What interested me most about The Known World was how Jones maintained a sense of tension between time on both the profane and celestial levels through his deceased protagonist Henry Townsend and the supporting character, Townsend’s slave, Moses. While the novel centers on Henry Townsend, a former slave, who upon gaining his freedom purchases slaves and establishes a plantation of his own, Jones opens the story with Moses, a slave owned by Townsend.
Jones writes:
“… The evening his master died he [Moses] 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… When he, Moses, finally freed himself of the ancient and brittle harness that connected him to the oldest mule 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 fifteen hours …”
The very name, Moses, evokes the Biblical realms of Moses of the Old Testament, a leader of his people, who guided them out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land of Israel. Yet in Jones’s “The Known World” set in pre-Civil War Virginia, a tale of African Americans owning African Americans, where are we, the reader, to go with Moses, the character through which Jones reveals his dead protagonist, Henry Townsend?
Alas, this is the very nature of Jones’s writing at its very best, a reflection of his artistry in telling stories. Much like the southerners of olden times, and as we see today, Jones often starts out in the left corner of a room wherein he directs us to the center of the matter–which in this case is the hypocrisy of a former slave, Henry Townsend, who grew up to enslave those of his own people.
Jones’s novel is a maze, a larger one filled with smaller ones embedded and revealed over the course of the narrative in skillfully constructed scenes that deliver the foibles and secrets of human character along with the vibrant and human history sitting at the very heart of America. The personalities of Jones’s characters display the crux and conundrum of the American and human psyche.
We believe the novel is about Moses, since it opens with him masturbating in the fields of the deceased Henry Townsend’s plantation. And yet it is Henry Townsend, Moses’ deceased master and owner, on whom the narrative focuses. For to know Henry is to know ourselves as Americans.
Reading the “Known World” is a bit like reading of Moses in The Book of Exodus to learn about Pharaoh in Egypt and then to find we, the reader have more in common with Pharaoh versus the Israelites. But what is it of Pharaoh that lives on in Moses? And what has been handed down to us. Furthermore, what insights gained of Henry Townsend’s character rendered through Moses, tell us about Moses himself, and ultimately our shadow as human individuals?
When Moses sleeps with Henry’s widow we wonder what was it that Henry never gave her, or that she didn’t ask for and receive as his wife that would allow her to have intimate relations with a person that her deceased husband owned? What resides in Henry’s widow that she now yearns to unleash through such close interactions with Moses?
We are also left to wonder what to make of her actions of informing Moses that while they have slept together she is not about to take a husband. What about her strength as a free woman of color, who incidentally came from a slave owning family, that so castrated Henry, a former slave, and left him possibly feeling impotent?
Suspicion also lurks about Henry’s death if only in the mind of the reader. Henry’s mother-in-law, his wife’s mother, ruled his widow’s father, Henry’s father-in-law, both physically and emotionally. And then there is the scene where Henry’s former slave master finds Henry working jovially with Moses. Henry’s former master admonishes Henry to discontinue such behavior by slapping him, Henry, in front of Moses, Henry’s slave. Henry’s friendly manner stands in stark contradiction to what the master has done with Henry in grooming him from a slave boy to a slave-owning man.
And yet there is a level of hypocrisy to the matter. Clearly Henry’s former master must have cared something for Henry. He mentored him toward financial success by profiting in the inhumane process buying and selling other humans–what Henry himself had at one time been when owned by his master. Once Henry’s former master is gone, Henry then goes and slaps Moses. And we see how the desire for acceptance from those we respect, even those who have injured us, can corrupt the mind and heart.
Henry and Moses are inextricably bound in death as they were in life, perhaps even more now that Henry has passed on. And yet neither seemed to have achieved or experienced what they desired in intimate fashion with the woman to which they were at least attracted, and one perhaps loved.
It remains for the reader to decide what Jones is saying, showing, calling us to witness and further explore in ourselves. The words are varied and multitudinous, as they should be with any piece good writing and art.
But the quiet, yet firm, tension between the dead protagonist of Henry Townsend, and surviving character of Moses, his slave, whose life bespeaks how his owner, Henry, lived, and perhaps died, leaves much for the reader to discern.
One thing we know is that life and death are forever bound. Those in this world live upon the trails of those who have died. This is what we know.
And it is either in or out of their shoes we come to comprehend our way in the world.
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