The Known World

EDWARD P. JONES
2003

INTRODUCTION

The fact that free African Americans used to own other blacks as slaves is an ironic oddity of U.S. history that Edward P. Jones pondered for a long time. This perplexing detail about life before the Civil War eventually inspired him to write an eloquently crafted, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel entitled The Known World, published in 2003. Beginning with the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black slave master, Jones's novel explores a fictional county in antebellum Virginia over several decades. With its community-narrative approach and its patchwork storytelling style, the work gets to the heart of the moral dilemma that surrounds the institution of slavery. Jones delves into fundamental questions of human ownership and power over others while exploring views on justice, religion, and morality in the antebellum South.

An astute analysis of a tense era in U.S. history and a critical and literary success, The Known World carries an aura of historical accuracy and gravity even though it is entirely fictional. The novel's frequent allusions to the twentieth-century descendents of its characters and its fabricated references to twentieth-century historical scholarship suggest that Jones is also interested in how slaveholding bears on contemporary life. Jones's other work focuses on blacks living in late-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and The Known World enters a fictional chapter of black history which is not necessarily so distant from the frequently desperate conditions that many blacks face in urban U.S. society.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Edward P. Jones was born in Washington, D.C., on October 5, 1950, and raised by his single mother, to whom Jones dedicated his first two books. He grew up well aware of the widespread poverty and desperation in the U.S. capital, particularly among African Americans, and this problem was a frequent subject of his writing in the 1990s and early 2000s. Jones himself was homeless for a period in the 1970s, and he struggled with depression. He did well at school and earned a scholarship to Holy Cross College, and he took care of his mother when she became ill and died in 1975.

Jones went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Virginia, where he studied with authors James McPherson, John Casey, and Peter Taylor. He held a variety of jobs, including summarizing business articles, working as an assistant at Science Magazine, and teaching writing at universities, including Princeton and Georgetown. For most of his life, he has resided in or near Washington, D.C., and for twenty years preceding the publication of The Known World (2003), he lived in the same flat in Arlington, Virginia.

Jones's first book, a collection of short stories entitled Lost in the City, was published in 1992 to critical acclaim; it won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and received a nomination for the National Book Award. The stories vividly portray African Americans coping with confusion and decay in poverty-stricken, inner-city Washington, D.C., during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Though they tend to portray bleak circumstances, the stories generate sympathy for their characters, many of whom are warm-hearted. Jones won a Lannan Foundation grant in 1994 and another in 2003, the same year he published The Known World. In 2004, Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Known World.

Jones has published short stories in journals, including the New Yorker and Ploughshares. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, and in 2006, he published a collection of short stories, entitled All Aunt Hagar's Children, which focuses on characters living in Washington, D.C., many of them from the rural South. As of 2006, he continued to live and write in the Washington, D.C., area.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapter 1

The Known World begins with a description of the 1855 evening when Henry Townsend, the black master of a Virginia plantation, dies. Henry's slave overseer, Moses, wanders into the rainy woods and masturbates, while Henry's wife, Caldonia, sits with her husband as she has done for the previous six days and nights.

When Henry's father, Augustus, bought himself out of slavery, he left his wife Mildred and his son as slaves to William Robbins until he could earn enough money to free them. Although he freed his wife shortly afterwards, it was many years before he earned enough to free his son. During this time, Henry curried Robbins's favor, learned about Robbins's family with a black woman named Philomena, and helped his master suffer through "storms," or mental breakdowns, on his returns from Philomena's house.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• HarperAudio released an unabridged audio version of The Known World, narrated by Kevin Free. As of 2007, it was readily available in compact disc and audio cassette formats.

Chapter 2

John Skiffington was a deputy to Sheriff Giles Patterson when he married Patterson's niece Winifred. Skiffington's cousin Counsel and his wife gave the newlyweds a slave named Minerva as a wedding present, and although Skiffington and his wife agreed that they wanted nothing to do with slavery, they kept Minerva and treated her like a daughter. Meanwhile William Robbins was worried that Patterson was not doing enough to keep slaves from running away, and after his slave Rita escaped (with secret help from Augustus), Robbins used his influence to force Patterson to retire. Skiffington took over as sheriff and hired twelve poor white and Native American slave patrollers to ensure that no more slaves escaped.

Chapter 3

After Henry dies, Caldonia's maid Loretta tells Moses to break the news to everyone and deal with all problems. Augustus, Mildred, Fern Elston, and all of the slaves come to the house and listen to Caldonia's words of comfort, which imply that the slaves will not be set free. Calvin, Louis, and Augustus help the slaves dig Henry's grave. That night, Alice goes out wandering, singing and dancing, but the slave patrollers leave her alone. The night of the day Henry is buried, Elias finishes the doll he has been whittling for his daughter Tessie and begins to whittle a horse for his son.

Celeste caught Elias staring at her shortly after Henry purchased him, and she resented this, thinking that he was staring at her limp. She was mean to him whenever possible afterwards, although she began to pity him when he became ill. After he recovered, Elias attempted to escape, but he grew ill on the journey and William Robbins caught him. Henry had Elias chained and resolved to have Elias's ear chopped off. This decision troubled Henry, who became enraged when Ramsey Elston insulted him at dinner that night, but the next morning he paid Oden Peoples to cut off a third of Elias's ear.

A slave boy named Luke befriended Elias while he was recovering, and later Celeste resolved to look after the boy. Elias carved her a wooden comb, and they fell in love. Elias told Henry that he would like to live with Celeste, and Henry agreed, pleased that this would prevent Elias from running away again. The couple lived with Luke until Henry hired the boy out as a harvest worker to a white man who worked him so hard that the boy died.

Chapter 4

In 1881, a Canadian pamphlet-writer called Anderson Frazier comes to Manchester County in order to interview Fern Elston about the "oddest" thing he had ever come upon as a journalist: the fact that blacks used to own black slaves. Fern tells him that, contrary to his impression, it was not the same as owning members of one's family, and she tells him about Henry.

Henry was always devoted to Robbins, and after Augustus bought his freedom, Henry continued to visit Robbins and travel with him. When Philomena ran away to Richmond for the second time, Robbins took Henry with him to help bring her back. Robbins got into a violent fight with Philomena when he found her, in which he punched her brutally while Henry screamed. Henry followed Robbins's instructions and calmed the children, however, and then drove them to Manchester the next day.

One day when Henry was building his house with Moses, Robbins rode up and saw them wrestling in the dirt. Furious, Robbins told Henry that he must act as a master, not a slave. Henry walked back and slapped Moses twice, telling him that he was leaving and that Moses must be "doin right" when he returned. He rode to his parents' house, but the news that he had purchased a slave horrified them. Augustus beat Henry with a walking stick, breaking his shoulder, and Henry left for Robbins's house. Meanwhile, Robbins had gone to Fern and asked if she would educate Henry. Fern agreed because Robbins protected her from any trouble with the slave patrollers. Henry was Fern's most intelligent, darkest-skinned, and oldest student. He met Caldonia at Fern's house and married her soon afterwards.

Chapter 5

In 1844, Skiffington went to the house of Clara Martin, his wife's cousin, to ease her fears about her slave Ralph. After dinner at Clara's, Skiffington rode out to settle a dispute between his slave patrollers Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford over a cow flowing with milk. Travis sold the cow thinking it would not give milk, but now he wanted it back and was threatening violence. Skiffington told him that he could not have the cow back and warned him about making trouble. When Skiffington arrived at the jail the next morning, William Robbins came to complain that Travis hit Henry, and while he was there Robbins bought Moses from Jean Broussard, a French prisoner. Moses pleaded for Robbins not to separate him from his wife, but Robbins ignored him. The money went to Broussard's widow in France, however, because the jury decided to hang Broussard, disbelieving his story because he had a foreign accent.

