The Known World by Edward P. Jones

The book opens with In 1855, Henry Townsend, a former slave who is now the owner of 33 slaves and 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Virginia, lies dying on his bed. When I did my last tour of former plantations, the first place my friend and I stopped was a similar situation, with black people owning other black people, and even though that trip was after this book was written, I had not read it and so the concept was a new one for me. The allure of slavery is apparently not restricted to whites (I could have known this, since the slave trade involved Africans selling other Africans). Summarizing the plot of this award winning novel is a hopeless enterprise. A lot happens. Time is fluid. What is ubiquitous is that enslaved women are raped and white Southerners routinely enslaved their children, and the dynamic of that is a common underlying thread. The book has been described as a moral vision, which locates the struggle between good and evil not in the vicissitudes of the diabolical slaveholding system of the American south, but inside the consciousness of each person, black or white, slave or free, who attempts to flourish within that soul-deadening system. There are no real heroes or heroines in the populous world of this novel, nor are there unmitigated villains, though there are many who fail to live honorably despite the best intentions.