August 14, 2003

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; His Brother's Keeper In Antebellum Virginia

At the end of Edward P. Jones's stunning new antebellum novel, an artist recreates the book's plantation setting as ''a map of life made with every kind of life man has ever thought to represent himself.'' One of the characters says, ''It is what God sees when He looks down.''

The author's viewpoint has the same effect in this book about slavery, property, freedom and family, all in a most unusual setting. With hard-won wisdom and hugely effective understatement, Mr. Jones explores the unsettling, contradiction-prone world of a Virginia slaveholder who happens to be black.

Such situations did exist, although Mr. Jones teases his readers by occasionally citing some nonexistent scholarly treatise on the subject. But this is entirely a work of imagination. And while it burns with quiet outrage over the particulars of American slavery, ''The Known World'' is a big enough book to transcend its history and geography. As in any panorama of a prewar civilization (the narrative ends in 1861), it reverberates with terrible foreboding.

''Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known,'' Mr. Jones writes of his book's central character. ''He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.''

The author deepens his vision of Henry Townsend by gliding gracefully with the character back and forth through time, from his boyhood to the days after his funeral. It is during the latter part of the story that all Henry has worked for begins to come undone.

''The Known World'' includes the usual and unavoidable blunt indictments of slavery. (One year's rainy slave market is remembered sadly because so many white people caught colds.) But in no way is Mr. Jones's work morally black and white. Racial lines here are intriguingly tangled and not easily drawn. When a black woman takes her black slave as a lover, she worries that this might be miscegenation. Might she be punished as severely as a white woman would for the same offense? If a powerful white slaveholder like William Robbins has children with a slave, children who are also his slaves by definition, what do government records make of such a circumstance? ''The census did not say that the children were Robbins's flesh and blood,'' Mr. Jones writes, ''and that he traveled into Manchester because he loved their mother far more than anything he could name and that, in his quieter moments, after the storms in his head, he feared that he was losing his mind because of that love.''

Because Robbins likes Henry and treats him as a protégé, he worries about Henry's future. ''Robbins had a fear in his eyes, the same fear a man would have sending his son out into the world to hunt for bear with only a favorite gun that had failed the father once too often,'' Mr. Jones writes. Meanwhile Henry's father, Augustus, who became free at age 22, is aghast to find his son emulating Robbins and owning slaves. ''Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there,'' Augustus warns.

Most of ''The Known World,'' which takes its title with irony from a 300-year-old map and reflects the backwardness of such a document, is set on Henry's plantation. When the book goes elsewhere, it is usually following a slave who has escaped. Otherwise it may be moving through time, as Mr. Jones's haunting foreshadowing runs through the book.

''He was standing less than 10 feet from the spot where he would die one morning,'' he notes typically about Moses, Henry's overseer. Moses understands the taste of the plantation's soil better than he understands the idea of being Henry's property.

As events unfold within the tightly knit plantation community, Henry's widow, Caldonia, finds herself pressured to hang on to his human legacy. Her mother, Maude, was not above using arsenic on Caldonia's father to make sure their slaves were not freed, and she expects comparable determination from her daughter. Ancillary characters exist to enforce the increasingly unstable hold of slavery and to behave with a casual cruelty that makes a mockery of law.

In one of the book's most memorable confrontations, a bounty hunter simply eats another man's identification papers. ''Whatcha got for me?'' this predator is asked. He answers that he has a black ''who didn't know what to do with his freedom,'' who ''thought it meant he was free.''

Though his book consists largely of closely observed storytelling, Mr. Jones nonetheless steps back to view events from a careful distance. When he invents a Canadian who is interested in slave owning and who writes a pamphlet called ''Curiosities and Oddities About Our Southern Neighbors,'' Mr. Jones wickedly notes that copies of this rare document were purchased for $1.7 million by a German auto manufacturer with a yen for black memorabilia.

Mr. Jones was a National Book Award finalist for his only other book, the short-story collection ''Lost in the City.'' His first novel is even more likely to win acclaim.

With its hard realities and prescient dreams, with its eloquent restraint and simplicity, ''The Known World'' penetrates a realm of contradictions and takes the measure of slavery's punishments.

''The hitter can never be the judge,'' one character says about a schoolyard fistfight. ''Only the receiver of the blow can tell you how hard it was, whether it would kill a man or make a baby just yawn.''