Jones’ story of the fictional ante-bellum Virginia county of Manchester is entirely facinating, both for the tale told and the manner of its telling. I call this a county’s story because there is no clear protagonist. Some characters and settings are more central than others, but it’s an ensemble cast, with Manchester County their point of commonality.

There are a few central white characters—the county’s richest man and its sheriff being the most notable—but most are black. Some of the black characters are slaves, but just as many are free. Of the free blacks, several are slaveowners themselves.

A brief aside: I arrived at the University of California, Irvine, just as Professor Michael Johnson (now at Johns Hopkins University) was publishing his seminal work, Black Masters. Since then, historians have published a variety of studies on black slaveholders, but back in 1986 this was pretty new territory for me.

In any event, Jones is undoubtedly indebted to this historiography, and he’s able to portray the uneasy relationship between free (and sometimes wealthy) blacks and white society quite convincingly. With more subtlety, but with no less conviction, Jones also paints a complex picture of the relationships between black slaves, black masters, poorer whites, and powerful whites. That he's able to allow his characters to live in this very real-feeling world is a testament to Jones’ skill as a writer of fiction.

Just as facinating is the story’s narrator, for whom time is no obstacle. The past, present, and future are all known to the narrator, and he (assuming here the masculine as a nod to the author) will often leap years, even decades, into the past or future to fill out a character’s life story. The effect is almost like that of reading a hyperlinked document, using links to insert not so much footnotes as interludes. One slave, first introduced to readers as a hothead going nowhere fast, gets such a zoom forward, to a future when he is a philanthropist and strong family man. The effect is dizzying, even as it humanizes and rounds out the characters in an extraordinary and unique way.