Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known.

 The Known World  by Edward P. Jones

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Known World is a story of duality. Slaver and owner. Love and pain. Freedom and capture. It chronicles the plantation owned by Henry and Caldonia Townsend in Manchester County, Virginia, in the mid-19th century. Henry and Caldonia are both Black; Henry was a former slave, Caldonia was born free. How Henry comes to own slaves himself is a complex and yet also simple path; the emotional weight of the decision is heavy, but the economy of the South makes it almost natural that he would become a slaveowner himself, once free. His parents, Augustus and Mildred Townsend, former slaves who are now free (Augustus worked to buy each one's freedom), don't approve of Henry owning slaves, but Henry decides to move forward with his own life plan, and eventually amasses a plantation and collection of slaves. The book opens with Henry's death from an unknown illness, and we follow Caldonia in the days and weeks to come as she attempts to keep the plantation up and running. The book is written from a variety of viewpoints, so we hear from Henry's previous owner (William Robbins), the overseer of Henry's plantation, Moses, other slaves living there (Elias, Celeste, Zeddie, to name a few), children of a slave and an owner (Dora and Louis, born to Philomena and William Robbins), and slave patrollers, who come into being around the time this all takes place (Skiffingtons - John and Counsel, Harvey Travis, Oden Peoples).  The story comes to a close many years after Henry's death, as Caldonia's brother Calvin encounters three escaped slaves from the plantation now living in New York. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists, 

Greetings! I hope this message finds you well. I must admit I finished this book some time ago, but I find that in writing about books about slavery, I need a little emotional respite in between the steps of finishing the book, taking notes for the blob, and actually blobbing. On the whole, I think I wanted to like this book more than I actually liked this book. It has a nuanced conceit; exploring Black slave ownership isn't something I've spent much time thinking about, to be honest. But I got a little lost in the sheer number of viewpoints that Jones was speaking from, and eventually I found the constant shifting made it hard to really connect with the characters on a deeper level. To be clear, this novel won a Pulitzer Prize, so this is just one gal's opinion, and definitely not representative of the critical sphere. Here are some of my thoughts!

Cognitive Dissonance

I kept coming back to this idea as I was reading, because it was a real mental twist to process the idea of Black people who had been enslaved now owning slaves. Here are some lines I thought captured this well. 

In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and a father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. 

It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore? 

Fern Elston, a free Black woman - "'I did not own my family, and you must not tell people that I did. I did not. We did not. We owned...' She sighed, and her words seemed to come up through a throat much drier than only seconds before. 'We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."

The same Fern Elston, in dinner conversation - I realized all over again that if I were in bondage I would slash my master's throat on the first day. I wonder why they all have not risen up and done that.

Slave Patrollers

Obviously given current events I've been doing a lot of reflecting on the police force in America, and reading the section of this work about the early days of slave patrolling really drew that through line. 

Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible.

Putting Rita in a Box

There were some crazy scenes in this book, but one of the craziest was when Augustus and Mildred end up packing Rita, their friend and former slave, into a box with some of Augustus's walking sticks that were going to be shipped to a seller in New York, to get her to freedom. I can't even begin to imagine the number of similar scenarios and unthinkable things that helped slaves get to the North (or try to, at least). 

Augustus moved a stick just where her head would be. He was surprised at the ease of how he worked, no trembling of the hands, as if he had been born just to put a woman in a box and send her to New York.

Augustus and Mildred visiting Henry

When Augustus buys his freedom, his wife and son are still enslaved, and he has to decide whose freedom he wants to purchase first. He decides to buy his wife, Mildred, first, and then save up to buy his son, but in later years he wonders if his decision to leave his son longer in slavery contributed to his 'normalization' of the enterprise. I loved the tenderness in Augustus and Mildred's visits to Henry:

Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.

What emotional trauma to a family to not only suffer enslavement but to share such small snippets of time together, stolen here and there. 

Foreshadowing

Jones was a big fan of the foreshadowing, but he sort of took it one step beyond Dickens. Which I found interesting at first, but then very confusing as time went on. The novel was already written in a non-linear fashion, with a variety of times happening concurrently that were actually chronologically discrete, and reading things like "but little did he know he wouldn't feel this way 90 years later on his deathbed" was just jarring, especially when we never followed up with those people. Why do I care how he felt when he died if we're not even going to be there when he does? Ultimately, just felt a little too trippy for my taste.

Moses

He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life. 

I admit I loved the opening, where we come in on Moses, the overseer, a slave, and we see him tasting the dirt.  

Is he really dead?

I loved this exchange between two of the slaves after news of Henry's death came to them:

"Tell Celeste that Henry be dead."

"You stick a needle in him to make sure?' Elias said. "You poke him and poke him to make sure?"

I'm sure it was actually not a laughing matter to make sure one's master was really dead, but it made me think of putting down my cat, Suzy, and me asking my friend Phyllis to 'make sure she was dead' before we could leave the room. Her eyes were still open and she looked just the same, so how was I to be sure? ;)

Travis eating Augustus's free papers

It's a bit too long to capture in full here, and there's a lot that builds to this moment, but the scene where Harvey Travis, one of the slave patrollers, eats Augustus's free papers (yes, you read that right) just to spite him and sell him back into slavery was epic in its poignancy. It spoke to the impermanence of freedom, the total impotence of the Black person at that time, and the deeply arbitrary bigotry and hatred that some of the white folk leveraged with the power of the 'law'. Again, echoes of every police brutality incident caroming around in my brain.

Referents and Reverberations

While I wasn't much for Caldonia as a character overall, I liked this moment she shared with Henry, just before he died:

'Shall I sing?' Caldonia said, and reached over and touched his hand resting at the side of the bed. 'Shall I sing till the birds wake up?'"

It reminded me of this exchange, from Fahrenheit-451, when Faber offers to read to Montag: 

"Would you like me to read? I'll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like, I'll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear."

Terms I Learned

hobbling (a slave) - I can't find an exact definition, but the way Jones describes it, it's slashing the Achilles Tendon of a slave (one or both feet) so that they can never run away again. It happens to Moses at the end of the book. There's nothing that isn't barbaric about slavery in America, but this feels especially brutal.

Lines I Liked

• For the moment, death was giving all the orders.

• It seemed to Loretta that Maude rose each and every morning with the heat under her blood and a sword in both hands, and even her own children had to make known their loyalty to her all over again. I love this line.

• Better open your eyes or you'll fall off Texas.

• I give yall the work I done and my foot for free.

• It was the kind of day made for running away.

I'll close with an exchange between Augustus and his son, Henry, just after he has purchased his freedom.

Augustus, to his son, Henry: "You feelin any different?"

Henry: "Bout what?"

Augustus: "Bout bein free? Bout not bein nobody's slave?"

Henry: "No, sir, I don't reckon I do." He wanted to know if he was supposed to, but he did not know how to ask that. 

Augustus: "Not that you need to feel any different. You can just feel whatever you want to feel." 

Then later:

Augustus: "You can just go on and do whatever it is you want to feel. Feel sad, go on and feel sad. Feel happy, you go on and feel happy."

Henry: "I reckon."

Augustus: "Oh, yes. I know so. I've had a little experience with this freedom situation. It's big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time."

I know it's no comparison to being enslaved and then being freed, but it felt like an apt description of life in the current moment. So blobbists, feel what you need to feel, whenever you need to feel it. We'll keep riding the waves, big and little, up and down, all at the same time, together. 

Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Keep reading. I'm off to Housekeeping.