On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck a fatal blow to segregation with its landmark ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case. To commemorate this and also to mark Black History Month in February, the Sunday Book Club has chosen three novels by some very talented black authors to kick off the new year.

This month’s pick, “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones, explores a little-known aspect of this country’s brutal history of slavery: free-black slaveholders. Jones’ debut novel, set in rural Antebellum Virginia, traces the intricate boundaries that separate black plantation owners from their human property.

Jones

The novel begins with the death of 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a talented shoemaker whose father bought him out of slavery. After being freed, Henry slowly builds a successful plantation, with the requisite slaves, and despite their former relationship comes to view his ex-owner as a mentor and father figure.

Early on, Henry learns the importance of owners keeping their distance from their slaves. And as a result his plantation thrived. After Henry’s death, his carefully constructed “known world” soon begins to unravel when his grieving wife, Caldonia, begins an affair with the estate’s overseer. The slaves begin to realize how close they are to freedom and the fine line that separates them and their new mistress.

Jones is a wonderful writer, and he conveys the complexities of the black master/black slave relationship with subtlety and skill. Even after Caldonia’s first intimate encounter with Moses, the overseer, the line between mistress and slave remains firmly set:

The air did indeed have teeth in it, but she warmed as she walked to the cemetery with its one occupant. The mound of dirt had settled even more since her last visit. A tombstone had been ordered, but the man had said it might take a month for it to be delivered. Standing at the foot of Henry’s grave, she wished she had brought flowers from her garden. “Am I forgiven?” she said. The flowers from her last visit, two days before, still had some vigor in them, and they were atop flowers from four days before that were browning and becoming one with the soil. “I still am your wife, so am I forgiven?”

Moses came to her that evening and she gave him no indication that he was to rise from the chair and come to her. So he talked of the slaves’ work from the wing chair, hair combed and the not-so-new-anymore shirt and pants clinging to him because the sweat had come even before he had set one foot in the kitchen. He had hoped that by having her again they would cross an irrevocable threshold. But there were no tears and no hint that she wanted him, so he sat in sweat and fumbled through a recitation of their preparations for the harvest. Had he not been her slave, he might have gotten up and went to her just on the authority of last night. But the sun did not rise very high in Moses’s life, and it was only one day at a time and no one day was kin to the next.

Jones also plays with time sequences in the novel, moving — often abruptly — between past, present and future. At first this seems a little unsettling, but in the end blends well with his often dreamlike prose and elements of magic realism.

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.