The real villain is the system itself, where the buying and selling of human beings becomes the core of commerce. Some perspective comes from Fern Elston, the schoolteacher to a generation of free blacks, who makes herself available to a historian thirty years after the events. Slave patrollers supplement their modest wages by kidnapping and selling free blacks. A white couple who reluctantly receive a slave as a wedding present are more likable. William Robbins, the white slave owner who started Henry in the plantation, stands by his two mixed-race children, but he is too caught up in the peculiar institution to emerge as a sympathetic character. The Townsend slaves include an overseer who has ambitions to succeed his master and an aging slave who believes that possessing young women will provide his only escape from bondage. The use of census material and references to the views of future historians create a sense of grounding in history, but all of the characters are fictional creations. The setting is the 1850s, but the omniscient narrator frequently flashes forward to tell of the eventual consequences of the events. This novel (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and National Book Award nominee) opens with the death of Henry Townsend, a free black who left 33 slaves to his widow.
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