The Law’s Business: Peculiar Profits in Edward Jones’s The Known World

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines Edward Jones’s radical historiography in The Known World (2003), specifically how he represents law as a mercurial, illogical, and generative force in the workings of American slavery. Centrally, Jones highlights the viability and profitability of the American nineteenth-century legal system’s absurdities. The essay extends current scholarship to reckon with a central tension in Jones’s novel: his linking of the quotidian with the bizarre. Jones’s understated realism is, paradoxically, rife with freakish phenomenon, from two-headed chickens to cannibalistic lawmen, and his juxtaposition of the commonplace and the freakish compels readers to recognize the absurd and potent powers of American slave law. Beginning with Jones’s anachronistic reference to a historian and a local story of two-headed chickens, the essay shows how conjoined entities and other anomalous phenomenon in Jones’s novel enable three key historiographic interventions. First, the symbol of conjoined entities connects with the dual and dysfunctional status of slaves before the law—namely, a slave’s legal identity as coexistent person and property. Second, “two-headedness” serves as means to interrogate the mental acrobatics necessitated by antebellum law. Specifically, Jones creates an intensely ambivalent officer of the law—a sheriff of two minds, I argue—to explore the psychological exertions needed to administer a nonsensical legal paradigm. Finally, and most importantly, Jones’s metaphors of conjoined entities illuminate the interconnected, interdependent workings of law and economics in fictional Manchester County, Virginia. Two-headed chickens link with a far more profitable conjoining in American history—namely, what Jones calls “the law’s business” in slavery.