Just briefly, this is a beautiful novel. It's poignant, wise, and taught me a great deal about a phenomenon I knew nothing about: black slave owners in the South before the Civil War. The issues of social relations between whites, free blacks (with and without slaves), and slaves, and the issues of identity for the free blacks who had to figure out where and how they fit in this dangerously fluid social fabric, were beautifully explored as the novel wove back and forth in time in the lives of the characters. I am putting the other works of Edward P. Jones on my "to be read" shelf immediately.
