The Known World Review
Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World bears a title full of irony. The novel is set in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War and hosts a broad set of characters who are all playing out their ethical lives in an environment that has firmly accepted the racial and economic premises of a slave system. On the wall of the local sheriff’s office, a godly man who refuses to own a slave (though he will accept one as a wedding gift), is a map of “the known world.” Edward Jones describes the map in the following paragraphs:
A Russian who claimed to be a descendant of Waldseemuller had passed through the town and Skiffington had bought the map from him. He wanted it as a present for Winifred but she thought it too hideous to be in her house. Heading the legend were the words “The Known World.” Skiffington suspected the Russian, a man with a white beard down to his stomach, was a Jew but he could not tell a Jew from any other white man.
“I get you better,” Broussard said. “I get you better map, and more map of today. Map of today, how the world out together today, not yesterday, not long ago.” The Russian had told Skiffington that it was the first time the word America had ever been put on a map. The land of North America on the map was smaller than it was in actuality, and where Florida should have been, there was nothing. South America seemed the right size, but it alone of the two continents was called “America.” North America went nameless.
“I’m happy with what I got,” Skiffington said.”
It is fair to say that what is true of Sheriff Skiffington’s map of the world is true of everyone in the novel’s moral map of the world. That map, also provided to them by Jews (the writers of the Bible) makes plenty of moral room for slavery. Indeed, the local ministers we are introduced to in the novel endorse and uphold it as part of a divine order. The characters of the novel (and there are many) navigate their lives using a flawed map and seem unwilling to accept the idea that they should upgrade to something better.
They are “happy with what they got,” even though they are not. It is fair to say that no one in this novel is happy. Navigating through life with their ancient unrevised moral map is literally killing them all.
One can imagine an omniscient God, knowing what the shape of the continents are, in reality, shaking His head as he watches the knuckleheaded human cartographers so badly represent the world they think they know as “the known world.” But what does that God do as He watches millions of people buy into and navigate through their daily lives in a slave-besotted economic system as though what is “known” must be true? The author of The Known World plays that role of the omniscient observer though he is often critical of God (or at least of the God of Virginia slavocrats). For, like the stage manager in Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town, he knows all. The voice of the narrator of the novel can, and does, tell you about his characters’ motives. He tells you about their pasts and about their futures, sometimes distant futures. He tells you how they are, unbeknownst to themselves, connected. What he knows goes well beyond what might be predicted. He sees where people eventually wind up as clearly as he sees what they are doing.
What he is doing by telling this story in this way is hard to say but the theme seems clear to me. He is making the case that like Sheriff Skiffington, we all live out our lives in the context of a defective moral map that we lean on far too much for our own good. We all live our lives in the presence of a divine being who we may have gotten completely wrong. We would all be wise to take Broussard’s offer and get an upgrade.
Here is an example of the way the novel relentlessly describes people living life in a world with a defective moral map.
“The very day Elias was bought by Henry some white people had talked about building a permanent structure for the slave market—that was the year it rained every spring day the market was held, and many white people caught colds as a result. One woman died of pneumonia. But God was generous with his blessings the following fall and each day was perfect for buying and selling slaves and not a soul said anything about constructing a permanent place, so fine was the roof God himself had provided for the market.”
“Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn’t fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?”
Not even Elias can imagine a world where God disapproved of the entire system.
Everywhere in the novel, you see people incorporating their theology of slavery into their decisions.
“The few black slave owners had begun to believe that their own salvation would flow down to their slaves: if they themselves went to church and led exemplary lives, then God would bless them and what they owned. And one day they would go to heaven and so would their slaves.”
Sheriff Skiffington sees himself as an upholder of the law and a decent man. He has come to oppose slavery personally but, professionally, he is sees it as his God given duty to uphold and protect the system. And then his cousin gives him a slave for a wedding present. “Skiffington asked his wife, “Are you and me not good people?”
“We will not own slaves,” Skiffington promised God, and he promised each morning he went to his knees to pray. Though everyone in the county saw Minerva the wedding present as their property, the Skiffingtons did not feel that they owned her, not in the way whites and a few blacks owned slaves. Minerva was not free, but only in the way a child in a family is not free. In fact, in Philadelphia years later, as she paid for all those posters with Minerva’s picture on them, Winifred Skiffington was to think only one thing—“I must get my daughter back. I must get my daughter back.”
It is as if you can see people who begin to doubt that they may be righteous consult their tattered moral map of the known world and say to themselves “No! See here! We have not lost our way! The map says so!”
Take the following passage about the practice of mutilating slaves as punishment for running away.
“A white man had cut off the ear of his ‘habitual runaway,’ and the slave had bled to death. No one could understand what had happened—people had been cutting off ears or parts of ears for more than two centuries. In the seventeenth century throughout the Virginia colony even white indentured servants had had their ears cut off. But somehow the luck of the Amherst County man had run out and his $515 slave had died from the loss of blood. A few white people wanted him indicted for manslaughter, but the grand jury declined, finding that the man had suffered enough with the loss of his property.”
“People were spooked by what happened to the slave who bled to death, began to believe that even after two hundred years of doing it there might yet be a real science to cutting off ears, just as there was to hobbling a slave and butchering hogs in the fall.”
