the known world

He pointed to the left wall where Skiffington had hung a map, a browned and yellowed woodcut of some eight feet by six feet. The map had been created by a German, Hans Waldseemuller, who lived in France three centuries before, according to a legend in the bottom right-hand corner. . . . A Russian who claimed to be a descendant of Waldseemuller had passed through the town and Skiffington had bought the map from him. He wanted it as a present for [his wife] but she thought it to hideous to be in her house. Heading the legend were the words "The Known World." Skiffington suspected the Russian, a man with a white beard down to his stomach, was a Jew but he could not tell a Jew from any other white man.

Edward P. Jones's novel The Known World, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, explores the lives of slaves and slaveowners in the fictional county of Manchester in northern antebellum Virginia. The slaves, of course, are black, but Jones has seized on a little-known historical fact and made some of the slaveowners black, too. Henry Townsend, a former slave himself, and his wife Caldonia form the center of Jones's World. The couple owns 13 slaves; the novel begins and ends with their overseer and first slave, Moses. The reader learns Henry's history through the story of his father, Augustus, also a former slave who purchases his own and his wife's freedom first, and then that of his 16-year-old son. The whites who touch the Townsends' world include John Skiffington, the sheriff of Manchester County, and William Robbins, the Townsends' former owner, as well as a handful of county slave patrollers.

The premise of the story--black slaveowners--happens actually to be true, but other historical "facts" pepper the novel, lending to it the patina of non-fiction. Thus Jones evaluates the term of Manchester County's top law enforcement official:

[Skiffington] turned twenty-nine the month he became sheriff. The town and county went into a period of years and years of what University of Virginia historian Roberta Murphy in a 1979 book would call "peace and prosperity." . . . The historian--whose book was rejected by the University of Virginia Press and finally published by the University of North Carolina Press--would also call Skiffington "a godsend" for the county. This historian was especially drawn to the quirks of the county. In 1851, she noted, for example, a man of two slaves at the eastern end of Manchester had five chickens born on the same day with two heads. Two of the chickens were even said to do a kind of dance when the harmonica was played. . . . In the history of the county, the chickens, all of which managed to live until 1856, were a momentous event ten places below the tenure of John Skiffington as sheriff, according to this historian, who became a full professor at Washington and Lee University three years after her book was published.

This passage is illustrative of several motifs that recur throughout the novel. No such historian exists, although the abundance of details belie this truth. Also evident here is the playing with the progression of time: Skiffington assumes the post of sheriff in 1843 in the novel's timeline, but Jones explores his legacy 130 years later. This pattern crops up frequently, as the narrative will jump ahead to a character's death or later stature at that character's introduction. The entire book, in fact, starts in medias res, with the death of Henry Townsend, then moves back to his childhood, and ends in the chaos caused by his untimely passing. The above excerpt also demonstrates Jones's gift for understatement, a talent he uses with enormous effect in delving into the problematic complexities of black slaveownership.

Lastly, I really enjoyed the cryptic phrases that serve as chapter titles. Chapter 8, for example, begins with, "Namesakes. Scheherazade. Waiting for the End of the World." These expressions seem at first to be incongruous and inscrutable, but they somehow at the end of the chapter make perfect sense. The phenomenon is partly attributable to Jones's skill in bringing together seamlessly the stories of so many different characters. As mentioned above, in telling his story he makes not only large temporal shifts but also significant spatial shifts. This beautiful work ends with a moving image: Caldonia's brother writes to her from Washington, D.C., about a cloth hanging that he runs across in a local hotel. It bears the signature of one of his sister's escaped slaves and depicts a map of the county, "what G-d sees when He looks down on Manchester." The art seems to be a microcosm of Jones's novel.

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The New York Times review