The Known World (Paperback)

Slavery is threatened, and the promise of freedom is now hopeful for many blacks. The abolitionist movement is growing, but having free papers still doesn't necessarily mean much, and in a world where people believe in a God they cannot see and pretend the wind is his voice, a piece of paper often means nothing.

Full of heartache, loss, and the enduring power of the human spirit, The Known World focuses on Henry Townsend, who at 31 has achieved the kind of success, that most black folk can only dream of. Building a small fortune, Henry is now free, owns some land, and is married to Caldonia, an accomplished and educated young woman. In his early years, Henry learnt much from Williams Robbins, his white owner, and now he also owns his own slaves, seemingly without conscience.

The novel begins with Henry's quiet death, and then jumps back in time to the events leading up to the accumulation of his wealth and the sometimes-strained relationship with his parents. The story then moves forward to Caledonia's troubled handling of the estate, where she blurs the lines of behaviour, crosses boundaries, and becomes intimate with Moses, Henry's first slave. Moses, who helped Henry build the plantation years before, is now Henry's overseer, but he chooses to work among his fellow slaves. As Caldonia begins to rely heavily on Moses, Moses starts to expect his freedom.

However, things are beginning to fall apart in Manchester County. Slaves are beginning to revolt and escape, and corrupt patrollers are stealing free men back into slavery. Previously trusted slaves have become suspect, family is now turning on family, and the County's police force, chock-full of dishonesty and corruption are choosing to believe the word of white men, rather than the word of freed black slaves.

With his multi-layered and complex narrative, Jones portrays a world undergoing profound social change and upheaval. From the small, country cabins of the slaves, to the opulent drawing rooms of the wealthy white landowners, and to the bright lights and boarding houses in the cities of Richmond and Washington, the author offers an insightful, multifaceted portrait of America on the cusp of the Civil War.

The characters in The Known World are hard and tough, and driven to survive. It's a bleak world where black slave owners have begun to believe that their own salvation would flow down to their slaves, and if they themselves went to church and led exemplary lives then God would bless them and what they owned. One day they would go to heaven and so would their slaves. Mike Leonard February 05.

Perhaps most noticeable at the beginning of the book is the style it is told in. This is not a linear narrative with a well-defined protagonist and a clear-cut set of problems. Instead, Jones jumps from character to character, backward and forward in time, sometimes with his focus on an individual, sometimes reading more like an academic treatise documenting historical occurrences - often doing so even within a single paragraph. Because of this style and the sheer number of characters that are introduced or casually mentioned (over a hundred of them), it is very difficult to get quickly engrossed in this work. Not until almost a hundred fifty pages in does a coherent picture emerge and the characters coalesce from names into being people.

But what does finally emerge is a picture of just how 'free' blacks could really be in that time. Though legally able to buy and sell others, the rights of this miniscule class of people did not extend to the full protection of the law - although as clearly shown here, it didn't extend to many others as well: the poor, the half-breeds, even women as a class. Entry into 'society' is clearly denied, even though some of them were well respected for their skills and general level-headedness. And they always had to carry their papers proving their freedom - in a world where only a few were literate, this is quite an irony as well as being degrading. Perhaps most disturbing was the incident of Augustus Townsend, who purchased his own freedom and then that of his wife and son, respected as one of the best furniture makers in the county, who is sold back into slavery not for any malfeasance on his part, but merely due to the malice of a 'slave patroller' - and the only action taken against the patroller is a 'talking to'.

Conditions of that time are shown almost as a sidelight to the story: the prevalence of diseases now unheard of, the very short life expectancy, working hours from before dawn to after dark, the casual attitude towards worker injuries - highlighted by the 'insurance' policy sold to the wife of Henry Townsend after his death.

The climax of this novel does not come as any surprise, as Jones has left multiple clues and forshadowings throughout the earlier portions of the work, but it is extremely depressing, pointing out in no uncertain terms just how inhumane all too many people are, and how little an individual can do to change his own circumstances.

Though clearly well-researched and with a powerful story at its heart, I found the style to be quite a detriment to the story's overall impact. Though the mosaic formed by this style does eventually become a large picture of that time and place, it necessarily means there is no tight focus, and difficulty in presenting any depth of character. This lessened my emotional involvement in the main characters, and their fates never quite got beyond 'an historical occurrence' to become 'a real event' - a pity, as with a more direct style I think this could have been a great book.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

'The Known World' is set primarily in Manchester County in the state of Virginia in the 1850s and 1860s, although Jones also journeys outside the county and travels both forwards and backwards in time to flesh out particular threads of the story. If there is a central character in the story then it is Henry Townsend, a former slave who becomes a successful, slave-owning black farmer. Indeed, this raises my principal concern with the novel, that there really is no central character but rather an array of loosely-connected characters whose lives are explored in varying degrees of depth. As a consequence, unlike in the prize-winning novels mentioned in the introduction, I failed to particularly engage with any of the characters despite some of the awful incidents that occur. This inability to engage fully with the novel is compounded by Jones' impersonal and academic-sounding prose. 'The Known World' is clearly particularly well-researched and contains a wealth of factual information about the practice of slavery in the particular period, so that the work continued to hold my interest throughout. In particular, the novel is interesting in portraying blacks and American Indians as slave-owners; the social distinctions between whites in the South and the precariousness of life even for supposedly 'free' blacks. However, my lack of engagement with the characters in the novel meant that I finished feeling curiously flat and indifferent.