This was a Bamako book club pick. Here's what I wrote up after our discussion:
The first thing everyone wanted to talk about, and a subject we returned to frequently over the course of the evening, was the historical nonfiction "flavor" of the novel. Many of us, as we read the book, wondered how much of it was true.
Why did the "realness" or "truth" matter? Hard to say. Someone was bothered that the book made it seem as if there were many slave-owning free blacks in Virginia, when in fact there were very few -- but someone else replied that the slave-owning free blacks likely knew each other, and their "known world" may have felt very much like the world Jones describes.
Of course the issue of race ran throughout our entire discussion. I personally admired Jones for depicting extremely complicated race relations and giving no easy answers, no clear moral high ground. For instance, William Robbins is not a cruel, evil slaveowner. He is a complicated white man who owns slaves, is in love with a black woman and has two children with her, is like a father to another black boy. He relates to these different people in different ways that even he does not understand. The Skiffingtons are another example -- against slavery in principle, treating Winnifred almost like their daughter -- almost, but not quite.
The character of Henry Townswend is even more complicated and frankly he was a bit of a mystery to us. Why would a freed black man choose to own slaves? Because it was all he'd ever known? Because that's what men of stature did in his world? Because he was unconsciously reenacting the sins perpetrated against him as a boy?
Someone made an interesting point here: There is slavery in Africa today, in the twenty-first century. It may not be the same thing we think of in the antebellum South of the United States, but it is nonetheless slavery.
We didn't follow up on that point very much (I think we broke for birthday cake) but luckily, it looks like "Prince Among Slaves" will be one of our next books. I hope it will prompt us to talk about this complicated issue in greater depth.
