The Known World Read online

  The Known World

  Edward P. Jones

  Amazon.com Review

  Set in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began, Edward P. Jones's debut novel, The Known World, is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery. Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters, rewarding the patient reader with unexpected connections, some reaching into the present day.

  From Publishers Weekly

  In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South. His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children; Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing.

  Edward P. Jones

  The Known World

  TO MY BROTHER

  JOSEPH V. JONES

  And, again,

  TO THE MEMORY OF OUR MOTHER JEANETTE S.M. JONES

  who could have done much more in a better world.

  My soul’s often wondered how I got over…

  1 Liaison. The Warmth of Family. Stormy Weather.

  The evening his master died he worked again well after he ended the day for the other adults, his own wife among them, and sent them back with hunger and tiredness to their cabins. The young ones, his son among them, had been sent out of the fields an hour or so before the adults, to prepare the late supper and, if there was time enough, to play in the few minutes of sun that were left. When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule his master owned, all that was left of the sun was a five-inch-long memory of red orange laid out in still waves across the horizon between two mountains on the left and one on the right. He had been in the fields for all of fourteen hours. He paused before leaving the fields as the evening quiet wrapped itself about him. The mule quivered, wanting home and rest. Moses closed his eyes and bent down and took a pinch of the soil and ate it with no more thought than if it were a spot of cornbread. He worked the dirt around in his mouth and swallowed, leaning his head back and opening his eyes in time to see the strip of sun fade to dark blue and then to nothing. He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life.

  This was July, and July dirt tasted even more like sweetened metal than the dirt of June or May. Something in the growing crops unleashed a metallic life that only began to dissipate in mid-August, and by harvest time that life would be gone altogether, replaced by a sour moldiness he associated with the coming of fall and winter, the end of a relationship he had begun with the first taste of dirt back in March, before the first hard spring rain. Now, with the sun gone and no moon and the darkness having taken a nice hold of him, he walked to the end of the row, holding the mule by the tail. In the clearing he dropped the tail and moved around the mule toward the barn.

  The mule followed him, and after he had prepared the animal for the night and came out, Moses smelled the coming of rain. He breathed deeply, feeling it surge through him. Believing he was alone, he smiled. He knelt down to be closer to the earth and breathed deeply some more. Finally, when the effect began to dwindle, he stood and turned away, for the third time that week, from the path that led to the narrow lane of the quarters with its people and his own cabin, his woman and his boy. His wife knew enough now not to wait for him to come and eat with them. On a night with the moon he could see some of the smoke rising from the world that was the lane-home and food and rest and what passed in many cabins for the life of family. He turned his head slightly to the right and made out what he thought was the sound of playing children, but when he turned his head back, he could hear far more clearly the last bird of the day as it evening-chirped in the small forest far off to the left.

  He went straight ahead, to the farthest edge of the cornfields to a patch of woods that had yielded nothing of value since the day his master bought it from a white man who had gone broke and returned to Ireland. “I did well over there,” that man lied to his people back in Ireland, his dying wife standing hunched over beside him, “but I longed for all of you and for the wealth of my homeland.” The patch of woods of no more than three acres did yield some soft, blue grass that no animal would touch and many trees that no one could identify. Just before Moses stepped into the woods, the rain began, and as he walked on the rain became heavier. Well into the forest the rain came in torrents through the trees and the mighty summer leaves and after a bit Moses stopped and held out his hands and collected water that he washed over his face. Then he undressed down to his nakedness and lay down. To keep the rain out of his nose, he rolled up his shirt and placed it under his head so that it tilted just enough for the rain to flow down about his face. When he was an old man and rheumatism chained up his body, he would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these, and on nights when he lost himself completely and fell asleep and didn’t come to until morning, covered with dew.

