We get a clear understanding of what motivates each of them as they navigate through this complicated world where it is not uncommon for people to own their own wives, children or other relatives. Even the minor characters have rich interior lives. There are so many characters and sub-stories in The Known World that it is impossible here to convey adequately the elegant complexity of this tale. When Augustus is sold back into bondage by one of these men, Skiffington’s unfortunate destiny is sealed. Yet despite his personal views, Skiffington has vowed to uphold the law of the land, which means hiring patrollers to round up escaped slaves. When he and his Philadelphia-born wife are given a young girl as a slave for a wedding present, they choose to raise her almost as a daughter.

The local sheriff is John Skiffington, an anti-slavery Southerner. Before long, the two begin a sexual liaison that blurs the line between owner and slave, and gives Moses dangerous notions about his “place.” Meanwhile, the fragile balance of the Southern caste system is teetering throughout the county. When Henry dies, Caldonia has the moral support of Robbins and a small group of fellow free blacks, but she turns increasingly to Moses for the day-to-day running of things. Henry marries Caldonia, a light-skinned, free black woman, and sets about running his farm. Augustus and Mildred’s joy over having secured their son’s freedom is spoiled by the fact that he would choose to own other humans. Robbins sells Henry a parcel of land and his first slave, Moses, who will become overseer of the Townsend place.

By the time Henry is freed, he has absorbed Robbins’ keen business sense, and that includes the knowledge that land, and the slaves necessary to work it, are the sources of power in the agrarian South. In the intervening years, though, Henry becomes a favorite of his owner, William Robbins. His father, Augustus, bought his own freedom with money saved doing carpentry work, then freed his wife, Mildred, and finally Henry. Set in the 1850s, the novel begins with the death of Henry Townsend, “a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia.” Henry had been born a slave.

This strange and disturbing footnote to African-American history forms the core of a truly remarkable work of fiction by a writer who was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 1992 collection of short stories, Lost in the City (just reissued by Amistad Press). Jones’ staggeringly accomplished first novel, I had no idea that there had been free black people in the antebellum South who themselves owned slaves. Before reading The Known World, Edward P.

Edward p jones the known world 2003