The challlenges and the greatness of Edward P. Jones's The Known World

As noted previously, during this period of voluntary quarantine I've turned to my own library for sustenance and am focusing on novels that I first read more than 10 years ago that, at the time, I thought were great works of art. So far, so good - Light in August and Suite Francaise both lived up to maybe even exceeded my expectations and recollections. A have started now (re)reading Edward P. Jones's The Known World (2003), a novel I loved on first reading and about which I was far from alone; the book won a # of national awards including a Pulitzer Prize (and Jones has published since then a new excellent short stories but mot much else, as he's strangely faded into near-obscurity - from all accounts he seems to be a brilliant and eccentric writer, who, I've read, has his stories fully committed to memory before writing them down in any manner!). At first going on The Known World I thought: Is there something wrong w/ me? Or with this novel? The novel is in the mode of and probably influenced by Garcia Marquez, with many characters quickly introduced and many plot lines, set in the past, portrait of an entire community, moving around quite freely in time - in short, extremely difficult to follow over the first 50 pp of so. But I had faith and stayed the course, so to speak, and The Known World comes gradually into focus (it helps that I have been vigilant in writing marginalia and even brief plot summaries of each of the sections - would be harder to read  this novel if it were from a library) and at this point, about 150 pp (33%or so) into the novel, I can see its grandeur and originality: Essentially, it's the story of a black ma, Henry Townsend, born into slavery, his freedom purchased by his father (Augustus) from his "master," Robbins; Henry is smart and industrious and begins to build his own small Va. plantation - this is ca 1840, pre-Civil War - and eventually purchases slaves on his own, infuriating his father; Henry works and lives under the protection of Robbins - a cruel and nasty man to many, but who has a particular fatherly liking for Henry. The first chapter tells of Henry's death - at a pretty young age, maybe his 30s? - and its effect on the plantation and on his surviving parents and wife, Caldonia. Over the course of this narrative we learn about a world that is not really the "known" but more like the un-known: It's still not clear to me if there actually were black slave owners in Virginia (I'm pretty sure that, if there were, that would have ended by the Civil War era); we see a whole community in all of its diversity and eccentricity, and in a world of hurt and sorrow; perhaps no other novel since Beloved has given as stark and outrageous depiction of the tolerated and state-supported racism under which so many tragically lived, worked (slaved), and died.