Chapter 6

Caldonia's mother Maude comes to the plantation two days after Henry's death and urges Caldonia not to waste her "legacy" by selling or freeing her slaves. Moses puts the slaves back to work, but Calvin tells them to return home. Stamford tries anxiously to find a young woman and gets into a fight which leaves him unable to work for a week and a half. Meanwhile, an insurance salesman attempts to sell Caldonia a policy on her slaves.

Stamford becomes depressed and starts drinking a strange brew. He makes a pass at Delphie, and she tries to help him but then turns him out into a storm. Stamford finds a little girl named Delores trying to collect blueberries, and he insists on sending her inside and doing it for her. He sees lightening strike a tree and kill two crows and their nest, and this experience affects him deeply. He gives a bucket of blueberries to Delores and her brother and resolves to look after the plantation's children. During this time, Moses begins to meet with Caldonia and tell her about the slaves' activities that day, and he begins to fabricate stories about Henry and the slaves.

One night when Augustus is traveling home, he meets slave patrollers Harvey Travis, Oden Peoples, and Barnum Kinsey. Travis eats Augustus's free papers and sells him to a speculator named Darcy. Barnum protests, but Travis spits on him, pushes him down, and threatens to shoot him. Darcy and his slave Stennis drive away with Augustus, and Travis burns Augustus's wagon.

Chapter 7

Counsel Skiffington's creditor Manfred Carlyle spreads smallpox to Counsel's estate. The epidemic kills everyone except Counsel, who sets fire to the entire plantation and starts traveling southwest with no destination in mind. Eventually Counsel makes his way to Georgia, where he hires himself out as a laborer, and to Louisiana, where he stays in a barn and has sex with a married woman. Counsel then meets a group of mixed-race migrants in Texas who frighten him, and he shoots his horse when it will not follow him into a thicket. Dismayed, he asks what God wants of him, and then he decides to go back to Virginia.

Chapter 8

Maude is the first to leave Caldonia after Henry dies, and when she returns she becomes intimate with her slave Clarke. Calvin and Fern leave afterwards, and on her way home Fern meets Jebediah Dickinson, who claims that her husband owes him five hundred dollars. Fern refuses to give him the money, but Jebediah stays there waiting until his horse dies, and then Oden Peoples arrests him for vagrancy. Skiffington telegraphs the sheriff of Jebediah's town, and Reverend Wilbur Mann comes to Manchester claiming that Jebediah has written false papers and is his property. Mann threatens to bring Jebediah home and torture him, but Fern buys him.

When Jebediah sees Ramsey, he shouts that Ramsey owes him money and was unfaithful to Fern. Fern keeps Jebediah as a slave, but soon he starts leaving her plantation with passes that he has forged. Fern has him flogged for making a sexual comment towards her, and afterwards he steps on a rusty nail and needs to have his right foot amputated. Fern frees him, and he corrects her spelling of "manumit" in his free papers.

Moses continues to meet Caldonia each night and tell her stories. He begins to have ambitions about being a free man, and he asks the house slave Bennett for a new set of clothes without Caldonia's permission. He also begins to act more harshly towards his wife and the other slaves and to have suspicions that Alice is not actually crazy. He starts following Alice on her nightly wanderings and has a near run-in with slave patrollers. One night Caldonia kisses Moses, and a week later they begin making love.

Chapter 9

Darcy and Stennis drive with Augustus and the other people they have stolen to South Carolina. A child dies and they dump her on the side of the road, and they start to sell black people who used to be free. They try to sell Augustus, but he pretends to be mute. Augustus asks Stennis to let him slip away or escape with him, but Stennis refuses. Counsel arrives at John Skiffington's house after his long travels, and Skiffington asks him to be his deputy. Two weeks after Augustus's disappearance, Mildred, Caldonia, and Fern tell Counsel that he is gone, but Counsel does not pass the message along to Skiffington.

Meanwhile, Caldonia's relationship with Moses intensifies, and she goes to Henry's grave and asks for forgiveness. Fern, Louis, Dora, and Calvin come to dinner, and they talk about abolition and the possibility of slave uprisings. After Caldonia arranges for him to have supper with her in the kitchen, Moses feels increasingly confident. He goes to Alice and asks her to run away on Saturday night, taking his wife and son with her. Moses tells Priscilla and Jamie that he will join them later, and Moses goes with them to the edge of the plantation. Priscilla is worried, but Alice slaps her and talks to her in a new, perfectly sane voice. The next day at noon, Moses tells Caldonia that the three slaves are missing, and Caldonia tells Bennett to report their "‘disappearance’" to Skiffington on Monday.

Skiffington begins to suspect Moses of murder, and he comes to Caldonia's plantation to investigate. Two days later, Barnum comes to Skiffington while he is drunk and tells him that Travis and Oden sold Augustus. Skiffington rides to Mildred's house and finds out that she had already told Counsel about Augustus's disappearance. He goes to Counsel's boardinghouse and tells him that he has "but one more time to do this." Then Skiffington warns Harvey and Oden, and he writes to the Richmond authorities about the matter. Meanwhile, Darcy and Stennis continue to try to sell Augustus.

Chapter 10

Caldonia begins to worry about the missing slaves and to cool to Moses' affection. Skiffington visits Caldonia and Mildred and then goes to William Robbins's plantation. Robbins tells him that he will pay for a five-hundred-dollar bounty on the head of the speculator Darcy. That night, Moses makes love to Caldonia and then asks her to free him, but she says she does not want to talk about it. The next day, Moses forces Celeste to work even though she is six months pregnant and not feeling well, and she loses her baby. Elias says he will kill Moses.

Moses confronts Caldonia again about his freedom, and after he leaves, Loretta begins protecting the house with a pistol. The next day, Moses refuses to come out of his cabin, and that night he runs away. In the confusion, Gloria and Clement also run away. Elias becomes the new overseer, against Celeste's wishes. Bennettt rides to tell Skiffington that Moses has run away then returns to say that Gloria and Clement are gone as well, and Skiffington worries that the world is falling apart.

Chapter 11

A wealthy man in Georgia develops resentment for a poor woman named Hope Ulster because she refuses to see him about marrying his son, and he ensures that she and her family stay poor. Hope's husband, Hillard, buys Augustus from Darcy for fifty-three dollars, but Augustus starts to walk away from him and Hillard shoots him in the shoulder. Augustus dies, and his ghost walks rapidly to let Mildred know that he has died.

Skiffington develops a painful toothache and sends his patrollers and deputy all over to look for the missing slaves. Stamford plays with Elias's son Ellwood, who later helps Stamford and Delphie run the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. Ray Topps, the insurance salesman, returns and sells Caldonia a policy for her slaves which covers incidents that are not "‘ordinary act[s] of God.’"

Chapter 12

Skiffington decides that Moses must be hidden in Mildred's house, and he and Counsel travel there. Mildred points a rifle at them when they arrive, and Skiffington tells her to surrender the property. He shoots her in the heart, and then he tells Counsel to get Moses out of the house. Inside, Counsel finds five gold pieces, and when he comes out he shoots Skiffington with Mildred's rifle and puts the rifle in Mildred's hands. He notices Moses watching him and threatens to kill Moses if he says anything. Counsel meets Elias and Louis, and then Barnum, Travis, and Oden on the road, and he tells them that Mildred shot Skiffington. Oden offers to hobble Moses or cut his Achilles tendon, and Counsel tells him to go ahead, over Barnum's and Louis's protests.

Barnum takes his family to Missouri but dies not long after they cross the Mississippi River. Robbins enters the dispute over what should happen to Mildred and Augustus's property, and this conflict escalates a feud between him and Robert Colfax which leads to the dissolution of the county of Manchester. Darcy and Stennis are caught and imprisoned. Winifred and Minerva move to Philadelphia, and one day Minerva meets a handsome black man and marries him. She never returns to tell Winifred why she left.

The novel ends with a letter from Calvin to Caldonia, which describes his life in Washington, D.C., and tells her that Alice, Priscilla, and Jamie live there as well. Caldonia has married Louis, even though seeing Moses continues to make her heart stop. Celeste continues to make meals for Moses until he dies.

