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Magill’s Literary Annual 2004

The Known World

by Scott D. Yarbrough

First published: 2003

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins (New York). 388 pp. $24.95

Type of work: Novel

Time of work: 1855

Locale: The fictional Manchester County, in Virginia.

A tour-de-force consideration of slavery in antebellum Virginia centers around the death of a slave owner, Henry Townsend, who is himself a former slave

Edward P. Jones has published stories and articles in a variety of venues, and his first book, the short-story collection Lost in the City (1992), earned a PEN/Hemingway Award. In his ambitious and significant first novel, The Known World, Jones has broken new ground. Centered on the death of a black slave owner in the decade before the Civil War, The Known World employs a host of characters in its consideration of slavery, unrestrained power, morality, and racism.

As a popular subject in literature, film, and legend, the great horror of slavery sometimes seems to have dimmed as a result of the contempt bred by its familiarity. The more obvious facts of slavery as practiced in the American South have become so shopworn and almost stereotypical that often a reader recognizes the tropes without appreciating them, and so the bleak realities of humanity revealed by slavery become glossed over by clichés.

African American writer Jones reverses the trend, however, in The Known World. By choosing a known but often overlooked historical truth—that some free black southerners owned slaves—Jones explodes the accountings of slavery that have become too familiar. He looks beyond the commonplace settings and stories to confront the dark truths of humanity that gave rise to the “peculiar institution.” At the same time, the author does not fail to consider the evil of slavery itself, the way its existence, with one foot in racism and the other in ungoverned and unrestrained power over other humans, can corrupt everything and everyone it touches.

In The Known World, Jones tells a series of stories; his focus is not the life of one particular character but rather how slavery affects a whole battery of characters. Although a slow linear narrative does develop over the course of the novel, the book’s structure follows a spiral pattern. The reader is introduced to a character and told things about that character; then the narrative moves away, only to return to that character in more detail as the plot develops. The novel begins with Moses (one of several ironically named slave characters), a slave who initially took two weeks 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,” and the resolution to his story is one of the last sections of the novel.

This spiral structure reminds the reader that everyone has a story to tell and that an institution as powerful and malignant as slavery can never be reduced to stereotype, because it affected each human life in powerful, poignant, and starkly individual ways. Ostensibly, the title of the novel comes from a large, antique wooden map given the town’s sheriff. More to the point, the title reminds the reader that the familiar renderings of slavery—the world one feels one “knows”—mean nothing without considering the lives behind each story.

Henry Townsend is the character who serves as the nexus of the novel. A former slave, Henry is the owner of a plantation and “thirteen women, eleven men, and nine children.” The stories of his wife, Caldonia; his teacher Fern Elston; his slave and overseer, Moses; his former master and patron in the ways of slave ownership, William Robbins; his parents; the sheriff John Skiffington; slaves like Elias, Stamford, Celeste, and Loretta; and a host of other characters all revolve around Henry’s life and death.

Augustus and Mildred Townsend, Henry’s parents, buy their freedom from William Robbins and work hard to pay for the freedom of Henry as well. Not long after his has been purchased, however, Henry buys Moses, his first slave, and damages forever his relationship with his parents. One learns that Henry always stated that he “wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known,” but that Henry did not “understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.”

Henry, like Fern Elston, Caldonia, and a number of other characters who are free blacks and who own slaves, has internalized the skewed standards of the antebellum, slaveholding South. If people who are known to be worthy and important members of society also own slaves, then perhaps owning slaves becomes a way of demonstrating worthiness, a way to rise in society. When a Canadian travel writer of sorts suggests to Fern that for a free black woman to own slaves would be like him “owning [his] own family,” she replies, “It is not the same at all.” She argues that “all of us do only what the law and God tell us we can do.” Similarly, when Caldonia has a brief affair with the slave overseer Moses, she wonders if she has committed miscegenation.

The Known World makes the same point over and over again: Humans with almost limitless power over others can easily become corrupted, even when the inherent racism of the time, place, and social system is not a factor. When Henry first purchases Moses, he treats him more like an employee or a friend than a slave. While visiting, Henry’s former master and mentor Robbins sees Henry wrestling and playing with Moses. “Henry,” he tells him, “the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . You are the master and that is all the law wants to know.” However, he tells Henry, if he continues to be a “playmate” to his “property,” then he “will have failed in [his] part of the bargain.” Henry becomes a stern enough owner that he later sanctions the mutilation of runaway slave Elias’s ear as punishment for his attempted escape.

The story of Robbins himself also sheds a light on other human truths within slavery. On one hand, despite the difference in their races and classes, Robbins loves his slave Philomena “far more than anything he could name,” so much so that he fears “losing his mind because of that love” and keeps her and their two children in a house in town. At the same time, Robbins will not allow Philomena her freedom, even to the point of chasing her down and bringing her back when she once attempts to flee. Furthermore, at one point in the novel Robbins flies into a rage because he fears he may have mistakenly sold slaves to an abolitionist.

