The Known World

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Job. Mongrels. Parting Shots.”

Smallpox devastates Counsel Skiffington’s plantation, named “A Child’s Dream” by Counsel’s wife. One of Counsel’s creditors, Manfred Carlyle, brought the disease to the plantation when he came to visit. Carlyle, unaware that he had the disease since he didn’t suffer from any symptoms, unleashed the disease on Counsel’s land with devastating effects. Everyone dies except for Counsel. Rather than bury the bodies of his family and his slaves, Counsel burns them, along with the mansion and all of its structures, in a massive fire. The only things left standing after the fire are the slave homes because they had very little in them to contribute to the fire. Ironically, after the devastation, the crops on the farm thrive after three years of failure, but there is no one left to them.

Full of sorrow, Counsel leaves North Carolina, heading west. He stops in Estill, South Carolina, and a terrible cold makes him think that he, too, will die of smallpox. But he recovers and moves on. He works at a farm in Georgia, where he gets sick again, and again he thinks he will die. However, he recovers. “‘Make up your mind,’ he said to God. ‘I don’t mind dying. I just want you to make up your mind’” (228). In Louisiana, he stays with a family that offers him a meal. The father, Hiram Jinkins, is a strange man, and the son, “Hiram number four,” is even more disturbing than the father. He treats his mother coldly, as does the father; she says little. While Counsel sleeps in the barn, the mother, Meg, comes to his bed, and they have sex. The next morning, Counsel is eager to leave the family’s home as he feels threatened by both the father, who keeps a gun on his lap, and the son, who keeps referring to Counsel as ungrateful.

As he travels through Texas, Counsel sees a strange sight. A line of wagons and horses as well as men and women of all races starts to appear. “Counsel wondered if the authorities knew about all these people. There was something wrong here and the government of Texas should be doing something about it” (239). Counsel’s discomfort increases as some of the people begin to talk to him. One man suggests that Counsel join them. After they pass him, Counsel is unable to get his horse to move any further, so he shoots the horse.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Namesakes. Scheherazade. Waiting for the End of the World.”

The narrative returns to Fern Elston, the teacher. After staying with Caldonia for five weeks following Henry’s death, Fern returns home. On her way home, a man stops her and says that her husband owes him a $500 gambling debt. She tells him that her husband’s gambling is none of her business and continues on. The man, Jebediah Dickinson, shows up at her house and waits for her husband outside so he can get his money. Eventually John has Jebediah arrested for vagrancy. Reverend Wilbur Mann shows up, claiming to be Jebediah’s owner. He threatens to beat Jebediah when he brings him home. Fern comes to the jail and offers to buy Jebediah from Mann, which she does for $375.

Fern had expected to free Jebediah, but she changes her mind when Jebediah, in a heated exchange with her husband, Ramsay Elston, reveals that Ramsay slept with another woman. Jebediah eventually labors for them as a slave, but he wanders off at will. Because he learned how to read and write, he made himself a travel pass forged with the Elstons’s signatures. He steps on a rusty nail, which leads to a foot amputation. Fern eventually frees Jebediah, and when he leaves, Fern gives him $50 and a horse. He says, “You and your no-good husband owe me $450 more and there ain’t no way round it. I give yall the work I done and my foot for free” (260). He leaves Virginia, which he refers to as a “demon state” (260), and lives the rest of his life in Washington, DC, where he has a daughter, Maribelle, and a son, Jim.

The story shifts back to Caldonia. In the evenings, Moses recites an account of the day’s events. In order to prolong his tale, he embellishes details and goes on to tell Caldonia stories about Henry, again embellishing the facts of the past to say that Henry built the house with Caldonia’s wishes in mind, even though Henry had not even met Caldonia when he built the house. “Her head was leaning back again and if she remembered that the house had been completed long before Henry met her, she said nothing” (264). Caldonia enjoys these nightly recitations, offering Moses refreshments and letting him feel comfortable as she relaxes in his company. Eventually, the two have sex.

Chapter 9 Summary: “States of Decay. A Modest Proposal. Why Georgians Are Smarter.”

The story turns back to Augustus and what happened to him after the slave trader Darcy kidnapped him. Darcy and Stennis, Darcy’s slave, are trying to sell Augustus along with two other men, 22-year-old Selby and 37-year-old Willis, and a 29-year-old woman, Sara Marshall. An eight-year-old girl, Abundance Crawford, dies soon after she is captured, and Darcy and Stennis simply dump her on the side of the road in the weeds, despite Augustus’s protests offering to bury the girl. Although the other men try to explain to the people they encounter that they are free, all are sold into slavery. Only Augustus is left. He tries to persuade Stennis to allow him to escape, emphasizing that they could escape together.

