The Individual Known Worlds

The Known World shows how individual perspectives can vary so much, even in a small uneventful county like Manchester. William Robbins is a man at the one end of the spectrum. He is the stereotypical southern plantation owner who sees no problems with owning people as slaves, and treating them like a piece of property. While there are multiple occasions when Robbins shows his callous view towards slavery, it is quite well exemplified when he bans Augustus and Mildred from seeing Henry for a month. After learning Augustus pushed Henry to the ground, Robbins says, “I heard you did something to my boy, to my property” (19). Despite Robbins’s great affection towards Henry, he is a piece of property at the end. Robbins doesn’t know the names of most of his slaves as well, and they are often described by their physical characteristics, similar to how furniture or animals are described. Rita is simply known as the slave with “noticeable mole on left cheek with grey eyes” (18).

Being a southern county, one would expect that all whites would most likely have similar view points as that of Robbins; however, John Skiffington proves otherwise. He promised Winifred on their weeding night that “he and his father had sworn off slavery before they left North Carolina” (33). However, he willingly sets up slave patroller positions around Manchester, which seems contradictory to his beliefs. His flawed map of America created by “a German, Hans Waldseemuller, who lived in France three centuries before” sold by a Russian best symbolizes his view (174). He knows that it wrong, but it is what he has and what he know. He draws comfort from the sense of familiarity/normality of his everyday life, and being a man from the south, slavery naturally falls in that category. He perhaps even experiences some degree of pleasure from “believing” that slavery is wrong, similar to how he enjoys his map of “The Known World,” even though he is aware of the mistakes on it.

           

Henry perhaps carries the most interesting view point. He is a black, yet being raised alongside Robbins, he doesn't necessarily believe that slavery is evil. Rather, he thinks he could be a “gentle” slave master, kinder than any other white slave owner. It is interesting how he fails to see how oxymoronic his statement is. “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” (64). Even when confronting Augustus about owning slaves, he takes the stick from his father’s hands and breaks. He then says, “Thas how a master feels” (138). It is also interesting to note how he says such statement in a “non-white” pronunciation, highlighting the statement’s irony.

          

I maybe stretching this too far, but I see a parallel between these flawed individual perspectives, and how Christopher Columbus “found” America, especially with how Skiffington’s map is described in such detail. Columbus thought he reached the East Indies he set out for, and because that was his “known world,” he called the native inhabitants “Indians.” Instead of the location of the continent, slavery is the topic of discussion, and the characters in the book offer varying view points, despite the fact that slavery is inherently wrong, just as America were never the East Indies under no circumstances.