The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Known World by Edward P. Jones , published in 2003, is a richly woven saga set in antebellum South between 1840 and 1860. The central focus is the Townsend family headed by Augustus and Mildred, who are freed former slaves.  They have also bought freedom from their white former owner, William Robbins, for their son Henry, who, when freed, eventually establishes himself as a property owner. That property includes slaves. (I intentionally avoided posting this on Juneteenth.)

The setting is fictional Manchester County, Virginia, home to 34 free black families, eight of which owned slaves. The author’s use of census statistics seems to impart historical authenticity, but that’s part of Jones’s creation. Real-life census figures statewide from that era note 124 black slave owners in Virginia. Across the South, between 3000 and 6000 blacks owned slaves.

Henry never fully addresses how a former slave can be comfortable owning other human beings. His credo is to be a “better master than any white man he had ever known,” including providing better living quarters and fairer working conditions. His goals of better treatment are doomed because the world around them isn’t built that way. His workers and their families are still slaves, and their lives are thwarted and degraded at every turn.

A full roster of characters includes slave families, freed slaves, and white slave owners. Even a full-blooded Cherokee had four black slaves. There is a teacher who could, as her family has done, pass for white but refuses to do so. There is a sheriff whose basic instincts are toward fairness, but fairness within the context of Southern laws. Some of his deputies are given to brutality.  In the early chapters, the reader struggles to keep track of all of them.

Somehow Jones succeeds in bringing it all together into one rich narrative.  The freed Negro class is never guaranteed safety. Tension builds when one free black man is bullied by corrupt whites, kidnapped and sold back into slavery. A black overseer becomes corrupted by his own power over other slaves but is forced to flee his plantation. White law enforcers are themselves chained to a system in which raping a slave was not a crime, but killing property was a greater crime.

Jones’s characters are complex, not merely – um – black and white. He manages to tell the back stories of even his minor figures. He does it masterfully. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. It is a very good read.