  The ground was almost soaked. The leaves seemed to soften the hard rain as it fell and it hit his body and face with no more power than the gentle tapping of fingers. He opened his mouth; it was rare for him and the rain to meet up like this. His eyes had remained open, and after taking in all that he could without turning his head, he took up his thing and did it. When he was done, after a few strokes, he closed his eyes, turned on his side and dozed. After a half hour or so the rain stopped abruptly and plunged everything into silence, and that silence woke him. He came to his feet with the usual reluctance. All about his body was mud and leaves and debris for the rain had sent a wind through the woods. He wiped himself with
his pants and remembered that the last time he had been there in the rain, the rain had lasted long enough to wash him clean. He had been seized then by an even greater happiness and had laughed and twirled himself around and around in what someone watching him might have called a dance. He did not know it, but Alice, a woman people said had lost her mind, was watching him now, only the first time in her six months of wandering about in the night that she had come upon him. Had he known she was there, he would not have thought she had sense enough to know what was going on, given how hard, the story went, the mule had kicked her on the plantation in a faraway county whose name only she remembered. In her saner moments, which were very rare since the day Moses’s master bought her, Alice could describe everything about the Sunday the mule kicked her in the head and sent all common sense flying out of her. No one questioned her because her story was so vivid, so sad-another slave without freedom and now she had a mind so addled she wandered in the night like a cow without a bell. No one knew enough about the place she had come from to know that her former master was terrified of mules and would not have them on his place, had even banished pictures and books about mules from his little world.

  Moses walked out of the forest and into still more darkness toward the quarters, needing no moon to light his way. He was thirty-five years old and for every moment of those years he had been someone’s slave, a white man’s slave and then another white man’s slave and now, for nearly ten years, the overseer slave for a black master.

  Caldonia Townsend, his master’s wife, had for the last six days and nights only been catnapping, as her husband made his hard way toward death. The white people’s doctor had come the morning of the first day, as a favor to Caldonia’s mother, who believed in the magic of white people, but that doctor had only pronounced that Moses’s master, Henry Townsend, was going through a bad spell and would recover soon. The ailments of white people and black people were different, and a man who specialized in one was not expected to know much about the other, and that was something he believed Caldonia should know without him telling her. If her husband was dying, the doctor didn’t know anything about it. And he left in the heat of the day, having pocketed 75 cents from Caldonia, 60 cents for looking at Henry and 15 cents for the wear and tear on himself and his buggy and his one-eyed horse.

  Henry Townsend-a black man of thirty-one years with thirty-three slaves and more than fifty acres of land that sat him high above many others, white and black, in Manchester County, Virginia-sat up in bed for most of his dying days, eating a watery porridge and looking out his window at land his wife Caldonia kept telling him he would walk and ride over again. But she was young and naively vigorous and had known but one death in her life, that of her father, who had been secretly poisoned by his own wife. On the fourth day on his way to death, Henry found sitting up difficult and lay down. He spent that night trying to reassure his wife. “Nothin hurts,” he said more than once that day, a day in July 1855. “Nothin hurts.”

  “Would you tell me if it did?” Caldonia said. It was near about three in the morning, two hours or so after she had dismissed for the evening Loretta, her personal maid, the one who had come with her marriage to Henry.

  “I ain’t took on the habit of not tellin you the truth,” Henry said that fourth evening. “I can’t start now.” He had received some education when he was twenty and twenty-one, educated just enough to appreciate a wife like Caldonia, a colored woman born free and who had been educated all her days. Finding a wife had been near the end of a list of things he planned to do with his life. “Why don’t you go on to bed, darlin?” Henry said. “I can feel sleep comin on and you shouldn’t wait for it to get here.” He was in what the slaves who worked in the house called the “sick and gettin well room,” where he had taken himself that first sick day to give Caldonia some peace at night.

  “I’m fine right here,” she said. The night had gotten cooler and he was in fresh nightclothes, having sweated through the ones they had put him in at about nine o’clock. “Should I read to you?” Caldonia said, covered in a lace shawl Henry had seen in Richmond. He had paid a white boy to go into the white man’s shop to purchase it for him, because the shop would have no black customers. “A bit of Milton? Or the Bible?” She was curled up in a large horsehair chair that had been pulled up to his bed. On either side of the bed were small tables, each just large enough for a book and a candelabrum that held three candles as thick as a woman’s wrist. The candelabrum on the right side was dark, and the one on the left had only one burning candle. There was no fire in the hearth.

