“May I ask what this is about?”
Edward P. Jones and I were in an elevator in the Army and Navy Building in Washington, D.C., not far from the White House, on our way up to The New York Times bureau. Jones’s most recent book was published in 2006. Why did I want to interview him now?
Thus it fell to me to inform him that, in a recent poll commissioned by the Times Book Review, his only novel, “The Known World,” had been voted the best work of fiction by an American writer in the 21st century so far. (The book placed fourth overall). Breaking that news was not a bad way to break the ice.
He seemed pleased—“Number four,” he whispered to himself, smiling — and maybe also a little bit surprised. That was how I felt too.
Can a book, or an author, be lauded and overlooked at the same time? “The Known World” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. Jones has been a MacArthur fellow, and his two short story collections, “Lost in the City” (1992) and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” (2006, and No. 70 on our list) are plumed with awards and nominations of their own.
Dawn Davis, who edited “The Known World” and is currently an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, recalled by email the experience of seeing the novel into print. “I remember telling the copy editor that we were stewards of a masterpiece,” she wrote, “so to take extra care, that the book would be assigned to our children’s children.”
Its canonical status is hardly in doubt, but at the same time, 20 years after its publication, “The Known World” can still feel like a discovery. Even a rereading propels you into uncharted territory. You may think you know about American slavery, about the American novel, about the American slavery novel, but here is something you couldn’t have imagined, a secret history hidden in plain sight.
The author occupies a similarly paradoxical status: He’s a major writer, yet somehow underrecognized. This may be partly because he doesn’t call much attention to himself, and partly because of his compact output. (When I asked, he said he wasn’t working on anything new at the moment, though there was a story that had been gestating for a while.)
Jones, who teaches creative writing at George Washington University, is not a recluse, but he’s not a public figure either. Our meeting place was his idea. Jones doesn’t drive or use a cellphone, and when I asked, via email, if I might come to Washington to interview him in person, he suggested the bureau, “a fairly brief ride” on the N bus from his apartment.
Not wanting to intrude on his privacy — he also asked not to be photographed — I agreed. But I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed. Washington is a city I’ve experienced on a handful of tourist excursions and 28 times, not counting repeat visits, as a reader of Jones’s short fiction.
That’s the number of stories collected in “Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” books that do for the nation’s capital what the writings of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner did for Mississippi: bring its hidden corners, human idiosyncrasies and deep history to vivid life. So I was hoping for a bit of literary sightseeing — a chance to encounter, in Jones’s presence, the actual landscape of his fictional world.
I need not have worried. As we settled into a Times conference room, he noted that we were just around the corner from 819 Connecticut Avenue, formerly the home of a French restaurant called Chez François. “My mother worked there for 16, 17 years as a dishwasher,” he said — from the 1950s into the early ’70s. “In the morning she would vacuum the dining room, peel potatoes. Now my office at George Washington University is diagonally across from the hospital where she died.” There was palpable feeling in the way he related these facts — “I always think about my mother at times like this, because she meant the world to me,” he said — but also an almost objective interest in the facts themselves.
Jones’s mother, like most of the adults he knew growing up, was from the South. He considers himself at least partly a Southern writer, living in a Southern city. That regional background is evident in the cadences of his speech, in his humor, in the warmth and the guardedness of his manner. On the day of our meeting, he was wearing gold-framed glasses and a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. He was born in 1950, and his beard is mostly white.
“By the time I was 18,” he said, “we had lived in 18 different places in Washington, mostly in Northwest.” Since then, apart from his years in college (at Holy Cross, in Worcester, Mass.) and graduate school (at the University of Virginia), and brief spells in Philadelphia and “across the river” in Arlington, he has spent most of his life in the District of Columbia.
Two of his three books are also rooted there. I’ve written about those before and would happily delve into their intricately counterpointed structure and quotidian epiphanies all over again. But what had brought me to Washington on a merciful low-humidity summer day was “The Known World.”
That book is set in the middle of the 19th century in Manchester County, an imaginary section of rural Virginia mapped with a care and precision that matches the real-world urban cartography of the story collections. “My original intention had been to use some fictional place in South Carolina,” Jones said, “but I had never been to South Carolina. Then I was going to go visit a guy I went to grad school with, who was from Lynchburg, Virginia, but I never got around to that. So after 10 years of living with this thing in my head, I had to invent my own place, and I could see it as well as anything.”