From then on, they determine to have all ears that needed to be cut off, cut off by a Cherokee Indian who specialized in the procedure. This of course seemed consistent with the moral map they followed as it was a map that allowed people to mutilate their “property” but not to kill them.
Jones allows for the moral ignorance to move from one race to another and back. He does not dignify the notion that the moral maps of the slave are somehow always superior to that of the white slave owners. Plantation owners can be philanderers and so can slaves. There are bad men and good men. Slaves who lie and whites who lie. Henry, a former slave who has been bought out of bondage by his parents, begins to make a stake for himself by buying slaves and he justifies it with the logic of the man who had owned him.
“How could anyone, white or not white, think that he could hold on to his land and servants and his future if he thought himself no higher than what he owned? The gods, the changeable gods, hated a man with so much, but they hated more a man who did not appreciate how high they had pulled him up from the dust.”
When Henry tells his father Augustus Townsend that he has purchased a slave, Augustus rebukes him and hits him with a cane.
“Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus said.
“Nobody never told me the wrong of that.”
“Why should anybody haveta teach you the wrong, son?” Augustus said. “Ain’t you got eyes to see it without me tellin you?”
Augustus said quietly, “I promised myself when I got this little bit of land that I would never suffer a slaveowner to set foot on it. Never.” He put his hand momentarily to his mouth and then tugged at his beard. “Of all the human beins on God’s earth I never once thought the first slaveowner I would tell to leave my place would be my own child. I never thought it would be you. Why did we ever buy you offa Robbins if you gon do this? Why trouble ourselves with you bein free, Henry? You could not have hurt me more if you had cut off my arms and my legs.” Augustus walked out the room to the front door, meaning for Henry to follow. Mildred sat back down but soon stood up again.
“Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to. I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do. Papa, wait. . . . ”
“I ain’t done nothin that any white man wouldn’t do. I ain’t broke no law. I ain’t. You listen here.”
One of the characters will later explain to an interviewer asking about black people who owned slaves that it was inappropriate to apply a morality foreign to the times. “We not a single one of us Negroes would have done what we were not allowed to do.” She says. The moral map of Virginia allowed people to own people. Would it not be an injustice to restrict that ownership to one race?
After Henry dies, his wife, Caldonia, contemplates the morality of the system that her husband left her (her “legacy”)
“Henry had been a good master, his widow decided, as good as they come. Yes, he sometimes had to ration the food he gave them. But that was not his fault-had God sent down more food, Henry would certainly have given it to them. Henry was only the middleman in that particular transaction. Yes, he had to have some slaves beaten, but those were the ones who would not do what was right and proper. Spare the rod…, the Bible warned. Her husband had done the best he could, and on Judgment Day his slaves would stand before God and testify to that fact.”
The influence of the moral map with its God-approved slave system infects everything and every thought of everyone in the story, black, white, or in between. “The God of that Bible, being who he was, never gave a slave a good day without wanting something big in return,” one character says. “Could the cord of a man born into slavery ever be cut forever and completely, even if he had been free for some years?” asks Skiffington, “Was he not doomed by virtue of the color of his skin? “
In the novel’s concluding lines, the author makes it clear that even the best of people will suffer from the effects of an outdated moral map. When the Skiffington’s “daughter” Minerva runs away, Mrs. Skiffington tries in every way she can to reunite with her.
“The poster reproduced that portion of the photograph that contained Minerva. But at the bottom of the posters, like some kind of afterthought, in words much smaller than everything else on the poster, was the line “Will Answer To The Name Minnie.” And so Minerva did not see Winifred Skiffington again for a very long time.”
“It was the “Will Answer To,” of course, that had done it. Winifred had meant no bad thing by the words. With what little money she had, she hired a printer–an enlightened white immigrant from Savannah, Georgia–to make up the posters and put them up all about Philadelphia, “where any eye could see,” she had instructed the printer. She had meant only love with all the words, for she loved Minerva more than she loved any other human being in the world. But John Skiffington’s widow had been fifteen years in the South, in Manchester County, Virginia, and people down there just talked that way. She and the printer from Savannah would have told anyone that they didn’t mean any harm by it.
A passage from the book provides us with a suggestion that we would all do well to heed. If I can be so bold as to say it, I think Edward Jones may be telling us that we might all be well served to consult that moral map of our own conscience rather than the moral map the culture gives us.
“In Fern Elston’s class one day when Caldonia was ten, Calvin, her brother, had punched another child on the arm and the boy cried. “I didn’t hit him all that hard, Mrs. Elston. I hit him with a soft lick, a baby lick. I didn’t hurt him.” Fern had come up to Calvin and slapped him and shook him by the shoulders until Calvin cried. “Why are you crying, Calvin? I just gave you a baby lick.” When both boys had stopped crying, Fern said gently to Calvin, “The hitter can never be the judge. Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.”
Question for Comment: The following passage talks about people who get morally lost.
“Elias could see Celeste standing in their cabin doorway, waiting for him. He needed Celeste now. He needed Celeste to tell him right and point him toward home. How had he come to forget just where he was in the world?”
How do you figure out where you are in the moral world? How do you determine whether something is right simply because it aligns with what your present culture says is right? Who helps you find your way when you are lost?
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