March 2023 Book, The Known World

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. There is a zoom option available, though most people are attending in person.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS once said that he learned more about postrevolutionary French society from Balzac than from ''all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together.'' The same might be said of slavery in America and Edward P. Jones who writes about its history not as if it were fixed in time, safely over and done with, but as if anything could happen in the chaos of the moment.

The Known World opens with the death of a master of 33 slaves in antebellum Virginia. None of his property grows teary-eyed, though, at the news that Henry Townsend has died. They surely don't know that when he obtained his first slave he wanted to be ''the kind of shepherd master God had intended,'' someone who would provide ''good food for his slaves, no whippings, short and happy days in the fields.'' By his death, he had learned his lesson. It seems he had no choice but to chain a runaway slave in his barn and pay a Cherokee patroller to slice a third of his ear off. A familiar story, perhaps, so far. There's a difference, though. Henry Townsend is black.

In 1855 in Manchester County, Va. (a fictional place standing in for an actual historical landscape), we learn that ''there were 34 free black families . . . and eight of those free families owned slaves.'' Henry Townsend's freedom had been purchased by his father, Augustus, a carpenter who bought his own freedom with money earned from his carvings and furniture, then over time bought his wife and son out of slavery. Henry himself financed his first slaves by making boots and shoes. But why would a former slave himself buy slaves, especially against the wishes of his father? Though the novel never explicitly addresses this question, readers get the message: because slavery was legal and believed to be sanctioned by God, because wealth and status consisted in owning human flesh -- and because Henry ''wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known.''

 There are few certified villains in this novel, white or black, because slavery poisons moral judgments at the root. As Jones shows, slavery corrupts good intentions and underwrites bad ones, yet allows decency the odd occasion -- but only by creating such an enormous need for it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

March 2024 Book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

Image
  Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.    In American Dialogue, Ellis divides four chapters into two parts each: Then and Now.  Each chapter focuses on what he identifies as four enduring issues that are more salient and challenging in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Ellis establishes the historical foundation for each subject and then examines the complexity of each in the context of a divisive political climate complicated by domestic and international obstacles.  Acknowledging that a true conversation with the founders is obviously impossible, he attempts to connect their concerns regarding these controversial topics with those of modern America. Hence, his use of the term dialogue in his title.  The four areas he identifies are race, equality, law, and foreign policy. In each case, Ellis chooses one member of the founding generation as the central figure with whom to engage...
Read more
Image
 Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library. It's 1932, a time of hardship, adversity, and despair. Especially at the Lincoln Indian Training School, formerly a military outpost called Fort Sibley. It's a place where Indian children who have been taken from their families are sent so they can be educated in the ways of the white world. But it's really a place meant to obliterate every trace of their Indianness, by force if necessary. Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert, orphans, are the only two white boys in the school. The opening pages describe their time in the school's quiet room, what used to be the military's solitary confinement cell. Odie tells the story from the viewpoint of his younger self: "The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the de...
Read more

July 2024 book, The Color of Water

Image
  Talk About books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30. If the book of the month interests you, contact the library to reserve a copy and join in the discussion. In this memoir, James McBride tells the story of growing up as a son of his white, Jewish mother Ruth. Ruth was born in Poland and raised in Suffolk, Va, the daughter of an itinerant rabbi and a loving, disabled mother who spoke no English. At 17, Ruth fled the South, landed in Harlem, married a black man in 1941, founded a church, was twice widowed and raised 12 children in New York City. Despite hardship, poverty, and suffering, Ruth sent all 12 of her children to college. An astounding story of triumph over poverty and cruelty, through love, courage and determination. It leaves one to acknowledge that "truth can be stranger than fiction."
Read more