The novel takes in a wide cross-section of Manchester County’s population in the decades before the Civil War. The reader meets dozens of characters, Black and white, enslaved and free, all of them connected in some way to Henry Townsend, a free Black man who is also a slave owner, with 33 human beings in his possession at the time of his death.
“I don’t think that I really would have been interested in writing a book about white slave owners,” Jones said. “I also think that if there had been no Black slave owners that I would not have been able to come up with that concept.” But there were a few—“just a kind of footnote, or maybe something in passing that a professor had said” — and that fact opened up an unexplored corner of history, and suggested a resonance between past and present.
In the early 1990s, as the novel began to germinate, Black conservatives (including Clarence Thomas, his Holy Cross classmate) were coming to prominence. They were among the inspirations for Henry Townsend. “Not only Black conservatives,” Jones pointed out, “but Black musicians, movie stars and sports people. And I said those kinds of people, without political or social consciences, those Black people would have owned Black slaves.”
The point of writing about a Black slaveholder isn’t to engage in a kind of perverse historical whataboutism, but rather to expose the profound moral corruption of a system that held people as chattel based on their race. Henry Townsend does a monstrous thing in acquiring human property, but neither he nor his mentor (and erstwhile owner), the white planter William Robbins, is entirely a monster. The “peculiar institution,” as it used to be called, is a human institution, with laws and customs and loopholes that sometimes disguise but more often rationalize its bottomless cruelty.
Henry’s parents, Mildred and Augustus, scrimped and toiled to purchase their son’s freedom from Robbins, their former master. Their sense of betrayal when he becomes a master himself, and their helplessness in the face of his choice, are dominant chords in the book’s symphony of tragedy and absurdity.
“Don’t you know the wrong of that, Henry?” Augustus asks. “Papa, I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to,” is Henry’s answer. “I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”
For him, owning human chattel is a sign not only of worldly success, but of existential liberty. The world is divided into slaves and masters, and his parents’ painstaking efforts to find another way to live — to be decent as well as independent and prosperous — make no sense to Henry.
I had always assumed that “The Known World” was the product of prodigious, grinding research, but when I asked Jones about that part of the project he had a different story to tell. “By the time I started to think about the whole thing I had 40 books on American slavery,” he said. “And I’ll never forget this: The first book I started reading was about slavery in Virginia, and I read 50 pages. I think I got one or two nice facts. By the time I got to about Page 50, the will left me. So I stopped after that. The next year I picked it up, and I had to read the 50 pages again, and I stopped around the same place. And I’ve never been back to any of the books.”
My mistake had been assuming that the novel, which feels absolutely true on every page, was in some way an empirical achievement, rather than a triumph of imagination. Repeatedly in our conversation, Jones asserted the fiction-writer’s freedom — his delight and also his duty — to make things up.
This isn’t an absolute liberty. The laws of cause and effect, of time and space, must be observed. “I tell my students that this kind of thing is permissible,” Jones said, referring to the prerogatives of invention, “as long as you don’t have someone walking down the road in 1855 wearing a Rolex watch.”
“Another thing that I tell students,” he continued, “is that 5,000 years ago, people were doing awful things, and they’re doing awful things now, and 5,000 years from now they’ll still be doing awful things, if people are still around. People don’t change, so as long as you can zero in and get the emotion right, then you can throw in all the other stuff, and you don’t need to do a lot of research.”
Not that the contemplation of human awfulness is the whole of the job. The people in “The Known World” can be tender, brave and silly, qualities of the species that have also endured for thousands of years. What remains startling — what may explain the book’s enduring power more than anything else — is their vividness and variety.
The book took shape in Jones’s mind long before it emerged on the page. When I asked him, at the end of our conversation, about his writing process, he said he didn’t have one: “I do a lot of things in my head, and I haven’t done anything for a while. The hope is, once I get back to it, I just sit down and start working.” I look forward to that, and in the meantime, I will continue to marvel at the work he has already done.
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