Reviewed by Monique Prince, Undergraduate Services Librarian
Set in antebellum Virginia, in fictional Manchester County, The Known World is a 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner and debut novel by Edward P. Jones. It examines the paradoxical circumstances surrounding a free black class that owns slaves. The book opens with the death of freed slave Henry Townsend, who owns a plantation and 33 slaves. Responsibility for operating the plantation is left to his wife, Caldonia and before long, things begin to fall apart. Slaves escape, free blacks are resold into slavery, and masters and slaves grow increasingly suspicious of each other. This is a highly intricate novel--the reader is introduced not only to the Townsends, but to their parents, most of their slaves, their teacher, Henry's former owner, neighbors, the white law enforcement officers patrolling the county, and several others. Despite the breadth of characters presented, rarely are they purely good or purely evil--even Henry's former master who often treated his slaves harshly is depicted as a doting father to his children and lifelong mentor to Henry. To explain how free blacks viewed slave ownership, one character comments "It is not the same as owning people in your own family. It is not the same at all...All of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do. No one of us who believes in the law and God does more than that...We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."