  “I been so weary of Milton,” Henry said. “And the Bible suits me better in the day, when there’s sun and I can see what all God gave me.” Two days before he had told his parents to go home, that he was doing better, and he had indeed felt some improvement, but on the next day, after his folks were back at their place, Henry took a turn back to bad. He and his father had not been close for more than ten years, but his father was a man strong enough to put aside disappointment in his son when he knew his flesh and blood was sick. In fact, the only time his father had come to see Henry on the plantation was when the son had been doing poorly. Some seven times in the course of ten years or so. When Henry’s mother visited alone, whether he was ill or well, she stayed in the house, two rooms down from her son and Caldonia. The day Henry sent them home, his parents had come upstairs and kissed his smiling face good-bye, his mother on the lips and his father on the forehead, the way it had been done since Henry was a boy. His parents as a couple had never slept in the home he and Moses the slave had built, choosing to stay in whatever cabin was available down in the quarters. And they would do it that way when they came to bury their only child.

  “Shall I sing?” Caldonia said and reached over and touched his hand resting at the side of the bed. “Shall I sing till the birds wake up?” She had been educated by a freed black woman who herself had been educated in Washington, D.C., and Richmond. That woman, Fern Elston, had returned to her own plantation after visiting the Townsends three days ago to continue making part of her living teaching the freed black children in Manchester County whose parents could afford her. Caldonia said, “You think you’ve heard all my songs, Henry Townsend, but you haven’t. You really haven’t.” Fern Elston had married a man who was supposed to be a farmer, but he lived to gamble, and as Fern told herself in those moments when she was able to put love aside and see her husband for what he was, he seemed to be driving them the long way around to the poorhouse. Fern and her husband had twelve slaves to their names. In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew each other’s business. When the War between the States came, the number of slave-owning blacks in Manchester would be down to five, and one of those included an extremely morose man who, according to the U.S. census of 1860, legally owned his own wife and five children and three grandchildren. The census of 1860 said there were 2,670 slaves in Manchester County, but the census taker, a U.S. marshal who feared God, had argued with his wife the day he sent his report to Washington, D.C., and all his arithmetic was wrong because he had failed to carry a one.

  Henry said, “No. Best save the singin for some other time, darlin.” What he wanted was to love her, to get up from the sickbed and walk under his own power and take his wife to the bed they had been happy in all their married days. When he died, late the evening of the seventh day, Fern Elston would be with Caldonia in his death room. “I always thought you did right in marrying him,” Fern would say, in the first stages of grief for Henry, a former student. After the War between the States, Fern would tell a pamphlet writer, a white immigrant from Canada, that Henry had been the brightest of her students, someone she would have taught for free. Loretta, Caldonia’s maid, would be there as well when Henry died, but she would be silent. She merely closed her master’s eyes after a time and covered his face with a quilt
, a Christmas present from three slave women who had made it in fourteen days.

  Moses walked the lane of the quarters down to his cabin, the one nearest the house where his master and mistress lived. Next to Moses’s cabin, Elias sat on a damp tree stump before his own cabin, whittling a piece of pinewood that would be the body of a doll he was making for his daughter. It was the first thing he had ever given her. He had a lamp hanging from a nail beside his door but the light had been failing and he was as close to working blind as a body could get. But his daughter and his two sons, one only thirteen months old, were heaven and earth to him and somehow the knife cut into the pinewood in just the right way and began what would be the doll’s right eye.

  Moses, a few feet before passing Elias, said, “You gotta meet that mule in the mornin.”

  “I know,” Elias said. Moses had not stopped walking. “I ain’t hurtin a soul here,” Elias said. “Just fixin on some wood.” Now Moses stopped and said, “I ain’t carin if you fixin God’s throne. I said you gotta meet that mule in the mornin. That mule sleepin right now, so maybe you should follow after him.” Elias said nothing and he did not move. Moses said, “I ain’t but two minutes off you, fella, and you seem to wanna keep forgettin that.” Moses had found Elias a great bother in the mind from the day Henry Townsend drove up with Elias from the slave market, a one-day affair held out in the open twice a year at the eastern edge of the town of Manchester, in the spring and in the fall after harvest. The very day Elias was bought by Henry some white people had talked about building a permanent structure for the slave market-that was the year it rained every spring day the market was held, and many white people caught colds as a result. One woman died of pneumonia. But God was generous with his blessings the following fall and each day was perfect for buying and selling slaves and not a soul said anything about constructing a permanent place, so fine was the roof God himself had provided for the market.