CHARACTERS

Alice

Alice is Henry's slave, "a woman people said had lost her mind" because a mule kicked her in the head. Moses suspects that she knows what she is doing after all, however, and Alice confirms this when she leads Moses' wife and son to freedom in Washington, D.C.

Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson is the name that a preacher shares with his slave. The 1842 disappearance of the slave Tom Anderson worries William Robbins, even though he was probably sold by Tom Anderson the preacher.

Bennettt

Henry's house slave, Bennettt, is Zeddie's husband. He goes on errands for Caldonia and handles other odd jobs on the plantation.

Jean Broussard

Jean Broussard is an amiable Frenchman who is imprisoned after killing his Scandinavian partner. He loves the United States and plans to take his family there, but he is executed because the jury does not trust his accent.

Morris Calhenny

Morris Calhenny, a rich man from Georgia, is prone to bouts of melancholy. He resents Hope Uster because she does not marry his son and resolves to make life difficult for her and her husband.

Manfred Carlyle

Manfred Carlyle, who is in love with Saskia Wilhelm, is one of Counsel Skiffington's creditors. He contracts smallpox from Saskia and spreads it through Counsel's plantation, though he shows no symptoms and does not know that he carries it.

Cassandra

Cassandra, or Cassie, is Delphie's daughter and Henry's slave. Stamford tries to court her, but she is not interested.

Celeste

Henry's slave and Elias's wife, Celeste has a severe limp and is dedicated to caring for children. She resents Elias at first, but grows to love him.

Clarke

Clarke is Maude's slave, with whom Maude becomes intimate after she kills her husband.

Clement

Gloria's boyfriend, Clement, is a strong and protective man.

Robert Colfax

The second-wealthiest man in Manchester County, Colfax is friends with Robbins until Robbins angers him by purchasing Clara Martin's estate.

Darcy

Darcy is a corrupt speculator who buys and sells free men and women as slaves.

Darr

Darr is Counsel Skiffington's overseer and the first of his slaves to come down with smallpox.

Delores

Delores is a little slave girl who looks for blueberries in a storm.

Delphie

Delphie is Henry's slave and Alice's cabin mate. She is used to nursing and healing people, and later in life she marries Stamford.

Jebediah Dickinson

Jebediah Dickinson is a literate and extremely intelligent black man who comes to the Elton's house determined to collect on Ramsey's gambling debt. He is proud and resourceful and even corrects Fern's spelling when she finally writes his free papers. Later it becomes clear that Fern has fallen in love with him, but he does not return these feelings.

Dora

Dora is the daughter of William Robbins and Philomena.

Elias

Elias is Henry's slave and Moses' antagonist. Elias's loyalties are to his wife and children. He is determined to run away after Henry buys him from two white newlyweds, but William Robbins captures him and Henry orders a third of his ear cut off. Elias develops a hatred of Henry as a result and continues to resolve to escape until he falls in love with Celeste. As Henry puts it, she is the invisible chain which keeps Elias on the plantation.

Ellwood

Ellwood is Elias and Celeste's young son.

Fern Elston

Fern Elston is a well-educated teacher of free African Americans. She is responsible for the education of most of Manchester County's free blacks, and her students include Caldonia, Calvin, Louis, Dora, and Henry. She is black herself or has a small fraction of African American blood, but her complexion passes for white and some of her relatives live as white people. Her character is rooted in her strong sense of pride, justice, and order, and she suffers from living with her husband Ramsey. Fern continually repeats to herself the phrase "I have been a dutiful wife" in order to endure humiliations such as her husband's demand that she refrain from washing herself before he returns home and sleeps with her. Jebediah Dickenson's arrival deeply shakes Fern, perhaps because his extreme intelligence seems to her incompatible with his low breeding. Fern becomes obsessed with him and goes so far as to admit to her friends that she feels "as if [she] belong[s] to him." Fern thinks about Jebediah frequently for the rest of her life.

Ramsey Elston

Fern's husband, Ramsey Elston, is a profligate gambler who loses Fern's money and stays away from home for long periods of time. One of his quirks that most infuriates his wife is that he insists that she go without bathing before he sleeps with her.

Anderson Frazier

Anderson Frazier is a Canadian pamphlet writer who interviews Fern Elston in August of 1881. He converts to Judaism in order to marry a Jewish-American woman, and he writes a series of pamphlets entitled Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors, which focus on blacks who used to own other blacks as slaves.

Gloria

Henry's slave Gloria is Stamford's lover until she tires of him and takes up with Clement.

Jamie

Moses' son, Jamie, is a fat boy full of mischief. He escapes to Washington, D.C., with his mother.

Hiram Jinkins

Hiram Jinkins is a name shared by a father and son from Louisiana. Both are irascible and mysterious.

Meg Jinkins

Meg Jinkins is a married woman from Louisiana with whom Counsel has a one-night sexual encounter.

Barnum Kinsey

A poor white slave patroller with a drinking problem, Barnum has a good heart, but he lacks the courage to stand up to others. He tries to encourage tolerance and fairness towards slaves, but his companions Travis and Oden bully him for this.

Loretta

Caldonia's maid, Loretta, is a loyal house slave who protects her mistress carefully.

Louis

William Robbins's half-black son, Louis, eventually marries Caldonia when she is a widow. He has a traveling or lazy eye and is close with his father when he is young. He often tries to sound impressive about topics that he does not understand, and he never realizes that Calvin is in love with him.

Luke

Luke is a kind slave boy who befriends Elias.

Reverend Wilbur Mann

Jebediah's former master, Wilbur Mann is a brutal and bad-tempered preacher.

Clara Martin

Winifred's cousin, Clara Martin, becomes deathly afraid of her slave Ralph after she hears a story of a slave cook who puts ground-up glass in her mistress's food. This fear is related to her sexual attraction to Ralph, and it persists and intensifies throughout her lifetime.

Minerva

Minerva is John and Winifred Skiffington's slave, although they treat her like a daughter. When Minerva moves to Philadelphia and gets married, however, she resents Winifred for hanging posters which imply that Minerva is her property.

Valtims Moffett

Valtims Moffett is a preacher who holds services for slaves in exchange for a one-dollar fee. He lives with his wife and her sister and enjoys the fact that they constantly fight over him.

Moses

Moses is a powerful man whom Henry chooses as his first slave and overseer. William Robbins purchases Moses from a French prisoner, separating him from his wife and traumatizing him. Moses neglects and beats his second wife, Priscilla, and he maintains order on the plantation by intimidating and punishing those who disobey him. Moses is extremely loyal to Henry during Henry's lifetime, even after Henry abruptly begins to treat him as a slave and not a friend.

Elias points out that Moses is "world-stupid," by which he means that Moses does not know north from south and cannot negotiate life outside the plantation. This description pinpoints an important aspect of Moses' character, which is that he thrives only within the system that he knows. Moses is a very effective overseer, but his world begins to turn upside down when he becomes intimate with Caldonia. He grows restless and expects to marry Caldonia, and when he sees that this will not happen, he becomes depressed and then attempts to run away.

Calvin Newman

Calvin Newman is Caldonia's brother. He has homosexual desires and is in love with his schoolmate Louis, but he spends much of his life celibate, looking after his mother Maude. Calvin is an abolitionist, and he feels guilty about the fact that his family owns slaves, but he does little to act on his convictions. He lives in Washington, D.C., but never sees New York, as is his dream.

Maude Newman

Maude Newman is Caldonia's manipulative mother, whose great desire for privilege and power over others leads to her obsession with the "legacy" of slaves that she owns. Out of fear and disgust with her husband's plan to free his slaves, she poisons him with arsenic. Shortly after he dies, she takes her slave Clarke as her lover, perhaps because she enjoys having someone totally her power.

Tilmon Newman

Caldonia's father, Tilmon Newman, is a free black man who wishes to free all of his slaves at the end of his life. Before he is able to do so, however, his wife Maude murders him.