Counsel travels from Texas to Virginia and visits John, who is shocked that Counsel is alive, having thought everyone died in the blaze at A Child’s Dream. John offers Counsel a place to stay. Counsel comes to resent that Minerva, the slave he gave John and Winifred, has her own room while he must share a room with John’s father. He assumes that John and Minerva’s relationship is sexual. He eventually moves out to live in a boardinghouse. John offers Counsel a job as his deputy. When Mildred, along with Caldonia and Fern Elston, goes to the sheriff’s office to report Augustus’s disappearance, it is Counsel who receives their report.

Fern, Calvin, Dora, and Louis join Caldonia at her house for dinner. At dinner, they discuss abolition and the coming war. Fern is upset by Jebediah’s presence, and she drinks more than usual. During their discussion about the upcoming war between slaves and masters, she says, “The only question for us, around this blessed table, is which side should we choose” (289).

The next evening Caldonia kisses Moses, and the following evening they have sex again. Moses begins to think that he will become Caldonia’s next husband, and he realizes that his wife and child will be an obstacle to that future. He talks to Alice, telling her that she needs to take his wife and child and escape the plantation. He tells Priscilla and Jamie the plan and promises that he will join them later. The three of them escape, despite Priscilla’s protests that Moses should leave also. The next day, Moses reports their disappearances to Caldonia as is expected of the overseer. Caldonia assumes the three slaves just wandered off and will return. But when they don’t turn up, Caldonia reports the disappearances to John.

John learns about Augustus’s disappearance as well when Barnum Kinsey, drunk and sorrowful, finally tells him what Harvey Travis and Oden Peoples did to Augustus. John visits Mildred, asking her why she didn’t report what happened to Augustus, and she tells him that she did report the kidnapping to Counsel. John rides to Counsel’s boardinghouse, angrily confronting him about his failure to inform him about Augustus. John then writes to Richmond trying to seek any information he can about Augustus. Meanwhile, Darcy tries unsuccessfully to sell Augustus in Georgia.

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Like Henry, who did his best to impress William Robbins so that he could gain privileges and become closer to the master, Moses also does his best to gain intimacy with Caldonia to acquire privileges and power. But it is not just his hard work that captivates Caldonia; it is also his ability to tell stories about Henry and the past. Although Moses’s tales are clearly fictionalized, Caldonia doesn’t care because the detailed storytelling makes Henry come alive. She begins to offer Moses food and drink, then a chair, and then a place at her dinner table. Soon he is able to reach out to her, then to embrace her, and eventually he has sex with her.

Moses fails to understand that he will never become master of the house, despite the intimacy he has gained with Caldonia. He cannot see the larger picture; he doesn’t understand Caldonia’s point of view—as both a grieving widow and his master. Ironically, although Moses is the storyteller, he does not see how the story will end. Moses glorifies Henry’s character, while making sure to keep his own character in the background:

He went on to create the history of his master, starting with the boy who had enough in his head for two boys. He was present at Henry’s birth, he was there the day he was freed, he gave testimony of how all the best white people stretched out their feet and bid Henry to make them shoes and boots that they could walk to heaven in (272).

When Caldonia closes her eyes, she sees Henry, not Moses, in this glorified form. Later in the story, when Moses suddenly demands that Caldonia free him, she is shocked by the request and by Moses’s desires, having focused only on her own. She has not understood Moses’s point of view at all either.

In contrast to the power of narrative to bring someone back from the dead, the people whom Counsel encounters in Texas belong to no narrative. “He had seen a dark old man driving the wagon, not really a Negro, not really from any race that was recorded in any of the books in his destroyed library” (239). Counsel recalls reading stories to his daughters, now dead, from the books in his library, now destroyed. He remembers the family bible in which the names of his family members were recorded, the ink and thus their names and their story expected to last forever. But these people seem to belong to no story and no book. The surreal scene disorients Counsel. “Maybe it was not Texas where he should be; maybe it was still full of niggers and people no one could identify because they weren’t in books, and still full of white women gone bad and white men letting them go bad” (243). The unidentifiable people with no story disturb Counsel, and he returns to where he came from, a land full of stories that he can understand and approve of.

The appearance of Jebediah Dickinson further complicates the idea of narrative. Jebediah insists on controlling his own narrative, and his ability to read and write allows him to create the papers that reinforce his story that he is a free man. When Reverend Mann arrives to claim ownership, contradicting his story, Jebediah is silent until Fern buys him. He then reasserts his story, focusing on his rights and the money owed to him, and insisting on the payment of the debt as the proper end to the story. His insistence on his story shocks Fern. Slaves, especially field slaves, have no right to a story in her understanding of proper living.

Finally, Alice has used the power of narrative to gain freedom for herself. She has used the story that she was kicked in the head by a mule, and thus lost all her senses, to provide her with the freedom to wander around at night, seemingly in madness. In actuality, she was mapping the grounds, forming the basis for her escape and the beginning of her true story in true freedom.