The Know World- Book Review
The fact that free African Americans used to own other blacks as slaves is an ironic peculiarity of U.S. history that Edward P. Jones probably contemplated for a long time. Beginning with the life and death of Henry Townsend, a black slave master, Jones’ novel explores a fictional county in antebellum Virginia over several decades. Jones writes about the fictional Virginia county of Manchester and flourishes it with a host of vivid characters and their interrelationships. When Henry Townsend bought his freedom from slavery, he followed in the footsteps of his mentor, white slave-owner, William Robbins. Henry runs a plantation of over 30 slaves, an irony that is not lost on the slaves themselves nor on Henry's father, Augustus, whose principled stand against slaveholding by free blacks costs him very dearly. When Henry dies, his wife is unable to cope with her grief and life for his slaves is turned on its ear as slaves run away, an ambitious overseer plots to fill Henry's shoes, and slave patrollers descend with a vicious brutality.
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