![]() It should've been a quick read but I kept asking myself this question: who would I have been? The slave, toiling away in the field? The overseer, unable to see the world for what it truly was? The freed man, working desperately to free the rest of his family? The smart child, taken under the wing of the rich white slave owner and convinced that there was nothing wrong with owning another human being? The broken black man tortured by his family's wealth built on the backs of men and women that look just like me? The slave too proud, too strong, too powerful to let another take his freedom? Who would I have been? It is a fascinating place with peculiar problems and characters I cried for on more than one occasion. It took me nearly 2 months to finish the book's 388 pages. It was the world, a world where I could taste the soil I might till and the women I might marry and the terrible choices I might be faced with, that put it's claws in me and refused to let go. It was not so much the story of Henry Townsend, a black slave owner, and all the people that his death allows us to meet that engaged me. Jones creates feels as real and surreal as any factual history of slavery you've read. The complicated pre-civil war Southern society that Edward P. ![]() After reading The Known World, however, you'd be forgiven if you thought you could take a tour of it's plantations and slave cemetaries on your vacation to colonial Williamsburg. ![]() ![]() ![]() Manchester County, Virginia doesn't exist. ![]()
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