Mary O'Donnell

Mary O'Donnell is an Irish woman living in New York who receives the package with William Robbins's slave Rita inside.

Sheriff Gilly Patterson

Winifred's father, Gilly Patterson, precedes Skiffington as the sheriff of Manchester County.

Winifred Patterson

See Winifred Skiffington

Oden Peoples

A Cherokee slave patroller, Oden Peoples is a rough and brutal man. He specializes in maiming slaves as punishment for disobedience or attempted escape, and he seems to enjoy this work. After Henry pays him for cutting off a third of Elias's ear, for example, Oden offers to do the rest for free.

Philomena

The mother of William Robbins's mixed-race children, Philomena is an unhappy black woman who wishes to live in Richmond. She cultivates the desire to live there after hearing that even slaves have slaves in the city. Philomena finally comes to Richmond to live only after the Union Army burns it to the ground.

Priscilla

Priscilla is Henry's slave and Moses' wife. She is jealous and resentful of Moses for "years of abuse and rejection," but she escapes to Washington, D.C., under his arrangements and seems to prosper there.

Ralph

Clara Martin's slave Ralph is a harmless and loyal old man with rheumatism. He moves to Washington, D.C., after Clara dies.

Rita

William Robbins's slave Rita is close friends with Mildred, and she watches over Henry as his second mother when Augustus buys Mildred's freedom. Rita is so attached to Henry that she is unable to leave him when he is freed, and Augustus ends up shipping her in a box to New York.

Ethel Robbins

William Robbins's wife, Ethel, is horrified by and depressed about her husband's second family with Philomena.

Patience Robbins

Patience Robbins is the daughter of William Robbins and Ethel.

William Robbins

The wealthiest man in Manchester County, William Robbins is an intimidating and ambitious person obsessed with power and control. His grandfather was a stowaway on a ship from Bristol, England, and Robbins's fortune is self-made. He knows how to dominate others and pursue his sense of entitlement. Because Henry is an industrious worker with great respect for his master, Robbins grows to respect Henry as a son, and he is responsible for fostering Henry's own ambition and desire for power over others. In fact, Robbins needs Henry because he fears he is losing his mind, and Henry acts as an intermediary between Robbins and his black family. The fact that Robbins's intense blackouts occur when he returns from his visits to his black lover, Philomena, suggests that this relationship is part of the reason that Robbins is mentally ill. Philomena is not the first black woman with whom Robbins has children, however. In fact, Robbins has two children by a slave on his own plantation. After Henry dies, Robbins blesses the marriage of Caldonia and Louis.

Sam

Sam is a slave of William Robbins who has his ear cut off after he runs away for the second time. He scares slave children, including Henry, with the ear hole, and Henry remembers it long afterwards.

Belle Skiffington

From a well-to-do family in Raleigh, Belle Skiffington is Counsel's wife and the next-to-last person to die of smallpox on their plantation.

Carl Skiffington

Carl is John Skiffington's father, and he lives with Skiffington and Winifred.

Counsel Skiffington

John Skiffington's cousin, Counsel, is a racist and ambitious man who becomes increasingly greedy and ruthless after he travels to Texas and claims to find God. He and his wife give John a slave, Minerva, as a wedding gift, and he continues to be a symbol of the slave-holding ethos. Counsel is too proud to live with his cousin for more than a brief period, and he becomes increasingly disgusted with John's idea of justice.

Sheriff John Skiffington

Sheriff of Manchester County, John Skiffington is a religious man who does not like the idea of owning a slave, though he willingly does his work, which supports the institution of slavery. He tries to be just in his role of maintaining order, but he goes to great lengths to prevent slaves from running away and fails to ensure that free blacks are treated fairly. In some ways, this is the inevitable result of the legal system he is charged with upholding, but it is also due to Skiffington's feelings that blacks are inferior to whites. He is attached to his slave Minerva as though she were his daughter, but he also has sexual feelings for her (about which he feels guilty) and he will not allow her to become a free woman.

Winifred Skiffington

Giles Patterson's niece from Philadelphia, Winifred marries Skiffington and tells him that she does not want slavery in her life. Although she treats her slave Minerva like a daughter and lives with her in Philadelphia, paradoxically, she never accepts the idea that Minerva could be a free woman.

Stamford

Stamford is Henry's slave and a lover of younger women. When he was twelve, an older slave told him that the way to survive slavery is to be sexually active with young females, and so he becomes obsessed with them. He develops a commitment to help children in need, and later in life, he and his wife Delphie found the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans.

Stennis

Darcy's loyal slave, Stennis, is a large black man who helps his master buy and sell free black people.

Tessie

The oldest child of Elias and Celeste, Tessie lives to be ninety-seven years old and keeps the doll her father makes for her until she dies.

Thomasina

Thomasina owns the boardinghouse where Counsel stays while he is Skiffington's deputy. She has an affair with Counsel, and she cries and trembles after they make love.

Ray Topps

Ray Topps is the representative from Atlas Life, Casualty, and Assurance who keeps returning to the plantation attempting to sell Caldonia a policy on the slaves.

Augustus Townsend

Henry's father, Augustus Townsend, is William Robbins's slave until he buys his own freedom from the profits he makes as a woodcarver. Augustus hates the institution of slavery, and he and his wife are involved in the Underground Railroad, helping slaves reach freedom in the North. Even after Oden Peoples sells him back into slavery, Augustus refuses to act as a slave. His final act of resistance is to begin to walk north after he is sold, but this results in his death. His son Henry owns slaves, which is a great disappointment to Augustus, and he never recovers from it; even when he visits Henry's plantation, Augustus refuses to stay under the same roof as his son.

Caldonia Townsend

Caldonia Townsend is Henry's wife and later his widow. She means well towards the slaves, and they generally like her, and she has ideas about being a kind and tolerant mistress. Although she occasionally stops to reconsider what is happening to them as masters and slaves, she never has any plans to free them and prefers to think of her role as a benevolent mistress who helps her slaves lead good lives. Caldonia is deeply in love with Henry, and her relationship with Moses is due in no small part to the fact that she misses her dead husband. Caldonia has strong feelings for Moses, but she never sees him as more than a slave.

Henry Townsend

Henry Townsend is a bright, industrious, and ambitious black man who works his way to become the master of a successful plantation and a slave owner. He admires his master, William Robbins, and courts his favor even as his father, Augustus, is working terribly hard to free Henry and bring him home. They become increasingly close, and Henry cultivates himself in Robbins's image. For example, Henry treats Moses as his friend and equal until Robbins tells him that this is wrong. Henry can be a cruel and effective master, such as when he has the outer rim of Elias's ear cut off and then realizes with glee that the most effective way of chaining Elias to the plantation is to allow him to marry Celeste. Despite his great intelligence, Henry never fully understands why his father is so opposed to slavery, and he wishes to be remembered as a prosperous slave owner.

Mildred Townsend

Augustus's wife, Mildred Townsend, is a forthright woman who is caught in the battle between her son and husband. She hates slavery as much as Augustus, but she does not turn away from Henry when he becomes a slave owner. When she takes in Moses and attempts to help him, Mildred reveals her resourceful character and strong sympathy for slaves.

Harvey Travis

Harvey Travis is a vicious slave patroller with a Cherokee wife. He is jealous and resentful of people like Augustus who he feels have some kind of advantage over him (Augustus, for example, is a much better woodworker), and he responds with cruelty towards them.

Hillard Uster

Hillard Uster is a poor man from Georgia who buys Augustus Townsend for fifty-three dollars and shoots him when Augustus refuses to be his slave.

Hope Uster

Hope Uster is a poor white woman from Georgia who is with Augustus Townsend when he dies.

Beth Ann Wilford

Beth Ann Wilford is Clarence's wife and the mother of eight children.

Clarence Wilford

Clarence Wilford is a poor white slave patroller to whom Travis sells a cow.

