The Known World

The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
read: 2013
Pulitzer Prize

The Known World, the second novel I read for Black History Month, has a great hook: apparently there were a small number of free blacks who owned slaves before the Civil War. The story centers around the plantation of slave-owning black Henry Townsend, both before and after his death. By making the slaveowner black, author Edward P. Jones forces us to confront slavery divorced from racism, something I'd never done before. To me, slavery was always something blacks did to whites, and I could draw a line from the dehumanizing oppression of slavery to the Jim Crow laws of the early-to-mid 1900's to the more subtle racism that exists today. The Known World forced me to consider the tragedy and absurdity of slavery as an institution. A runaway slave is stealing from his master; he's stealing himself. This point is made most absurdly when we see Broussard, a murderer, conducting the sale of the slave Moses from the jail cell where he awaits trial. The prisoner on death row has more rights than the slave; he still has near-absolute dominion over the slave.

One of the themes that runs through the novel is the psychological damage slavery does not just to slaves but to slaveowners, and even non-slaveowners in the community. Some examples: William Robbins, the wealthiest man in the county, loves his slave Philomena, but he can never really know if she loves him back. Robbins has a daughter by Philomena, Dora, and a white daughter by his wife, Patience, but the girls are denied sisterhood because of the barriers slavery erects. One of the many mini-narratives in the story involves a depressed man named Morris, who as a child staved off his sadness through his friendship with the slave Beau. But Morris and Beau can never be friends as adults the same way they were as boys. Even John Skiffington, who does not own slaves, sees his duties as Sheriff more and more consumed by chasing runaway slaves, to the detriment of his health and sanity.

Professor Amy Hungerford gives two fascinating lectures on some of the metatextual elements in The Known World: the left-to-right symbolism, the fragility of the written word versus the stability of the plastic arts, the power and failures of words to evoke imagination. The narrative voice is godlike and omniscient: it travels back and forth through time, takes a minor character and gives his life story in just a few paragraphs, explodes with minute details, peers into people's heads, and withholds judgement for all. I'm reminded of one of my favorite lines in poetry, Tennyson's "Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours / With larger, other eyes than ours / To make allowance for us all." The narrative voice has this feeling, of absolute knowledge, and understanding, and even pity.

In her final lecture Professor Hungerford describes how Jones worked on this novel for a long time, reading and researching and formulating and re-formulating the narratives and mini-narratives and minutiae, all while writing very little, so that by the time he finally put pen to paper he had entire sections virtually memorized. Professor Hungerford notes that Jones' mother was illiterate, and this suggested to a young Jones the mystery, power, and fragility that pervade the written word as a symbol throughout The Known World. Professor Hungerford wonders aloud at one point about how Jones must have felt carrying the weight of the novel around in his head. I have an idea for a novel myself that I've been thinking about for nearly a year. I think it's time I started actually working on it.