The Prophets

"The Prophets" is something of a rare glimpse into the lives of slaves, two of whom (Isaiah and Samuel) also happened to be gay, and what their life was like within that enslaved community. The book itself is a swirling mix of religion, status, gender, and age, giving you insight into the complexities at play within those enslaved communities and their tense interactions with those who kept them enslaved. And it isn't an easy read. It can at times be disturbing, giving the reader a sense of how tenuous and tense their existance was every day. But then it is punctuated by the distracting digressions into brief passages narrated by what I can only presume are the ancestors. But they're done in a manner that is jarring, given the use of dialect in so much of the book. The ancestors speak in a very stilted manner which also doesn't convey much of great meaning; it is more tone and atmospherics, as though imparting a gravitas and weight that honestly I didn't feel. But to me it felt more trite and cliched and took me out of the book. The book is at time unflinching in its violence, particularly at the cataclsym that comes towards the end, but captures the violence that the enslaved likely experienced every day. To a degree it is hard to come up with something new to say about the slave experiences and I get a sense that was what Jones was striving for here. It does make for a tough and heavy read, especially some of the scenes that Jones creates, which indeed are borne out as historically true. These are things that need to be know and held up to the harsh light of day to expose all of the evils of that era. The largely unresolved end is a perfect metaphor for where we all are; freed from slavery but not truly having escaped from it, headed in an uncertain future direction.

"The outcome is always the same: in the end, death. But before death, the unspeakable.There are many stories to tell."The Prophets, by Robert Jones, Jr., is an ambitious, terrifyingly beautiful book. It's not a straight line, a straightforward story with a beginning, middle, and end. It advances in a kind of double helix spiral, with the entwined lives on an 1817 Mississippi plantation encircled by ancestral African voices of the dead, voices whose truth-telling guide us through clashing spiritual and historical forces awash in misery.I picked this up because Jones had been described as a young Baldwin. Halfway through I was unsure. Yes, the perfectly executed writing evokes the complex inner lives of enslaved individuals and the clenched, nakedly sociopathic Christianity of early American slave holders. The setting, actions, and people feel disturbingly authentic, Jones' clear-eyed detail etching them in my memory. But the way the chapters alternate between the plantation and the quasi-mystic ancestral voices made me wonder where it was all heading. Jones throws a lot of unknowns at us - will they eventually connect?By the end, though. The prose narrative and free-verse incantations of the voices ignite each other, telling a truth too big for history books and scholarly reports. Moreover, Jones recovers a past that had to exist, but which circumstance and prejudice erased: what were the inner lives of enslaved people who were attracted to their own sex like? It's the complex interiority, the full spectrum humanity that was always there but reduced to a cursory abstraction called 'slave' in the White imaginary, given life to breathe and make claims on us, that is this book's most emphatic achievement.Baldwin, indeed.The ancestral voices frame the lives of the enslaved people and the Christian slavers we follow. The voices bear witness to the slaves' blisters, bleeding fingers, broken bones, and festering whip wounds. They don't provide hope (there is none), but they emphatically remind their stolen descendants that they are people, individuals with agency, not the "cows and carriages" Whites try to make them.Speaking in flowing, rhythmic free verse, the voices acquire their own unique force and timbre:"Oh, our bloodlings, beds will rock and it will be as close to good as our natures allow. You will walk upright in your mother’s house!"Canny and knowing, they are the whispering moral antipode, the epistemic counterpoint to the insidious, rusting drone of Christian justification and capitalist, supply-chain calculations that smear away the reality slaves see clearly but White Americans dare not:"It is difficult to withstand the touch of a people who only bring their hands together to sow suffering who treat the menace that they create like it is not their creation."Hysterically desperate for the fugitive consolation and make-believe truth of Bible and ledger, we see echoes of these characters alive today. They lash out as Trump's violent insurrectionists or become sublimated in the privilege-sheltered arrogance of aloof white liberals. Paul's twisted gay son, Timothy, is especially heinous in his simultaneous yearning for and derision of African bodies.Isaiah and Samuel are the eye of the needle through which everyone else's story threads. Paul, the owner, sees in their strong backs, glowing skin, and refined skills a pair of studs to breed more slaves and increase profits. Maggie, the enslaved cook, sees in the boys a kind of dangerous grace, a brittle happiness too easily crushed, but one that, in their choice of one another, speaks to her of resistance. Puah, a proud spirit despite back-breaking fieldwork, has eyes only for Samuel. Be Auntie, the caretaker of the slaves' children, who makes herself easily available to the plantation's men while being too aware of male cruelty, sends Puah to wreck Samuel's love for Isaiah. The beautiful Essie was to be force-bred by Isaiah, but he holds her hand instead. Amos, an older slave who covets Essie, takes up Paul's Christianity in a bid to curry favor, claim Essie, and control Isaiah and Samuel.Adam, Paul's light-skinned bastard, doesn't understand the fuss over the boys' relationship. "His admiration for Isaiah and Samuel magnified because there they were in that barn, dim in the shadows of a truth that openly vexed anyone accustomed to lies." Claimed neither by slaves nor by the Big House, Adam wants to know what it feels like to belong:“"What it feel like,” Adam asked quietly, knowing full well the answer would never satisfy. “To have each other?”Samuel winced, but Isaiah broadened his chest.“Like it supposed to,” Isaiah said."What does this book feel like?A revelation, both of what we thought we knew but didn't, and what we never knew, but should have.

