She Wasn’t Crazy.  The World Was.

The Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones.  Harper Perennial.  388 pp.  *****

It isn’t often that I read a novel, then sit down immediately and read it again.  I wasn’t planning to do that this time.  But as I pondered my previous review of The Known World, I saw structural things about the novel that made me realize all I had missed the first time around.  (Specifically, despite a vast set of characters, the novel opens with a scene involving two characters, Moses and Alice, and ends with another one, though their fortunes have vastly changed.  I wondered at those chapters as a setting for all occurs in between.)  I haven’t changed my mind about the novel’s central theme: the immorality of regarding a human being as property, and the corruption that such a view brings about.  But I understand better now how Jones developed it.

I would guess that this piece will include spoilers, but there’s nothing I can do about that.  If you’re concerned about spoilers, go out and read the book, which is magnificent.

In that first scene, Moses, who is the overseer of a group of slaves, the first slave bought by his master, Henry Townsend, has ended his working day but doesn’t return to his cabin, though he has worked for fourteen hours.  He eats a little dirt—his way of judging the soil—and, as a light rain comes on, heads out to a small patch of woods to be with himself.  He undresses and lies down, taking in the woods around him, and then “he took up his thing and did it.”  He dozes off, and stays out there for about an hour.  He seems in a way to be communing with nature, making love to the material world.  He is also finding moments of freedom in a life that doesn’t allow for much.  But at some point he realizes that someone has been watching, and it is Alice, a slave woman who works as hard as anyone else in the group but is widely regarded as crazy, often wandering out in the dark somewhere at night.  He isn’t sure she’s seen him, but believes she has.  He hates the thought that someone has disturbed his solitude.

Both slaves were in a situation that was essentially absurd.  In a small county in Virginia named Manchester, they were owned by another black man, Henry Townsend, who—though just past the age of thirty—was about to die of some unknown illness.  The novel goes back and forth in time, but it is essentially about Henry’s widow Caldonia holding on to his wealth in a situation where people don’t think she can.  His wealth depends on slave labor, so she relies on it despite the fact that she, though a black woman, had been free all her life and certainly doesn’t approve of the institution.  It is a part of her known world.

We see the essential absurdity of this situation in a central scene that is as infuriating as it is bizarre.  Under pressure from slaveowners, the sheriff, John Skiffington, has deputized local men to ride the roads in the evening and look for slaves that might have escaped.  If slaves can escape in this rural part of Virginia, the whole system will collapse.  One of the people who urged him to do so is a white slaveowner named William Robbins, who is married to a white woman but is more in love with his mistress, who was one of his slaves.  He has had two children with her, and eventually he frees both her and her children, whom he loves as much as his white daughter.

The men Skiffington has hired are the dregs of this society, small farmers who need extra cash, and they’re envious of both the large landowners and the slaves favored by them, also the freed slaves.  One evening these patrollers happen on Augustus Townsend, Henry’s father and in some ways the moral center of the novel.  He is a fine woodworker who had worked for Robbins, and eventually—through the work he did—bought his own freedom as well of that of his wife and son.  He is furious, and in fact can’t quite believe, that his son ever owned slaves (Henry argued that it was the only way he could get ahead.  That was the economic system he was working under).

On this particular evening, when one of the patrollers stops Townsend—despite the fact that he knows that the man is free and is allowed to be out—he decides, on a whim, to subvert the law.  He literally eats, piece by piece, the documents that acknowledge Townsend’s status, then sells him to a man who specializes in kidnapping freemen and selling them back into slavery.  I read this scene in utter disbelief, and a kind of controlled fury.  But it happened, and was never set right.

Jones’ novel is vast, included a huge cast of characters, and has any number of subplots.  I’m almost tempted to say that this book—by a man whose other two books are volumes of stories set in Washington DC—is yet another book of stories, interrelated to be sure, but sometimes wandering off on crazy tangents (there is an almost surreal section a little past the midpoint where John Skiffington’s brother Counsel, who has come to financial ruin, is fleeing his distress, and seems to stumble across a group of pure spirits in the woods).  Maybe I should just call it picaresque.  But it contains a vast complicated world.  There’s nothing simple about it.

Back to the two characters who bookend this story, Moses and Alice.  As overseer to the slaves, Moses becomes the confidant of Caldonia, Henry’s widow, and in her grief she takes him as a lover.  He is convinced that once she has done that, she will make him free; his whole relationship with her has been a calculated attempt to achieve freedom.  In doing that, he urges his wife Priscilla, and his son Jamie, to escape the plantation, and sends them off with, of all people, Alice, the crazy woman who wanders at night.  But Caldonia had never intended to make Moses free; he was in many ways her most valuable piece of property.  And Alice, whom everybody—including this reader—thought was just crazy, has been wandering at night for months or years, and knows the woods, and how to avoid her captors, better than anyone else.  Priscilla, Jamie, and Alice seem to disappear.  Sheriff Skiffington believes Moses must have killed them.  But the story doesn’t follow them.  We don’t know what has happened.

Much more happens in even the small subplot I’m describing, to say nothing of the book as a whole.  If what I’ve told is a spoiler, I haven’t spoiled much.  But at the end of this book in which so many startling things happen, Calvin, Caldonia’s brother and also a freed man, makes his way to Washington, DC (where else, in a book by Edward P. Jones?) and finds, in a hotel where black people have rooms alongside Senators and Congressmen, where people take to strong drink by 1:00 in the afternoon (I assume he’s referring to the legislators), two magnificent works of art on display, both of them enormous wall hangings that are “part tapestry, part painting, part clay structure,” one of them portraying Manchester County and one the very plantation that Caldonia owns.  The artist is Alice, who is living in the hotel.  When Calvin asks how she is, the replies, “I been good as God keeps me.”  Priscilla and Jamie live in the hotel with her.  She signs her name Alice Night.  Calvin’s one wish, in this situation that seems nothing short of miraculous, is that no one will remember that he once owned slaves.  These two women, at least, seem forgiving.

This is not by any means a happy ending to the novel.  Too many dreadful things have happened to tie up everything with a bow.  But it is, in some way, the triumph of art over the circumstances of life.  The fact that these things are beautifully portrayed doesn’t make them any easier to take.  But it is wonderful to see a novel take on tragedies of life in this way, and still be, in its own way, a thing of beauty.