Saskia Wilhelm

A Dutch woman who elopes with a scoundrel, Saskia Wilhelm transmits smallpox indirectly to Counsel Skiffington's plantation.

Thorbecke Wilhelm

Thorbecke Wilhelm is Saskia's no-good husband who sells her to a brothel.

Willis

Willis is a brick marker whom Darcy kidnaps and sells to schoolteachers in North Carolina.

Zeddie

Zeddie is Henry's cook, the second slave he purchases.

Zeus

Zeus is Fern Elston's loyal house slave.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• The narrator of The Known World makes reference to the corruption and bias involved in formulating U.S. Census figures. Research the history of the U.S. Census from 1830 to the present day, particularly as it relates to issues of race, and then give a class presentation summarizing your findings. What was the purpose of the census, and how has it changed? How has race been defined, and why? How have the ethics of census-taking changed, and what are the continuing difficulties? Describe the major changes in government policy regarding the census. Include visual aids in your presentation.
• The novel makes reference to the fate of the children of Elias and Celeste, who survive into the twentieth century. Choose one of those characters, or invent one of their grandchildren, and write a short story that focuses on him or her. How does your character's ancestry affect his or her life?
• Jones uses a point of view that jumps back and forth in time and renders the reader omniscient. Write an essay discussing this formal or stylistic convention and its relationship to a particular theme or set of themes in the novel. As you do your research, you may want to consider other movements and genres that might have influenced Jones's narrative technique. You may want to consider also the novel's references to other authors, such as John Milton, and their significance to The Known World.
• Read a scholarly work of history, published by a university press, which deals with slavery in antebellum Virginia or another southern state. Then write a book review. In order to do this assignment, you will need to read a variety of reviews in a historical periodical such as the William and Mary Quarterly, studying their style and format. Be sure to state your book's specific area of inquiry and to focus less on synopsis than on the fundamental concepts of the work and its strengths and weaknesses.

THEMES

Slavery in the Antebellum South

Perhaps the predominant theme in The Known World is the nature of the power and distinction that human beings desired to hold over one another in the southern United States during the period leading up to the Civil War. The novel's central subject, African American ownership of other African Americans as slaves, encourages the reader to concentrate not only on the relationship between particular races, but on the fundamental desire to own other people. Blacks like Henry may have fostered their desire to own slaves based on their experience with white masters, but they do not necessarily want to become white or act as though they are white. The novel is intent on probing many different types of master-slave relationships that are defined in terms more complex than skin color or race.

The novel's many subplots bring various types and forms of inter-human ownership to the fore, starting with Henry's role as a master. As an ambitious young man trying to cultivate himself in his master's image, Henry associates the ownership of slaves with prosperity and success in general. At first, he does not even seem to believe that he is different or separate from his slaves, which is why he sees no problem with wrestling with Moses in the mud. He begins to think and act as though he is superior to slaves, however, after Robbins and Fern indoctrinate him in this convention. Other characters, such as Caldonia, by contrast, see the role of master rather differently, associating it less with economic prosperity than with paternalism. In other words, Caldonia believes that she will help and protect the slaves under her care, guiding them to a good life as they could not manage alone. Meanwhile, characters like Harvey Travis reveal that their conception of slavery is based on cruel and petty feelings of jealousy and hatred.

Despite revealing a great diversity in how various people conceptualize slavery, however, the novel reminds the reader that an institution which reduces people to property is always immoral and always fueled by the desire for superiority and control. Sometimes characters express the notion of control in terms of order and stability; Robbins, John Skiffington, and others worry that any breakup of the system of slaveholding will result in chaos and disorder. Even in these cases, however, the novel reveals the grim reality of slavery by displaying the violence and injustice that are its inevitable results. From Henry's decision to have one third of Elias's ear cut off to Counsel's order to cut Moses' Achilles tendon, the horror of slavery never recedes from the surface.

Ownership and Love

Another central theme in Jones's novel pertains to the connection between personal ownership and love or sex. The novel frequently draws attention to characters whose ideas of superiority, slavery, and property intersect with their intimate relationships and desires, including affairs between masters and slaves. Slaveholding characters, Robbins, Caldonia, and Maude, consummate relationships with one of their slaves, while Fern, Skiffington, and Clara Martin have a strong desire to do so.

For their part, slaves such as Minerva, Philomena, and Moses, either seem indifferent to a relationship with their masters or view it as an opportunity to rise on the social ladder. Moses' relationship with Caldonia sparks his desire for freedom, and he comes to see it as a pathway to a different life. In chapter 10, the narrator says that Moses wants to have sex with Caldonia not to satisfy his lust, but "because he needed to be able to walk through that back door again without knocking." Meanwhile, Fern's statement that she feels as though she is Jebediah Dickinson's "property" seems to be her way of saying that she is in love with him. Skiffington and Winifred's relationship with Minerva is another example of the way in which slavery is tied to love—both parental love and (for Skiffington) erotic love—but the fact that Minerva abandons Winifred in Philadelphia suggests that love between slaves and masters is flawed, problematic, and unequal.

Justice in an Inequitable System

The quest for justice is enacted, in a sense, by the subplot about John Skiffington. A religious man with a strong sense of fairness, Skiffington attempts to reconcile slavery with justice, but he is doomed to failure because he cannot control his subordinates and because he believes in or at least supports a fundamentally unjust legal system. The final scene of the novel, in which Skiffington shoots Mildred Townsend without provocation, is a climax to this subplot that reveals that Skiffington cannot police Manchester County without resorting to violence and inequity. Skiffington cannot provide Mildred with justice any more than, for example, Robbins can be fair to his true love Philomena, because both men treat black people as inferior, as property.

STYLE

Flashbacks and Nonlinear Narrative

Although much of The Known World focuses on events stretching from Henry's death to Skiffington's death, the novel does not progress in a strictly chronological order. Instead, it frequently jumps back and forward in time as it pieces together a wide-ranging story that includes key episodes from characters' pasts and futures. Jones sometimes jumps ahead to the twentieth century in a single sentence, for example, when he refers to the fate of Celeste and Elias's children, and he focuses at length on episodes from Henry's youth.

This nonlinear storytelling technique has the effect of weaving a tapestry of history around the reader. Events across a long range fit together in provocative ways that emphasize that historical periods are more closely connected than might appear. Henry's desire to be a slaveholder is rooted in his boyhood experience, and Elias's children carry their direct experience of slavery well into the twentieth century. The novel blurs the divide between mid-nineteenth-century events and lives with those generations later, implying that the institution of slavery and the practice of owning or controlling other human beings has a very long history and affects events and people long after the institution itself is made illegal.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1850s: According to the 1850 U.S. Census, 3,638,808 African Americans live in the United States, and of those, 3,204,313 are held as slaves.

  Today: According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 34,658,190 to 36,419,434 African Americans live in the United States, where slavery is illegal.

• 1850s: Vast numbers of African Americans live in poor and desperate circumstances. Many slaves are treated harshly and malnourished, while free blacks often have difficulty finding work and live in fear of being sold into slavery.

  Today: Many African Americans continue to struggle with poverty; by the end of the twentieth century, blacks are three times as likely as whites to be poor.

• 1850s: Political and cultural tensions between the northern and southern United States are rising and soon lead to the bloody Civil War.

  Today: There is debatably a sharp cultural divide between conservative and liberal areas of the United States.

• 1850s: Pro-southern president Franklin Pierce, who has a charming personality but is somewhat incompetent in his duties, fails to calm the rising tensions that result in the Civil War.

