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By Vicki Gundrum (Aug 12, 2005) The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, copyright 2003, published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publisher, is available on the "New Arrivals" shelf at the Biblioteca Pública. Thanks to Edward P. Jones, who wrote a book around an unusual bit about slavery he recalled from his college years-that some blacks owned other blacks-we have The Known World, a majestic work of historical fiction. Edward P Jones, an African American, worked 19 years for Tax Analysts, a nonprofit that helps tax accountants make sense of changing tax laws-before setting out to write The Known World, which for 10 years he had been composing in his head. It is an epic story about slavery in antebellum and fictional 1855 Manchester County, Virginia. The Known World is Jones's first novel and the winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. A short story collection, Lost in the City, won Jones the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. To tell the story of The Known World, Jones uses an omniscient narrator-omniscient like God, all-knowing, all-seeing-in a voice that is not showy and a bit matter-of-fact, like reading a ship's manifest: how perfect for a book about the buying and selling of slaves. Within the novel are references to the 1840 US Census, making the book appear to be based on research. However, Jones's story is a unique and powerful work of the imagination built around that startling fact of black slaveholders. Jones's novel is filled with complex characters such as Williams Robbins, the richest man in the county: "The richest man is often the one who owns the most slaves, and in his case that is true." Robbins is a white plantation owner who falls in love with Philomena, a black he owns. He sets her and their two children up in a fine house on a street with whites. He is the only man who could get away with such a thing. The character Sheriff Skiffington follows the Bible prohibition against owning slaves-"he and his wife will not own slaves is their God-fearing belief"-yet he upholds the laws about returning missing property, including runaway slaves. "A runaway slave was, in fact a thief, since he had stolen his master's property-himself." When Skiffington and his wife receive the wedding gift of a slave girl, Minerva, they observe the day's manners of accepting a gift in a gracious manner, and they tell themselves no one else would be as good to the girl as they are-but they keep her. And there is Henry Townsend, the black slave (once owned and trained by Williams Robbins) who becomes a slave-owner and "massa" of his own plantation. "Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He 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." There are strong and complex women characters, too. Fern Elston is a light-skinned black. She has relatives who are "passing," but Fern never thinks of passing for white herself as she doesn't care much for white people. She is educated and teaches the most privileged of blacks, including Williams Robbins's two mixed-race children and Robbins's protégé, Henry Townsend. The book opens and closes with observations about Henry's slave Moses, the overseer of Henry's plantation. With these passages, in spare but beautiful prose, Jones describes the brutality of slavery and its consequences. The lives "recalled" in The Known World act collectively as a great teacher of human behavior. And stories about slavery written before The Known World now seem curiously outdated. A Personal Response: My Own "Known World" So what does it mean to be reading this book in San Miguel, as a white woman who has recently moved here from ethnically diverse San Francisco? It means thinking about the legacy of slavery in the United States, and wondering about parallels to other peoples and places. I'd like to 'round my wheel of conversation, on your axel of consideration. This is a rhyme I remember reading from a slave plantation diary, part of an assignment for a history class in college. (What is it about small bits of information that stay with us our whole lives?) And I recall the explanation that such melodious wooing was part and parcel of a slave's life, as other means of impressing the girl of your dreams, such as property of almost any sort, wasn't usually available to a love-stricken slave. But what Jones creates in The Known World, in dramatizing his college remembrance of the rare-but-true situation of blacks owning property in the form of other blacks, sets the question of slavery in a different light. How much is slavery an aspect of race when there are other human flaws in the mix-such as the compulsion for control and power, hoarding and wealth? Many who were teenagers in the US of the 1980s were steeped in the popular culture of angry urban black males, as expressed in hip-hop and rap music-even if you were white and lived in a neighborhood where "diversity" wasn't visible or even a topic of conversation. My own teen years were earlier, but still I knew of rap music. And when I remember the rhyme about slavery from my college years, I want a rapper to resuscitate it-to busta rhyme over some beats. Now in San Miguel, I struggle to understand the mix of people here, trying on the word "diversity" to recognize groups such as locals, expats, Indian doll ladies, Chiclets kids. I need to learn more Spanish. I need some more time here. I need to learn more Mexican history-such as the history of the domination of Aztecs and Mayans by Cortéz, the mixed-blood heritage of the descendents of both conqueror and conquered. I've met no African-Americans among the expats in San Miguel, but there are reminders here of those with African heritage. These reminders accumulate in a catalog of observations: the loteria cards include el negrito, a minstrel-like black doing a dance with a hat and cane; the post-office never seems to have any of the controversial Mexican stamps featuring a black from the comic strip Memín Pinguín; the words of Vicente Fox are depicted in a Boondocks cartoon, by celebrated African-American cartoonist Aaron McGruder, as eliciting from African-Americans both outrage and a recognition of some kernel of truth. And, as though simply wishing for knowledge always makes it happen, last week I met Jes?s in Pozos, who told about the "negro slaves brought in from Veracruz" to work the mines, especially the sludge pits filled with arsenic, mercury and a third deadly thing-they all died by age 40. With this tip from Jesús, I have a start from which to read and research, and I learn: Escaped black slaves from the mines found their way to outlying communities, including San Miguel. That the Black community was large is made evident by the fact that the Church of the Oratorio was originally named La Iglesia de los Mulatos (the Black church). The Blacks bought the property, purchased the building materials, and built the original church themselves. (from "The Castas of San Miguel," by Dr. Morton Stith in Atención, June 6, 2003, p. 9) Thinking about a former slave owning other slaves; remembering particular friends from San Francisco, contemporaries with a heritage of slavery; listening to widely influential rap music, a truly American-born music style that sprang from the anger legion among urban American slave descendents-such thoughts broaden my personal known world. Our known worlds In the novel, the words "The Known World" are lettered onto a map of the world that hangs on the wall in Sheriff Skiffington's jail. The map is out of date, and both Skiffington and his prisoner know it. When the prisoner attempts to bribe his jailer by offering, "I get you better map, and more map of today…. How the world out together today, not yesterday, not long ago," the sheriff responds that he is "happy with what I got." So what is Jones saying? Perhaps that people can know their outlook is limited and be content with that. And yet somewhere else a new, better map is being made. Vicki Gundrum reads and edits books in her San Miguel apartment. You can reach her at vicki.gundrum@excite.com |