In fictional Manchester County, Virginia, before the Civil War, Henry Townsend — born enslaved, freed after his parents purchase their freedom, and raised under the tutelage of William Robbins, the county's most powerful white planter — becomes a prosperous bootmaker, landowner, and, following the only model of mastery he has been taught, an owner of enslaved people himself. When Henry dies suddenly at thirty-one, his widow Caldonia, paralyzed by grief, cannot hold the plantation's order together: the overseer Moses maneuvers for a place that will never be his, enslaved families begin to escape or betray one another, and the county around them — its sheriff, patrollers, speculators who sell free Black people into bondage, and white and Black families bound together by law, debt, and secret kinship — unravels with it. Moving freely backward and forward in time, the novel builds a whole society out of interlocking lives and asks what slavery did to everyone it touched. It won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Author: Edward P. Jones · Original publisher: Amistad Press (New York), 2003
