The Known World by Edward P. Jones

From time to time I like to take a risk in my reading, by selecting a book almost at random from the shelves, a book I have never heard of before. Here I admit I cheated. I saw the "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" sticker glinting on the cover. That takes away just a little of the risk. Generally, I keep track of major award winners like this, but for some odd reason, I had never heard of this book.

It is about slavery. That in itself, probably cuts its potential audience in half, especially in my neck of the woods, Mississippi. Slavery ended in the United States in 1865, but since then has inspired no end of magnificent fiction, starting with Huckleberry Finn in 1881 and going from there. More recently, we have had William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner, and virtually the entire life's work of Toni Morrisson. Naturally, I thought this well was running dry.

Not quite. Jones bases his story on an oddity of the slave era I did not know about -- freed slaves in the South that legally owned slaves just as white people did. Jones tells their story. His tale would have failed if he had just used the black-man-owning-black-man theme to rehash the tired man's-inhumanity-to-man argument. But, as I mentioned before, this is a Pulitzer prize winner. Jones has more to say than that, and a condemnation of slavery is the least of it.

The story centers on the life and death of Henry Townsend, a freed slave who, with the help of his old white master, builds a successful plantation. He dies not even halfway through the book, so I am not revealing too much of the plot by saying so. The remainder of the book deals with the events that led up to and resulted from his death. The story is not linear, and rolls out with an endless series of flashbacks and flash-aheads that sometimes drives the reader so far from the present action that it is hard to figure out what is going on in the present.

Jones uses slavery to focus on how oppression distorts lives. He is not necessarily talking about race relations either, which is one of the surprising things about this book. Some of the most brutal acts in the book are white against white, black against black, and Native American against black. There are no heroes and no villains. Everyone is diminished. It was very impressive to me to read a book that easily could have been an excoriating and trite attack on racism instead morph into the pointed observation that distorted social values erase perspective in unexpected ways.

This was one of the first books I bought to replace the library I lost to Hurricane Katrina, and the most striking thing about The Known World is that I found it Katrina-relevant. If you were a slave living in Virginia in 1850 and were freed, what would you do? I would head north as fast as my legs would carry me. But The Known World tells the story of a class of freed blacks that decided to stay in slave country even after they were freed. Several of them would pay a terrible price for their decision. Why would they stay, and face the racism and danger of living among slaveholders when they were free to leave?

Jones doesn't answer this question directly, but from the behavior of his characters emerges an answer -- when the culture and values of a land dig into you, it is very hard to leave it behind. Home is home, no matter how tenuous it is.

This struck me as Katrina-relevant because, after the storm, so many people asked the question: Why would anyone want to live below sea level in a hurricane zone? For the same reason an ex-slave would live in slave country. It is home. The world you live in, the known world, moulds you and makes you what you are. There is no escaping what you are. People in Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast live there because it is their known world, for better or worse.