This literary novel is so beautifully and powerfully written that the prose sings like poetry, demanding that readers stop and reread not only paragraphs but also entire pages.Masterfully written by Robert Jones Jr., this is the story of the forbidden love between Samuel and Isaiah, two slaves on the Elizabeth Plantation (but everyone aptly calls it Empty) in Mississippi in the early 1800s. Joined at the soul when they were little boys, the two become best of friends and eventually lovers. They live in the barn, caring for the animals, and together they do more work than any of the other slaves. Everyone is fine with this arrangement until the slave Amos ingratiates himself with the master, Paul Halifax, and asks to preach Christianity to his fellow slaves. Amos then decides that this unholy relationship must be stopped and punished—so he tells the master what's going on in the barn. What happens next is astonishing, tragic, horrifying, and strangely liberating.That is just a simple description of a complex, multilayered plot told from both the slaves' and enslavers' points of view. It is brilliant, ingenious, and emotionally wrenching. But most of all, this novel is a love story, and it is one that first made my heart sing and then broke it. It's a tribute to the power of love in any time or place--to transform and help us survive the horrors of life—but it is especially poignant here. The body may be enslaved but the heart and soul soar free with love.One of the most creative aspects of this novel is the chapter titles, all of which are biblical. Sometimes the chapter refers to a character's name, such as Samuel or Isaiah, but other times the chapter title reflects a biblical book, such as Exodus, Song of Songs, or Bel and the Dragon. A solid grounding in the Bible is helpful, but if you don't have that knowledge, Google the biblical name and you can probably make the connections between that chapter's narrative and the corresponding book in the Bible.This is not an easy read. Emotionally, it's a sucker punch to the heart—over and over and over. But it's so worth that anguish!

One of the best modern novels I have read. All the characters come alive off the page. The prose is glorious with its poetry always aligned with the narrative. We gain an intimate insight into the individual suffering inflicted on so many millions by the obscene mass genocidal crimes of the slave trade! However how the humanity of these people still manages to rise above the cruelty and abuse. The love of the two young men and the respect it generates inspires - until religion and insecurity conspire against it. Robert Jones radicalism extends to challenge homophobia even in modern day Africa. The Prophets is at times very sad and horrific, but its humanity never fails to move and inspire. You may read reviews that claim it needed more editing: so does much of Dickens, so what? I would have loved it to continue on. Let’s hope the end of this story will start another and we may learn more of those whose lives become so important to us.....A sequel please Robert...

I held my breath all the way through this beautifully written debut novel. the love of the two men, the devastation of slavery, the gravity of this sin. a must read and future classic.

Not an easy book to read but does highlight the trauma of slavery and the appalling life for the victims

This book is very insightful and meaningful but it read more like a complicated poem rather than a book

So powerful but, at times, I needed courage to keep on reading. It is beautiful in so many ways but encompasses one of the greatest evils.