Shadowlands Of Slavery

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By Susannah Meadows

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In one heartbreaking scene from Edward P. Jones's "The Known World," a slave named Elias presents his beloved with a wooden comb he's carved. "Aside from the food in her stomach," we're told, "the comb was all she had." But most of the heartbreak here isn't so simple. Jones's much-touted new novel teases out the moral ambiguities of slavery in what is typically a black and white issue, and explores a seldom-noted shadowland between bondage and freedom. One slave buys his own freedom and then must decide what to purchase next--his wife or his son. A white woman accepts a slave girl as a wedding present because she loves her like a daughter. And at the center of the novel sits Henry Townsend, a freed-man, who, mentored by his ex-master, buys slaves of his own.

Jones boldly flouts a basic convention of storytelling by systematically revealing the fates of his unknowing characters. We find out that one slave will ultimately die 10 feet from where he's standing, and that a white woman will breathe her last with a knife under her pillow, in terror of an ex-slave whom she'd begged to stay on after the war.

But the best, most counterintuitive idea in "The Known World" turns out to be the greatest disappointment. The human mystery that drives the narrative is the question of how a freed man could own another, and Jones never quite solves the puzzle of Henry's odd spiritual kinship with his former master. We learn that Henry is a reader of Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Jones takes pains to remind us of Satan's defiant, hopeless declaration that it's better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. (After death, Henry winds up in a dismally un-Miltonic afterlife, alone in a small rented house where his head scrapes the ceiling.) Such hints don't clarify this fascinating enigma of a character. Still, Jones's gift for storytelling provides almost satisfaction enough.

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