The Known World

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Character Analysis

Themes

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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 4 Summary: “Curiosities South of the Border. String Tricks in a Doomed City. A Child Departs from the Way. The Education of Henry Townsend.”

In 1883, a Canadian, Anderson Frazier, published a 27-page pamphlet on black slaveowners—a pamphlet that became his most famous from his series on Americans, Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors—focusing on Henry Townsend, Caldonia Townsend, Louis Cartwright, and Fern Elston. In 1881 he interviews Fern Elston for research about his pamphlet. She tells him about the past, both hers and Henry’s.

When Henry was still a slave, he worked not only as William Robbins’s groom but also as an apprentice to a shoemaker. He soon exceeded the shoemaker in his skills, and even after Henry became free, he would return to William’s home to make shoes for William’s guests, thus making money, “which, along with some real estate he would eventually get from Robbins, would be the foundation of what he was and what he had the evening he died” (113). Augustus wishes Henry would not associate with William, but Mildred sees the value of having connections to the wider world. “The bigger Henry could make the world he lived in, the freer he would be. ‘Them free papers he carry with him all over the place don’t carry anough freedom’” (113).

While still a slave, Henry traveled with William Robbins to Richmond to find Philomena Cartwright, the black woman William has two children with. She ran away because she had always wanted to live in Richmond. When William finds Philomena, he becomes angry and punches her, knocking her out. Henry cries out, thinking Philomena is dead because she is not moving. William assures Henry she is alive, and he asks Henry to look after his two children, who are frightened by the fighting. Henry comforts them, and when William sees this, he realizes that Henry is someone he trusts and wants him always to look after his children.

Once Henry becomes both a landowner and a slaveowner, William feels he needs to instruct Henry in the appropriate ways to act around slaves, especially when he sees Henry and Moses acting as friends instead of owner and slave. Henry follows William’s advice carefully and immediately treats Moses as William instructed, clearly defining their master-slave roles. William sets up Henry as a pupil of Fern Elston’s to further his education. At Fern’s school, Henry meets Caldonia, his future wife.

When Henry finally reveals to his parents that he has bought a slave to help him build his house, his parents are shocked. “You mean to tell me you bought a man and he yours now? You done bought him and you didn’t free that man? You own a man, Henry” (137). Henry protests that he hasn’t done anything wrong, but Augustus tells Henry he must leave his house. “I promised myself when I got this little bit of land that I would never suffer a slaveowner to set foot on it. Never” (138). Augustus strikes his son with one of his walking sticks, and Henry grabs the stick and breaks it in two before leaving in anger. He rides to William’s house. William advises Henry to take advantage of all that he can. “I know you have it in you to want, to want to take hold and pull it in for yourself […] Then take it and let the word be damned, Henry” (141).

At Henry’s funeral, both his father, Augustus, and his father figure, William, are present. Neither speaks at the funeral.

Chapter 5 Summary: “That Business Up in Arlington. A Cow Borrows a Life from a Cat. The Known World.”

As sheriff of Manchester County, John Skiffington does not have to deal with too much trouble. But “in the spring of 1844, many white people in Manchester County remained uneasy about news from other places about slave ‘restlessness’ that had gone on a few years before” (147). John and Winifred visit Winifred’s cousin Clara Martin, learning that she is very uneasy about her slave Ralph. Clara’s relative had a slave who had been putting ground-up glass in the food, and Clara fears that Ralph might do the same. She eats very little. Ralph has been a slave in the family all his life, and John tries to assure Clara that she has nothing to fear from Ralph. Five years earlier, Clara and Ralph shared intimate moments when he brushed her hair for an hour, and she was able to relax completely, eventually falling asleep. He did this for three days in a row and then never again.

John also has to mediate an argument between two of his patrollers, Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford. Travis sold Wilford a cow for $15. Wilford soon realized the cow would not give milk and that Travis had cheated him out of $15. But after a few weeks, the cow began providing milk, and the Wilford family, including the cat, was delighted. Travis, however, immediately regretted the sale and wanted his cow back. The families threaten each other with violence, so John goes to the Wilford farm to help settle the matter. John gets Travis to agree to stop harassing the Wilfords, and the Wilfords agree to let Travis send two sons to get milk twice; after that, it’s up to the Wilfords whether they will allow future visits for milk.

