profound beauty of this book.

Staggering technical skill. The narrative form is highly tangential and the point of view is sort of a kaleidoscopic omniscience—focusing closely on one character or scene, exploring the myriad effects and implications, and then moving on to another in the same way. It reminded me of a tree, actually, each character with his own set of branches. And each character does get a set of branches, not just one branch, because their stories include not just their presents, but also their histories and their lives to come, their deaths, and their legacies that extend to today. This provides an extraordinarily complete context in which to view the characters and judge their actions during the moments of the book's plot, and somehow, impressively, the digressions and asides never confuse or detract from the story.

Marvelously complex characters. There is very little absolute good or evil in this book; instead each character is drawn in one of the many shades in between black and white (I mean this, of course, in terms of morality and ethics.) And unlike some of the other great antebellum lit (think of the long-suffering saint/martyr Uncle Tom and vicious slave-owner Simon Legree), Jones gives the same complexity to black and white alike. Take, for example, the sheriff, John Skiffington. Here is a man who doesn’t believe in owning slaves, but is sworn to protect the investments of those who do. So even though he is someone who wants to do the right thing, someone who believes it wrong to own another human being, someone who wants to believe he can protect everyone equally, he’s still caught in this terrible thing. His livelihood depends on his ability to keep the plantation owners happy, and in the end, despite his commendable aspirations, he does something really really horrible. It’s so sad; but the amazing thing is watching him struggle between the impulses, many good, that compel him in different directions.

Another example: Henry Townsend. The irony of his position is so obvious to the reader, and to his parents and to his slaves (“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.”), but if Henry is aware of it, he manages to mask it well. He too has what he supposes are good intentions. (“Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known,” Jones writes. “He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.”) Even though he wants to be a good master, there are inevitable moments of brutality in that role, as when one of his slaves, Elias, escapes. So in Henry you see this remarkable mélange of genuine affection and sickening cruelty. And every character has similar internal conflicts and complexity; every last one is a fully realized person, never a stereotype or cliché. The author has such compassion for all the people he’s created, even the most brutal of the sheriff’s patrollers have life-altering moments where they just can’t take any more or know they’ve gone too far. The book is, as another reviewer put it, a “stunning portrait of moral confusion.”

Last amazing quality I will list: beautiful sentences. Simple yet intricate in what they imply. Deeply felt sentences, resonant with detail and rhythm. Listen, friends:

Someone down in the fields, a woman, was singing. She soon realized that the woman was Celeste. It was not a sad song Celeste was singing and it was not a happy song, just melodious words to fill the silence that would otherwise be claimed by the songs of the birds. The room had been dark when she first opened her eyes, but as the sun rose and rose, it took Celeste’s song and carried it with the light to every corner of the room, and little by little the stiffness of sleep went out of Caldonia and she stretched and yawned and wondered what in the end she would do about Moses.

So beautiful, that part about the song being carried on the light into her room. You see, without him having to say, the life of ease Caldonia (Henry’s widow) enjoys on the backs of her slaves, and there is so much conveyed in that last phrase about Moses, a slave she’s just slept with—her consciousness of her role and his, her detachment as she thinks about him not as a lover but as a problem.

Here is another passage, which I share because it’s heart-stopping. (Note that in this scene Augustus is dead—the after-death scenes in this book are SO extraordinary as the author continues to follow the character that has just died):

Augustus went upstairs and found Mildred sleeping in their bed. He looked at her for a long time, certainly as long as it would have taken him, walking up above it all, to walk to Canada and beyond. Then he went to the bed, leaned over and kissed her left breast.

The kiss went through the breast, through skin and bone and came to the cage that protected the heart. Now the kiss, like so many kisses, had all manner of keys, but it, like so many kisses, was forgetful, and it could not find the right key to the cage. So in the end, frustrated, desperate, the kiss squeezed through the bars and kissed Mildred’s heart. She woke immediately and she knew her husband was gone forever. All breath went and she was seized with such a pain that she had to come to her feet. But the room and the house were not big enough to contain her pain and she stumbled out of the room, out and down the stairs, out through the door that Augustus, as usual, had left open. The dog watched her from the hearth. Only in the yard could she begin to breathe again. And breath brought tears. She fell to her knees, out in the open yard, in her nightclothes, something Augustus would not have approved of.

Augustus died on Wednesday.

I love the poetry in that passage, a rare moment in this book, but so beautiful. And how the poetry is offset by simple, concrete details like the dog at the hearth. The rhythm and the repetition, too, in the sentence that begins “But the room and the house...” So wonderful.

Okay I will stop now. Only want to say, again: seriously, this book is amazing. Immensely moving, painfully wise. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius—really. Please read it. If not now, then one day. You really must read it.