The Known World by Edward P. Jones

“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 that 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.”

The opening lines of The Known World by Edward P. Jones.

Before we’re told his name, we’re told that Moses has a master, which, in a society built on slavery, is a more important and more pertinent piece of information about him. But we’re also shown that, despite his status as a slave, Moses also enjoys a degree of authority: it is his to tell the other slaves when they can stop working and leave the fields. The implication seems to be that this authority is the reward for his dedication: he regularly works longer than anyone else, and on this day he does not take the death of his master as an excuse to slack off. So it’s clear from the beginning that this will be not just a novel about slavery, but a novel about the nuances and details of slavery, about how the institution is experienced by individuals.

We’re shown Moses “freeing” himself from a “harness.” Not that he is free of the great harness of slavery, but perhaps it is suggestive of some smaller freedoms that he enjoys as an overseer and as the slave of a man determined to be a humane master.

In this book, Jones has a habit of interrupting a scene to offer information on the past or future experiences of a character; I initially found this technique disruptive and I resisted the book because of it.

But I tried to understand my own resistance and to think more objectively about what the technique might accomplish. I thought I saw some similarities with Samuel R. Delany’s investigations of the ways in which personal memories invade and inform the present. I also thought I heard echoes of an oral tradition in this discursiveness, which would be a resonant element in a story and a society in which literacy is a charged subject. And I thought about the fact that for any historical novel set in America in this period, the Civil War is always the elephant in the room. The usual solution is to ignore the elephant on the grounds that the characters can have no knowledge of events that will occur in their future, and that’s a very reasonable position, but inevitably the reader has that knowledge, and I thought that Jones was addressing that dynamic in an interesting way, since his digressions often dealt with the post-Civil War/post-slavery experiences of the characters.

It seems to me that one effect of a historical novel is to emphasize the historicity of its subject matter. Yes, it may allow the reader to feel a greater identification with characters who live in an unfamiliar time and place, but it also, I think, tends to insist on the distinction between “then” and “now.” And in a novel about slavery, about the greatest tragedy of American history, is such distancing desirable? Or does it make it too easy for the reader to compartmentalize slavery as something that happened “back then,” and to ignore the ongoing legacies and repercussions still with us today? It seems to me that Jones’s digressions have the effect of collapsing chronology, of minimizing the distinctions between then and now, and thereby reminding us that the effects and influences of the institution of slavery are still very much with us.