John also must deal with a prisoner. “The prisoner, an amiable Frenchman named Jean Broussard, had murdered his Scandinavian partner, the first murder of a white person in the county in twenty-six years” (149). While John is processing the prisoner, William arrives to complain about one of John’s patrollers. He says that Travis hit Henry and would have gone further if the other patroller, Barnum Kinsey, had not intervened. John assures William that he will take care of it. Then Broussard calls out to William, telling him that he has two good slaves for sale, Moses and another woman named Bessie. William ends up purchasing Moses, and the reader learns that Henry will purchase Moses from William a year later. Moses begs William not to separate him from Bessie. “‘Please, Master Sir,’ Moses said, ‘We together, her and me. Don’t pull us apart. We together’” (172). William threatens Moses, telling him to stay silent. Broussard eventually is convicted of murder and hanged. The money from the sale of Moses makes its way to Broussard’s widow, who lives in France with her lover. Later, one of the jurors states that he believes Broussard was hanged because of his accent. “The accent gave him ‘the stench of a dissembler’” (177).

Chapter 6 Summary: “A Frozen Cow and a Frozen Dog. A Cabin in the Sky. The Taste of Freedom.”

The story shifts from the past back to the present, as Caldonia grieves for the dead Henry. Her mother, Maude, is worried that Caldonia will become like Tilmon Newman, Caldonia’s father and Maude’s husband, who in Maude’s eyes was too soft-hearted to be a slaveowner. Tilmon was able to buy himself out of slavery, and, after he married Maude, he wanted to buy his family members out of slavery as well. Instead, Maude urged him to wait, noting that his family’s circumstances were not dire. When his mother, his father, his brothers, and his own child died, Tilmon felt God was sending him a message that he must free his slaves. Before he could do so, Maude poisoned him with arsenic so he could not. Maude is worried that Henry’s death may cause Caldonia to also consider freeing her slaves. Unlike Maude, Caldonia’s brother, Calvin, wants Caldonia to free her slaves, but he knows that isn’t likely.

The story shifts again, focusing on Stamford and his quest to be with a younger woman in order to avoid a horrible death. When he tries to plead with Gloria to get back together with him, he gets in a fight with another slave, Clement, who brutally beats him. Stamford survives the beating, but he doesn’t expect to live long and stops pursuing young women. One day, during a powerful thunderstorm, he helps a young girl who is determined to gather blueberries. He gets the blueberries for her so she won’t get hurt in the storm. When he sees lighting strike a nearby tree, he runs toward it, hoping that he too will be struck. But he isn’t killed. “This was the beginning of Stamford Crow Blueberry, the man who went on with his wife to found the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans” (205). The storm is a turning point for Stamford, as he begins to focus his life on serving the needs of children, eventually joined by his future wife, Delphie. At age 44, Delphie is not “young stuff,” but both live well into the future, providing homes for abandoned children.

The patrollers Barnum, Travis, and Oden stop Augustus Townsend as he is traveling home after delivering furniture pieces he has carved. Augustus shows them his papers proving that he is a free man. But Travis and Oden refuse to accept the papers, and Travis eats the papers. Barnum protests that Augustus is a free man, but when a slave trader, Darcy, passes by, Travis and Oden sell Augustus to Darcy.

Chapters 4-6 Analysis

Anderson Frazier’s pamphlet from the series Curiosities and Oddities about Our Southern Neighbors emphasizes the central “curiosity” of this novel—the little-known fact of black slaveowners. Frazier’s interview with Fern in 1881, 26 years after Henry died and 16 years after the end of the Civil War, reframes the novel from the point of view of a world where slavery is now illegal. The “known world” that existed at the time of Henry’s death, which included the legal system of slavery, is now outdated, like Skiffington’s map. But clearly the abolition of slavery in 1865 did not instantly reset attitudes and values. Frazier wants to learn about former black slaveholders so that he can capture the “curious” beliefs of that time period in the slim boundaries of his pamphlet.

Fern, however, is a resistant interviewee, and the legacy is too complex for Frazier to sum it up in a short form. Much of the heft of Jones’s novel comes from its sprawling resistance to straightforward linear narration. Frazier’s role as a historian, in contrast to the narrator’s role in the novel, raises the question of how to uncover the truth of the past, and whether doing so is possible at all. Will the “known world” of the past ever reveal itself to those living in the present? Papers and pamphlets are flimsy, as seen by Harvey Travis, who literally eats the papers proving that Augustus is free. The novel’s style relies on a constant layering of narrative, returning again and again to the events of the story from different points of view and through different time periods, to gradually build the truth from the holes. Jones’s style works more like a palimpsest than a pamphlet, resisting traditional history and storytelling to give the fullest possible truth of the past.