The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. Amistad/ HarperCollins Publishers. 400 pages. $24.95.
There are many dark moments in this fascinating story of slavery in antebellum Virginia, but none is more poignant than when Augustus Townsend, a well-known free black man, meets three white patrollers on an isolated country road.
Such confrontations happened thousands of times in our history, and in each there was the potential for disaster.
Jones, who won the PEN/Hemingway award for his collection of short stories, Lost in the City, sets The Known World in Manchester County, a speck on the map somewhere near Richmond. It is a place of desperation and violence, stolen moments of joy.
There is grief and fear, genuine affection and envy in this complex and fine novel.
It is unique in that the central story revolves around a free black man who owns slaves. The slave owner is Henry Townsend, son of Augustus, and his is a gentle form of slavery. He does not prowl the cabins for women. His overseer is not a brutal sociopath. The free black slave owners who populate his world see their slaves almost as family, though that idea never crosses the minds of the slaves. Gentle or not, it is still slavery.
The Known World asks us to drop our 21st-century ideals and notions about blacks in antebellum times. Sure, some free blacks engaged in a quiet abolitionism and used their homes as stops on the Underground Railroad, but Townsend has the prevailing attitude. He is proud of his success. Slave owning, whether by blacks or whites, defined life in Manchester County. Why should he feel or act much different from his white counterparts? As Townsend says after buying his first slave: "Papa, I ain't done nothing I ain't a right to. I ain't done nothin' no white man wouldn't do."
The white world gives the landed, slave-owning blacks and their property a measure of security. Other free blacks have no such protection. A white man with a mean streak and a hatred of black freedom can send them into the hell of slavery in a matter of minutes. When that happens, nothing, not "free papers" or reputation, can keep them from being kidnapped and treated as "nigger flesh" to be sold to the first buyer who comes along.
