In less than 400 pages, ”World” tries to find room for enchained slaves and escaped slaves, for sexual relations between owners and slaves, for mixed-race women who ”passed” as white and others who didn’t or wouldn’t, for patrollers who made their livings rounding up escapees, for slave children fathered by their owners, and for slave owners haunted by their children. Although Jones’ writing is plainspoken and tonally neutral - making this a fascinating counterweight to Toni Morrison’s ”Beloved” - his book is clearly the product of copious research, and sometimes he seems so intent on letting every story he’s unearthed be heard that he sacrifices structure and momentum. Amistad is sending the novel off with a bang-a 10-city author tour, a 20-city national radio campaign-and it should attract considerable review attention.Although the black-slaveowner hook will likely drive the novel’s initial publicity, ”World” quickly spirals outward from Henry Townsend to encompass the lives of his widow, his parents, his former owner, his own slaves, their husbands and wives and children, other freed men, and so forth. Lost in the City was set in Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and '70s. (Sept.)įorecast: This is a new tack for Jones, whose collection

Jones's prose can be rather static and his phrasings ponderous, but his narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight and generous character writing. Henry's wife, Caldonia, is not as disciplined as her husband, and when he dies, his worst fears are realized: the plantation falls into chaos. Though he is a cruel master to his slaves, Robbins is desperately in love with a black woman and feels as much fondness for Henry as for his own children Henry, meanwhile, reads Milton, but beats his slaves as readily as Robbins does. His richest characterizations-of Robbins and Henry-are particularly revealing. Jones's thorough knowledge of the legal and social intricacies of slaveholding allows him to paint a complex, often startling picture of life in the region. Even after Henry's parents purchase the family's freedom, Henry retains his allegiance to Robbins, who patronizes him when he sets up shop as a shoemaker and helps him buy his first slaves and his plantation. As a slave in his youth, Henry makes himself indispensable to his master, William Robbins.

His fictional examination of this unusual phenomenon starts with the dying 31-year-old Henry Townsend, a former slave-now master of 33 slaves of his own and more than 50 acres of land in Manchester County, Va.-worried about the fate of his holdings upon his early death. In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award–nominated short story collection ( Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South.

Edward p jones the known world 2003