  Today: As of late 2006, President George W. Bush, who is related to Franklin Pierce through his mother, is increasingly unpopular, in large part because of the disastrous aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

History and Authority

Jones's novel carefully develops a sense of historical reality by relating many specific details about Manchester County as well as the wider political and social context of the novel's characters. Referring to scholarly books published by university presses and sets of figures from the U.S. Census, the book appears to make frequent use of historical authorities. Such information lends the appearance of historical accuracy, and often it provides the basis for implied conclusions about the impact and import of events in the novel upon later generations. Although these references seem to involve a close acquaintance with the historical circumstances of the era, however, they are fictional; they are not based on scholarly research. Jones creates figures and references in order to suit his goals as an author and imbue his work with a sense of accuracy, gravity, and authority.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Laws and Politics Connected to Slavery

Some works of historical fiction, such as the 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, have romanticized the southern antebellum period and the period leading up to the Civil War. Gone with the Wind represents antebellum Georgia as a place of gallantry and prosperity, and such romantic imagery extended to Virginia and other southern states. In fact, however, the era was marked by rising political tensions and severe human rights abuses due to the institution of slavery.

Through the early nineteenth century, the North and South in the United States became increasingly disparate. While industrial manufacturing and urbanization were dominant features of the northern economy, the South remained a predominantly agricultural area which depended on slave labor. Slavery was prohibited in the North, the home of a growing abolitionist movement that worked for the eradication of slavery, but the system was a fundamental part of southern life. Slave patrollers had the authority to beat, maim, and kill slaves who violated the slave codes, those guidelines that stripped slaves of fundamental human rights. For example, slave codes prohibited slaves from reading, testifying in court in cases involving whites, and having sexual relations with white women. The codes also prohibited slaves from gathering for religious services without a white person present, a stipulation which resulted from the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, since Turner claimed that God inspired him to lead slave revolts. Slaves were frequently malnourished, separated from their families, raped, tortured, and murdered.

Although it is not a highly publicized phenomenon, many free blacks owned slaves in the early-nineteenth-century South. Many, perhaps most, owned family members in order to keep them close, since some states, including Virginia, required that manumitted slaves leave the state. Some purchased slaves with the intention of freeing them. There is evidence, however, that some blacks owned slaves in order to profit from them and their labor.

After the United States purchased Mexican land in 1845, then invaded and conquered much more between 1846 and 1848, major disputes arose over whether new western and southwestern territories would allow slavery. The discovery of gold in California and the accompanying rise in westward migration made the question more urgent. The Compromise of 1850 temporarily eased tensions by allowing residents in the New Mexico Territory to vote on whether it would outlaw slavery and conceding that southern slaveholders could claim fugitive slaves from northern states.

During the 1850s, disputes over the fate of the new territory of Kansas led to violent confrontations, and political parties became increasingly divided along northern and southern sympathies. The Supreme Court's 1858 Dred Scott decision, which declared that blacks were not entitled to constitutional rights, had a number of effects, including strengthening northern opposition to slavery. Abraham Lincoln became known for his opposition to the spread of slavery to new territories (though he did not favor abolition), and his election to the presidency in 1860 led to the secession of seven southern states. Four additional states, including Virginia, seceded after the Confederate Army overtook Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Civil War took hold, and in 1863 Lincoln emancipated slaves in Confederate territory.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Jones's first novel has been widely reviewed and roundly praised. John Vernon writes in the New York Times Book Review: "Among the many triumphs of The Known World, not the least is Jones's transformation of a little-known footnote in history into a story that goes right to the heart of slavery." Edward B. St. John, meanwhile, highly recommends the novel in Library Journal, writing that it is "A fascinating look at a painful theme." Vanessa Bush of Booklist agrees, emphasizing the elegance of Jones's prose: "This is a profoundly beautiful and insightful look at American slavery and human nature." Laurance

Wielder of the Virginia Quarterly Review praises Jones's "imaginative powers," while Kyle Minor of the Antioch Review compliments the novel's "thoroughly contemporary structure that dispenses with linear narrative in favor of disjointed juxtaposition."

Some reviewers have expressed frustration with Jones's style and the mystery surrounding the impulse of black characters to own slaves. For example, Trudier Harris-Lopez writes in Crisis: "I found the narrative to be simultaneously engaging and exasperating." The novel proved its enduring popularity, however, when it went on to become a National Book Award finalist and then win the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Today Show selected The Known World for its book club, and because of the novel, Jones won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Lannan Foundation Literary Award.

CRITICISM

Scott Trudell

Trudell is a doctoral student of English literature at Rutgers University. In the following essay, he argues that, in The Known World, slavery is a deeply rooted ideological system which results in communities and generations of people unable to relate to others except in terms of power and ownership.

Beginning and ending with scenes that establish Moses' alienation from Henry and Caldonia, Jones's novel dwells on the isolating relationship between black slaves and black masters. It closes with an image of Moses crippled, either failing to see Caldonia or unwilling to look at her, and it opens with a sentence that places Henry on an equal line with white slaveholders:

[Moses] was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone's slave, a white man's slave and then another white man's slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master.

Moses, whose name is a reference to the mediator between God and man in the Bible, is intimate with both Henry and Caldonia. He gives advice to Henry and wrestles with him in the mud as though they are equals, and he has a sexual relationship with Caldonia after Henry's death. In both cases, however, Moses' masters put him in his place when they refuse to free him or treat him as an equal. If the overseer Moses is the instrument of communication between those who think of themselves as gods and the common slaves, he nevertheless remains firmly on the slave side of the equation.

Moses' humiliations are significant because they highlight the profundity of the gulf between slave and master, the inescapability of the slaveholding ethos as it was inscribed into antebellum southern society. For Jones, slavery is not simply a means of keeping one race of people subservient to another—although this was an important part of its function. It is an economic and cultural way of life at the basis of southern society, and it affects all types of relationships between all races. The Known World is an exploration of the manifestations of the slaveholding ethos within individual minds and between members of a community, and one of its central implications is that slavery is an ideological legacy which remains influential many generations after manumission.

Jones articulates his view of the essence of slavery, first, by implying that even in the antebellum South, the idea that some people are property did not necessarily depend on race. As a legal system, slavery is powerful and effective in separating even members of the same racial group into a hierarchy of power. Most free blacks, even former slaves, are indoctrinated by the ideology of slavery enough to long to be masters themselves. Henry expresses his faith in this system when he tells his father, "Thas how a master feels," betraying a conviction that masters truly are better than slaves. Slavery may have developed as a method of forcing African captives to work and suffer for white people's gain, but by the mid-nineteenth century, it has become something much more insidious than this.

Of course, race remains an extremely important factor in most characters' understandings of inferiority and superiority, including tiny shades of difference in skin color or heritage. Some poor white or Native American characters, such as Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples, consider free blacks vastly inferior to themselves, although in point of fact Travis despises Augustus less because of the color of his skin than because Travis is jealous of his woodworking skills. Fern Elston's mother, meanwhile, suggests that individual worth is related not only to race but to a strict hierarchy of skin tone: "‘Marry nothing beneath you,’ [Fern's] mother always said, meaning no one darker than herself." Fern does not follow her mother's advice, however, and race is not the determining factor in her finely tuned understanding of cultural superiority: "But it had never crossed Fern's mind to pass as white. Not caring very much for white people, she saw no reason to become one of them."

Slavery reveals or inspires a desire to own others which extends far beyond the color line, therefore, and complex cultural factors determine who is a master and who is a slave in various situations. It is easy to have sympathy with Fern when she expresses disdain for white people, since her snobbery is a natural reaction to the inequitable, hierarchical system in which she lives. All her life she has been indoctrinated with the idea that some people are property, and those who are not need to act in a different or superior manner. Education is the key to Fern's understanding of self-worth and superiority, which is why William Robbins chooses her to alter Henry's mental state from a slave to a master. Robbins believes, perhaps correctly, that knowledge, poise, and manners hold the key to reinforcing the divide between slave and master that will ensure Henry's success as a domineering slave-driver.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Jones's 2006 short story collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children, focuses on African Americans living in Washington, D.C. Some of his richly drawn characters struggle with feelings of isolation and depression, while others harbor dreams of a different lifestyle away from the hectic city.
• In Charles Johnson's 1990 novel Middle Passage, which is set in the 1830s, a newly freed young black man accidentally embarks on an illegal slave ship headed for Africa. His views about women and race evolve through his adventures with the tyrannical captain and mutinous crew.
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), by Mark Twain, is a famous American realist examination of antebellum black-white relations, including the search for freedom.
• Langston Hughes, one of the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century, published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, in 1926. These striking poems combine the traditional rhythms of African American culture with the innovations of literary modernism.
• American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), Edmund S. Morgan's superb work on Virginian history before U.S. independence, details how the ideas of freedom from British rule and individualism became paired and reconcilable to the institution of slavery.