Like Moses, Philomena bears an ironically symbolic name. Moses will steer his wife and child to freedom but only because he believes mistakenly that he may have a chance to become the master of the plantation. In Greek mythology Philomena was famously abused and raped by the mad and evil King Tereus but did gain her freedom when the gods turned her into a nightingale. The Known World’s Philomena is treated perhaps as well as a slave can be treated, but she is nevertheless a slave, and one who will not find freedom for years to come.

The internal struggle slavery brings to characters like Henry and Robbins is given external life through two of the novel’s minor characters. One, sheriff John Skiffington’s cousin Counsel, is initially a well-to-do white plantation owner who gives his cousin a young slave girl as a wedding present. Although the sheriff and his bride have always been staunchly opposed to slavery, they, too, are pulled further and further into the culture of slave ownership. The sheriff finds himself establishing patrols for runaway slaves to keep Robbins and other slaveholding men happy. Counsel’s life is eventually plunged into chaos and darkness, as almost everyone on his plantation—including his wife and children and most of the slaves—catches smallpox and dies. Counsel sets fire to his house and land and begins to wander the South, seeing himself as a modern-day Job, until, penniless and alone, he finds his cousin John and becomes his deputy. Counsel fails to understand his wrongs or ever to realize that slavery in itself, and the way he has treated slaves and African Americans, is wrong. In the end, he destroys his cousin’s body, just as his gift began destroying his cousin’s soul years before.

Conversely, the slave Stamford (who later chooses the last names “Crow Blueberry”) has led a thoughtless life, following a prophecy which has assured him that by sleeping with young women he would continue to enjoy health. Although a slave, he attempts to exert power over others until he is badly beaten and almost dies. One night during a thunderstorm, however, he comes to understand that it is only through caring for others and through selflessness and sacrifice that one gains redemption and may in some way know peace. The narrative indicates that after Robbins and Henry and their peers are long forgotten, Stamford and his wife’s legacy of helping others will live on.

In The Known World, the evil presence of slavery ripples out in unforeseen, hardly discernible ways. One could argue that by largely focusing on the tiny percentage of African Americans who owned slaves, Jones either is ignoring the real issues or is playing into the hands of apologists who feel pressed to assert that the evils of the nineteenth century United States were not restricted to white southerners. Such an argument misses the point of the novel. The recognition that free black citizens like Fern and Henry owned slaves does not reduce the horror of slavery. Rather, it shows how insidious slavery was; it reminds the reader that slavery was not the act of a single madman or tyrant. It was, instead, an open and legal social system sanctioned by the society it operated within—and that may be the most telling detail of all.

Bibliography

1 

Herbert, Marilyn. Bookclub-in-a-Box Discusses the Novel “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones. Toronto: Bookclub-in-a-Box, 2007. Provides author information and discusses the novel’s themes and symbols, writing style, and use of historical detail.

2 

Jones, Edward P. Interview by ZZ Packer. In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2008. African American writer ZZ Packer interviews Jones; part of a collection of conversations between writers and their mentors.

3 

King, Richard H. Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. Rethinking History 9, nos. 2/3 (June, 2005): 355-380. Important review that discusses the way in which the novel fits into the post-1960’s genre of the slave novel, as well as what the novel teaches readers about slavery as a historical institution.

4 

Maslin, Janet. “His Brother’s Keeper in Antebellum Virginia.” Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. The New York Times, August 14, 2003, p. E1. Praising Jones for his wisdom, effective understatement, and wide range of perspective.

5 

Mason, Wyatt. “Ballad for Americans: The Stories of Edward P. Jones.” Harpers Magazine, September, 2006, pp. 87-92. Thoughtful, thorough, and appreciative analysis of a number of Jones’s stories, including those in The Known World.

6 

Pinckney, Darryl. “Gone with the Wind.” Review of The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004, pp. 14-18. Insightful review of The Known World as a new and intimate kind of historical novel.

7 

Saunders, James Robert. “A World of Irony in the Fiction of Edward P. Jones.” Hollins Critic, February, 2007, pp. 1-10. Featured article discusses Jones’s body of work, including The Known World, with regard to its deployment of irony, dramatic and otherwise.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Yarbrough, Scott D. "The Known World." Magill’s Literary Annual 2004, edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman, Salem Press, 2004. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MLA2004_10990300302152.
APA 7th
Yarbrough, S. D. (2004). The Known World. In J. D. Wilson & S. G. Kellman (Eds.), Magill’s Literary Annual 2004. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Yarbrough, Scott D. "The Known World." Edited by John D. Wilson & Steven G. Kellman. Magill’s Literary Annual 2004. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2004. Accessed April 05, 2026. online.salempress.com.