Monday, May 19, 2008

The premise

The hook of "The Known World," what makes it an unusual slavery novel, is that the slave owners are free blacks. I was intrigued by the idea, especially knowing that the slave master's parents -- who had worked hard to buy their son's freedom -- were horrified and angry that he would now be owning his own slaves.

As I was reading, I kept forgetting that Henry and Caldonia were black. I was picturing white people in some scenes, which I suppose is just because that's the traditional image of slave owners on the plantation.

Did you have that problem? Had you known before that some free blacks owned slaves before the Civil War? What do you think Jones' message is about slavery?
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2 comments:

kc said...

Yes, I sometimes had to stop and think about the characters' race and also their relations to one another. I started a little flow chart in the front of the book before I realized the publisher had put one in the back of the book!

I knew that some blacks and Indians had owned slaves, but I didn't really have a mental picture of what that might have been like.

I thought Jones' message, at least one of them, about slavery is that most people are morally frail and, in their own self-interest, will cling to whatever justification they have to do the wrong thing. In your "known world," if slave-owning equals success, then that's what you'll probably aspire to, if the opportunity is there for you, as it was for Henry. As Fern told the journalist, "We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did." And a little later, she says, "We, not a single one of us Negroes, would have done what we were not allowed to do." The Bible allows slavery. The law allows slavery. It's the rare person, like Augustus, who uses his own internal yardstick to measure morality by what is right rather than by what is allowed.

12:42 PM, May 21, 2008
Erin said...

Great point. That seems to be a pretty universal human tendency, across races and cultures.

5:59 PM, May 23, 2008

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