Fern's absorption of the idea that humans are separated into categories of power and property, however, results in severe psychological trauma. She is close with her friends and generous with her time and advice, but she is very troubled when it comes to sexual relationships. Obsessed with being "dutiful" to her husband, Fern allows Ramsey to humiliate her as though this is a necessary condition of sexual intimacy. She holds her degradation as a kind of trophy of her nobility and purity, which is why she asks for the phrase "Dutiful Wife" to be inscribed on her tombstone. Furthermore, she describes her love for Jebediah Dickinson by stating that she is "his property," even though she is the one who legally owns him. The fact that Fern is unable to conceptualize human love except as an interaction based on ownership and property is likely due to her internalization of the slaveholding ethos that runs so strongly through her community.

Others understand slavery on what seem to be different terms. Caldonia and Winifred and John Skiffington believe that owning a slave is an opportunity to offer this person a holy and a good life. To Counsel's confusion and consternation, the Skiffingtons treat Minerva as their daughter, and they seem to meet her needs and treat her fairly. Caldonia, meanwhile, tries to act in a manner which she considers kindly to her slaves. She visits them frequently, asks that they be given the occasional holiday from backbreaking labor, and allows the children more food when she hears that they have been stealing. Jones stresses emphatically, however, that these poses of benevolence are not only harmful and hypocritical, since supposedly kindly masters continue to profit from their slaves, but infuriating and disrespectful. This is why Minerva finds Winifred's advertisement stating that she "Will Answer To The Name Minnie" so offensive, why she refuses to see Winifred after she marries, and it is why many of Caldonia's slaves run away. The slaves tend to receive Caldonia's gestures of benevolence cordially, but they understand the cruelty and superiority that lurk behind their mistress's pretense of compassion.

In fact, Caldonia and Winifred's false generosity is not so different from William Robbins's view that the institution of slavery is the community's principal guarantor of prosperity and stability. Robbins, a fierce and ruthless slave driver, does not care to indulge in any compassion towards his slaves, but he believes that slavery is good for everyone because it ensures stability and safety; brutality is simply a means to an end for him. It is easy for the reader to see the flaw in Robbins's worldview because of the blatant horrors that he permits in its service, but his viewpoint is influential and, indeed, dominant in Manchester County. The reader develops a certain amount of sympathy for the man charged with implementing Robbins's desire for order, namely John Skiffington, but by the end of the novel, it is clear that Skiffington's desire for justice is hopelessly flawed and dependent on brutality as well.

Perhaps the key insight that Jones expresses through his analysis, however, is not so much that the institution of slavery is inevitably horrific—few would claim otherwise in this day and age—but that it is a system which seeps into every corner of southern life, from culture and education to politics and the law. Slavery is about much more than race, or even social control; it cultivates a desire to control other people and treat them as property. Robbins is no less a master because he spends so much time with black people and has a second family with a former slave, and Caldonia is no less a master because she mediates her impulse to control others through a pose of kindness and compassion. Sexual or intimate relationships, from Fern and Ramsey to Caldonia and Moses, are inextricable from feelings of power and ownership. Even the character most vehemently opposed to slavery, Augustus, tries (too late) to teach his son of its evils by posing as a master and beating Henry until his shoulder is broken. Slavery is a disease which has mutated into a vital force that mediates the most basic processes of community interaction in Manchester County, even among those who have been manumitted from it.

What is known about the world of the antebellum South, therefore, is that it is rooted in a cultural, legal, and economic system which cannot be eradicated simply by freeing the slaves. As Jones suggests with his narrative technique, which makes huge, omniscient jumps across decades and even centuries, the issues of the novel bear on widely divergent historical periods. Tessie, Elias and Celeste's child, continues to hold and treasure the doll her father made her, a physical relic of Elias's slavery and suffering and a metaphor for the continuing influence of slavery, nearly one hundred years after it is made. By making reference to academic studies of slavery through the 1990s, Jones implies that the cultural implications of such a powerful ethos seem likely to last even longer than that. Slavery is more than a horrific and exploitative set of rules that used to govern race relations. It is, to use Maude's term, a "legacy" so internalized and far-reaching during its heyday that it is hard to imagine the end of its influence. The novel implies that slavery's central ethos, that one should seek power and ownership of other human beings, is ingrained not only in U.S. history but into contemporary U.S. society, among people of all races.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on The Known World, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2008.

Sarah Anne Johnson

In the following interview, Jones discusses "what inspires his stories, how themes evolve and his writing process."

In The Known World, Edward P. Jones takes on the rarely explored phenomenon in our national history in which freed slaves turned around and purchased slaves of their own. The novel, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was a National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a slave who was purchased and freed by his father. Henry works hard to acquire land and then purchases slaves to work the land.

This compelling story roams seamlessly between the past, present and future in the characters' lives, weaving together the stories of freed and enslaved African Americans, whites and Native Americans to offer a deeper understanding of the complexities and injustices heaped upon the world by the institution of slavery.

The Known World undercuts the idea that freeing slaves provided them with the same freedom enjoyed by white Americans. In his writing, Jones often reveals the realities behind such myths. In his short-story collection Lost in the City (short-listed for the National Book Award), for example, he looks beyond the shiny tourist image of Washington, D.C. He reveals the Washington that he grew up in, a city in which poverty, hardship and misery were an everyday reality, a city in which ordinary people lived beautiful and complicated lives.

Jones is low-key about his literary success, pleased with the fact that people are willing to buy his books, but he's not banking on anything. He's currently working on a collection of stories built around minor characters from the stories in Lost in the City. In a telephone interview, he discussed what inspires his stories, how themes evolve and his writing process. He offered this advice to writers: "I think the only thing you can do really is read and write and read and write some more."

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] William Faulkner said: "I don't know anything about inspiration, because I don't know what inspiration is—I've heard about it, but I never saw it." Where do you find your inspiration?

[Edward P. Jones:] You just wake up one morning with some image or some words in your head, and you go on from there. You try to build a world around whatever image you woke up with. The first thing that set me off with The Known World was the image of Henry Townsend on his deathbed in the first few pages. You have to figure out how he got to be in the bed and who's in the room with him. Then you branch out even further and further until finally you have all the pages that are in the book right now.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] In writing the stories that make up Lost in the City, did you start with the idea of doing a collection?

[Edward P. Jones:] Some of the stories have been published someplace else, but even with that, without even knowing it, part of me knew that they would he part of one book. I never write a story here and a story there. That's certainly not the thing that I'm doing now with this new collection of stories. [For Lost in the City], I had an idea that things would start with the youngest character in the stories, and that's what happens, all the way to the very oldest person. Hopefully, somewhere along the line I have created just a little bit of the world that I had known once upon a time. Of course, it wasn't enough, and that's one of the reasons I went along and started creating another collection of stories. When I finished Lost in the City, I thought that that was all there was, and then time went on and I found that there was more to say. There was a crossover from one story to another.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] Many of the stories are about struggling for spiritual survival in the midst of the harsh realities of an inner-city environment. What drew you to this theme?

[Edward P. Jones:] Those are things that I never think about. The characters come first, and I say whatever I need to say in order to make people understand what kind of people they are. I'm not really a very spiritual person myself, but I find that I'm having to write about people who are. I think it's the way that I started out in life and it's difficult to let go of all that.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] When you sit down to write a novel, do you sit down and write from start to finish and then go back and rework it?

