This extraordinary novel is a very American story, set primarily in the time before the Civil War in a fictional Manchester County, Virginia. The setting and the story may be fictional, but the account of what takes place to the characters is very much rooted in the actual lived reality for people in that time period. I am struggling to remember how this book made it to my TBR pile – I wish I could remember who recommended it, because I’d be curious to see if I took to heart other recommendations they had made. This moving novel is a portrait of life for people who were enslaved and people who were enslaving other people – but it is also so much more than that. It is a portal through time, an epic novel that tells the stories of generations without really leaving the events of a short(ish) period of time in one particular county. It has deeply realized characters that you both love and hate, people making tragic choices and finding and losing freedom and striving towards some better human condition. It has some triumph, and plenty of pain. I thought it was a masterpiece.
The story begins with the death of Henry Townsend, and slowly, through twelve chapters, we come to know and care more about Henry and the people in his life. Henry was born enslaved to William Robbins, a man who very likely felt that he was largely benevolent to the humans that he owned. Henry’s father works to purchase his freedom from Robbins when Henry is a young boy, eventually purchasing the freedom of his wife and son, too. Henry remains close to Robbins, despite and because of their history together, and when Henry comes of age he determines that the best way forward for him would be to also own other humans to help him create his bounty. At the time of his death, Henry has a wife and owns several people. This creates a great deal of conflict between him and his father – in this novel, we are exposed to the many ways that free Black people in decades before the Civil War and ultimate emancipation faced burdens not only physically but also metaphysically. A group of free Black people in Virginia in the first half of the 19th century were as likely as any other group of people to have major differences in their thoughts about the important issues of the day. In this case, some of those free Black people, when given the means, decided that since it was legal they too deserved to purchase other humans to help them build their wealth. Others disagreed strongly with that assessment, and the strife that caused between families must have been very real. Henry’s story intersects with people from many different walks of life, many of whom have conflicting feelings about the institution of slavery but very few of whom have the power, or the will, to do much other than endure it and hope for the best for their souls.
Throughout the novel, Jones has a habit of inserting asides that foreshadow other events that will take place, some on the page and some off of it. Other times, in the middle of the action of the story, Jones will drop in an aside about some events of the past without warning. This sort of time-traveling on a single page happens throughout the novel, and can be a bit jarring at first. The format itself might not be for everyone because of that. For me, I felt that these asides enriched the story – but I could also see that at times they were a bit confusing and made it a little tough to track what was happening. This is a novel with a strong central cast of characters, but also dozens of related folks dropping in, sometimes for a few pages, occasionally making cameos later in the story. This format asks for something of the reader – the experience of reading this novel is not entirely passive. As a reader, we are consistently faced with characters who call other humans “property”, who talk about real lives in terms of their value in dollars – and Jones insists that we see them as more, that we see their future, whatever that may be, alongside the future of any other human being. He insists that the story continues and has value, not what is written in a “Big Book” but something less tangible and eternally true for all humans.
