the known world

I've just finished reading my latest bedtime book, Edward P. Jones's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Known World. Perhaps bedtime wasn't the best time to enter Jones's complex world of slave and free in his fictional Manchester, VA. Not only because you might not want to enter a dreamstate thinking about slavery, but also because you get sucked into the world Jones has created with what seems like almost a hundred characters, including free black slaveholding families as well as those who thought the idea of free blacks owning their enslaved "brethren" highly problematic. Jones really forces readers to confront our ideas of race, community, intimacy, humanity and what it means for someone to presume ownership over human beings. Jones doesn't hover much around the usual violences of slavery--the whippings, rapes, dismemberment--though some of it is present, but instead he probes the emotional and philosophical intricacies of "slave" and "master," including the sometimes perverse intimacies that transpire between the two.

When I first picked up Jones's novel, I thought "Do black people have to write about slavery in order to win a Pulitzer?" I'm not saying we should not write about slavery, I just wonder sometimes about how a "fascinated" readership and the publishing industry "like" to see black people represented in print. What "sells" in other words. I'm actually quite fascinated by what Ashraf Rushdy calls the "neoslave" narrative--those narratives written by black writers far removed from slavery but like all of us still entangled within those memories. Those narratives that, as Toni Morrison puts it, "rip the veil drawn over 'proceedings too terrible to relate'" ("The Site of Memory"). Writers like Morrison, Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones and Edward P. Jones try to hear behind those silences imposed on autobiographical slave narratives like Harriet Jacobs's and Frederick Douglass's. Most of those silences involve sexual matters.

Another silence involves those rare instances when free black families--who were wealthy enough and so inclined--owned slaves (these instances are distinct from black people who may have bought their own freedom and then purchased the freedom of their family members). We--as in general reading public--tend to have a myopic vision of antebellum America, one that doesn't include free and educated people of color who did or did not own slaves, whites who weren't racist and abhored slavery, same sex and/or interracial intimacy ... Contemporary writers who delve into those matters offer us a fuller vision of an institution that was vile and violent and also really peculiar. The more we excavate those buried truths around slavery, the better we can confront the challenges of sexuality, gender, race and class that trouble us today.