Edward P. Jones

[The Known World] is a complex look at slavery, set in a fictional county in Virginia in the 1830s. Jones's book goes deeper than the typical Southern white wealthy family owning hundreds of black slaves longing for freedom. In fact, several of the main characters here are free blacks who own slaves. Throughout the book, there is gray area on race - expectations of character, behavior, and wealth are turned on its head. There were lots of times, especially as I was settling into the show more characters, that I couldn't remember if the characters were black or white without thinking about it - not necessarily typical for a book set in this time period and location, where race meant everything. In addition to the moral complexities, Jones plays with time in a way I really enjoyed. The novel is basically linear, except that he'll insert quick glimpses into a character's future and even the future of his/her descendants.

So, what is the book about? Henry Townsend is a former slave whose father worked to free himself, his wife, and then his son from the wealthiest man in Manchester County, William Robbins. Robbins sees some promise in Henry and mentors him. Robbins has a complex relationship with his slaves, taking a mistress from his slaves and freeing her and their mixed race (considered black at the time) children. Henry marries Caldonia, another free black woman, who studied with the same black (though she could pass for white) teacher, Fern Elston. Henry dies young after amassing a fairly large farm and large number of slaves, to his parents' dismay. Caldonia is left to run the farm with Henry's first slave and overseer, Moses. There are many other stories being explored simultaneously and they all weave together to create a rich texture and complex novel.

I thought this book was fantastic and important both for the craft of the writing and the topic. I can see it becoming part of the southern American canon with Toni Morrison and Faulkner. show less

This book centers on Henry Townsend, a freed slave living in the decades before the American Civil War who owns a plantation and slaves. The novel centers on him, but beginning with the opening chapter, which starts after he has just died, the book is really about Manchester County, Virginia, and the people living in it, from Henry and his parents, to the county sheriff and his patrollers, to the wealthiest slave owner in the county, to the least fortunate slave.

Each chapter tells the story show more of someone different, circling back to certain characters, and giving the eventual fates of others. What results is a curiously well-rounded portrait of a particular time and place, wealthy in detail, but with a distance built into the structure, so that while I got to know many people intimately, I never felt as though I were ever inside their heads. It was an effective way of telling the story of something that could make for unbearable reading, giving it more the feel of an oral history.

This was a book that took me a few chapters to get into the format and writing style, but once I did, I read compulsively. The stories of the various denizens of Manchester County are still vivid in my mind. show less

probably 3.25 stars. this book got harder for me as it went along. it's an important and worthy read, though, but i definitely didn't like it as well by the end as i did near the beginning. the arc seemed a bit random and incomplete and i found it hard to follow throughout.

partly i think it was the sheer number of characters that were involved, and how they were sometimes called by their first names, sometimes their last names, sometimes both. additionally, while it's mostly written linearly show more overall, there are so many dips of just a paragraph or two into the past or future (and sometimes longer derailments) that i found it hard to keep track of everything and everyone.

still, it's well done, well written, and adds something new to (what i've read, anyway) slave history stories. i had no idea that so many freed blacks owned slaves, for example.

even as i had a little trouble with the timeline and keeping characters straight, i still find myself continuing to think about their stories. there was nothing in this book that was any more tragic than other slave histories. but it's more powerful for that, because it tells the stories of everyday slaves, their accommodations, their families, their lives. and what it was like for freed blacks and how they could have that freedom (and it certainly wasn't the freedom of equality) taken from them at a whim. it's a book full of tragedy, while not making their lives even more dramatically tragic than slavery simply was. there's a brilliance to that, to having written it this way.

an example of how it was sometimes hard to interpret or follow the relationships that the reader had to keep track of: "Loretta the maid was in the doorway and behind her stood Zeddie the cook and Bennett, her man." was bennett zeddie's man or loretta's man? it's not perfectly clear. it could be a lack of close reading, but i felt like there were so many examples of this that it made me start to question my understanding of the relationships and timelines.

"Whenever people in that part of the world asked Patterson about the wonders of America, the possibilities and the hope of America, Patterson would say that it was a good and fine place but all the Americans were running it into the ground and that it would be a far better place if it had no Americans."

"'A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming.'" show less

These stories were hard for me to read because they hardly seem like fiction. Almost every character seemed like a person I've met, and every one seemed real. This is heavy and complicated stuff, the way that people's lives are destroyed or made unbearably difficult by circumstances beyond their control and, sometimes, confounded by their own choices. Even when good things happen, there's an undercurrent of pain, in the racism and oppression that infiltrates the lives of every character, no show more matter how educated or successful by conventional measures. show less