[Edward P. Jones:] I try to, but sometimes you get up and you know in a general way what you want to do but the details don't come to you. So I sometimes found myself going to a part of the book where I was rather inspired, so that there wouldn't be a day where I hadn't done anything. Some days there was just nothing I wanted to say.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] Why did you decide to set The Known World in the fictional town of Manchester, Va., rather than an actual town?

[Edward P. Jones:] My plan had been … to read all these books on slavery and use that as background. I also was going to go visit this friend of mine in Lynchburg, Va., and use his county as the setting. I never got around to reading the books or going down to see him in the end, so when the day came for me to start working, I knew I wasn't going to take time off and go visit him. So, I decided that I would invent [the setting]. Then I could say whatever I wanted. If I used a real place, I'd be confined. If you say, as I do, that the place where all the judicial records were kept burnt down in 1912, it has to be true. Using a fictional town gave me the leeway to make those statements, and it let me lead into this whole thing about the coming Civil War. I could give this reason for why Manchester County no longer exists, that it was brother against brother, as it were.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] How did you create the historical data about Manchester County, and how does that data serve your narrative?

[Edward P. Jones:] You just make it up. I had to sit there and ask myself, "How many white people and how many slaves?" It couldn't be too many, but it was the largest county in Virginia at that time, so it had to be enough. I was aiming to add a sense of truth to the fiction.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] You begin this novel with Moses at the end of his workday, and end with him broken down in his cabin. How did you choose to begin and end this way?

[Edward P. Jones:] There are certain things that you have a feeling about. It just seems that that's where it should've begun and where it should've ended. I don't have any real idea that I can point to. When laying it all out there, that's just the way it had to be.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] Why did you think it important to show the point of view of a character whose experience of America does not live up to the promise of America?

[Edward P. Jones:] This country is built on a lot of myths. I mention … discouraged and homesick immigrants … [going back to their countries]. Now I've never heard of people doing that, but I'm sure, this world being what it is, there must've been people like that. From the first pages, I mention this Irish guy who went back.

The country moves along forever and ever on a certain plane where all the bad stuff is wiped away. Last year I happened to see this PBS special on Benjamin Franklin. They had mentioned that Franklin's role as a diplomat in France and in England was almost as important as all the fighting that was being done in America, but the country wanted the world to see it as having been built on the fighting. Franklin's role was downplayed to the point where you have to go digging for what he did.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] That goes back to what you were saying about wanting to write about the Washington, D.C., that you grew up in. It's the underside of what's on the postcards.

[Edward P. Jones:] That's a problem with the country now. It's why things still spin in a bad way, because people don't want to confront this stuff. It reminds me that many years ago, maybe 30 years ago, I came across this record by Dick Gregory. He was giving one of his funny talks. There was a woman in the audience who

stood up and said, "Mr. Gregory, don't you have anything good to say about America?" And he said, "If I'm dying of cancer, I don't want the doctor to tell me how good my teeth are." Talking about good teeth is fine, but there are a lot of major problems going on that started a long time ago.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] The women in The Known World take on powerful roles. Caldonia Townsend takes over running the plantation when her husband dies. Fern Elston educates the black kids and Alice creates transformative art. Where did you find your inspiration for these dynamic women?

[Edward P. Jones:] There are such women nowadays, and these women can't be the first ones. There must've been women like that before. I'm not doing anything extraordinary with them. I don't have some woman running for the Senate in Virginia in 1855—that would be ridiculous. You have women who, within the scheme of things, are able to stand up and assert themselves. Fern teaches William Robins' kids and she knows that she has a certain power with that, so when she's abused on the road by the slave patroller, she knows she can go to [Robins]. I didn't think that the women today came on the scene today. There were believable precedents for them.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] What inspires the events in your novel that could be called supernatural or superstitious, such as spontaneous combustion, or the cow whose milk supply came back? What does the story gain from these elements of magic?

[Edward P. Jones:] I don't necessarily believe in that kind of stuff, but I'm writing about people who do, so I have to be true to those beliefs. I realized that I was putting in everything that I had learned in life. I grew up with my mother talking about a woman she knew when she was a little girl who ate dirt, so I used that. In the '70s, I had friends who were going to law school and they would tell me about the cases they were reading about. One was about a man who'd sold a cow to someone thinking that the cow didn't give milk. Then one day the cow started giving milk again, so the guy went to court to try to get the cow back, because he believed that he'd sold a cow without milk, and now that it was a cow with milk, they should go back on the deal.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] Eudora Welty said, "I don't write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what so-and-so would think, or what I'd feel like if something were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed." How do you perceive the audience for your work when you're writing?

[Edward P. Jones:] You don't write for anybody but yourself. If you like it at the end of the day, then you go on to the next part of it. You shouldn't sit around thinking what that guy out there on the plains in Iowa would think about it. There's only one person you should try to please, and that's yourself.

[Sarah Anne Johnson:] What would you say to new writers working on their first stories or novels?

[Edward P. Jones:] I've been rather fortunate. You hear stories about people who work for years and years and years and then they have to go through 15 or 20 people before someone says yes. I haven't had that experience. The first time around, people said yes.

I will say, if you're writing to be recognized and to be paid, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. If you write because you're compelled to write, then that becomes the only reward you should look for. I'd probably be doing this even if there weren't any people out there willing to buy the stuff. It goes back to the first question about what you do, which is to continue writing and reading and writing and reading.

Source: Sarah Anne Johnson, "Untold Stories: An Interview with Edward P. Jones," in The Writer, Vol. 117, No. 8, August 2004, p. 20.

SOURCES

Bush, Vanessa, Review of The Known World, in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 2, September 15, 2003, p. 211.

Harris-Lopez, Trudier, "Novel Look at a Largely Unknown World in Antebellum Virginia," in Crisis, Vol. 110, No. 5, September-October 2003, p. 53.

Jones, Edward P., The Known World, Harper Collins/Amistad, 2003.

Minor, Kyle, Review of The Known World, in Antioch Review, Vol. 63, No. 1, Winter 2005, p. 190.

St. John, Edward B., Review of The Known World, in Library Journal, Vol. 128, No. 13, August 2003, pp. 132-33.

Vernon, John, "People Who Owned People: Two Historical Novels Deal with the Peculiar Institution of Slavery and its Power to Distort Human Life," in New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2003, p. 9.

Wielder, Laurance, Review of The Known World, in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 80, No. 1, Winter 2004, p. 271.

FURTHER READING

Kofie, Nelson F., Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Routledge, 1999.

The results of Kofie's three-year ethnographic case study develop a scholarly perspective on relationship between poor African Americans, the Nation of Islam, and the police in Washington, D.C. This community's struggle to deal with an open-air drug market offers insight into the difficult situation of the black poor across the U.S. capital.

Koger, Larry, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860, University of South Carolina Press, 1985.

This erudite historical analysis of black slave owners focuses on South Carolina, a state which was similar to Virginia in this regard. Koger challenges the notion that African Americans held slaves primarily for humanitarian reasons or to be near their relatives, drawing out the fundamentals of the southern caste system during this era.

Patton, Venetria K., Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction, State University of New York Press, 1999.

Patton's book explores the theme of motherhood among African American female authors. Suggesting that the legacy of slavery is to paint black women as breeders, not mothers, Patton argues that black female authors reverse and subvert this historical tendency by consistently portraying black women as motherly figures.

Rothman, Joshua D., Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Rothman's scholarly investigation of interracial sexual relations in Virginia from Thomas Jefferson's family to the Civil War is a helpful complement to some of the issues of miscegenation raised in The Known World.

Schwarz, Philip J., "Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies: Free Black Slave Owners in Virginia," in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 95, July 1987, pp. 321-22.

Schwarz provides a brief analysis and description of the practice of free black slaveholding as it was practiced in Virginia.

Solomon, Deborah, "Questions for Edward P. Jones: Prize Writer," in New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2004, p. 17.

In a brief interview with Jones, Solomon asks him about his mother and his reaction to winning the Pulitzer Prize.