The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr
Review by Jess Moody
‘“Your’n thing an old thing,” she said softly.
Isaiah looked at her. “You mean from before? From where you from?”
“Nobody never listened, but yeah.”
“I wish you would tell me.”’
They call the plantation ‘Empty’. In antebellum Mississippi, surrounded by forest and river, this is where Samuel and Isaiah, two young enslaved men, dare to love each other amidst the horrors of captivity, forced labour and stolen heritage. Around them, a chorus of sorts: Maggie, who brings them the food she hasn’t poisoned; Sarah, who knows the old truths about choosing to be ‘woman, man, free, or all’; besotted young Puah; lonely Adam; violated Essie; Beulah/Be-Auntie the mother to many; and Amos, who will betray them to protect his wife and all others enslaved by Paul Halifax and his family. In the July heat, something much older begins creeping into dreams and dancing in shadows – like the ‘finest of spider webs…holding the weight of a rainstorm’.
Robert Jones, Jr’s debut novel is centred on a love story, but its scope and mission, to ‘bear witness’, knows few limits. Samuel and Isaiah’s relationship (and its ultimate test) are but a source from which many other histories – personal, global, spiritual – all flow. Each chapter brings a new perspective: a dozen or more characters each given space to share their unique hopes, judgements and half-forgotten truths as opinions and circumstance start turning against ‘The Two of Them’.
Between these tales of daily life, the narrative makes occasional leaps across time and sea to the pre-colonial African continent, allowing the old ways to be recentred as living and breathing norms, before the horrors of invasion, abduction, and the Atlantic passage.
Circles are a key motif in The Prophets and Jones weaves this within the novel’s form itself: memories within memories, rebirths and rememberings. At one point, a chapter is repeated through different eyes: a rare carriage journey beyond the confines of the plantation told from the perspective of Paul, the plantation owner, and then again through coach-driver Adam – his unclaimed and enslaved ageing son. In later chapters, even linearity is abandoned, the climatic violent events of the novel told in ripples across eyes and hours.
In this way, Jones uses structure and voice to celebrate plurality. His story is many stories: and stories not only as histories but also celebrations, warnings, prophecies. Indeed, The Prophets has its title for a reason. Spirituality is central to the book, used by Paul and others to justify cruelties, by others for solace, and by a chosen few, as weapon and warning.
Jones is direct, too, in his exploration of the relationships between the spiritual and the body, including gender, sexuality, identity, and where these meet. Though the plot pivots around two young men, the links between their treatment and the fallen reverence of the feminine is grappled time and again. The women characters in particular are well-drawn. After one episode of particular brutality, the lovers need help to heal, and the women come together in power: Jones gives plenty of breathing room for this tentative alliance, tracing their communal knowledge and motivations back to the place where women were Kings, and lovers guarded the gates.
Enslavement, gospel, spells, betrayals, violence, ghosts and spirits: The Prophets quickly fills ‘Empty’ with a sense that greater forces are at work. Jones is unafraid of writing in a way that meets the scope of the themes and histories before him: with naked emotion, long passages of direct address to and from great spirits, observations at once shocking in their bluntness (‘let it be ugly so it could be truth)’, or disturbing in their contemporary relevance. The reader could – and should, given the subject matter – be overwhelmed, forced to pause. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t offerings of great delicacy here: prose poetry in daily life experiences, reverence for nature played out in metaphor, ‘tiny resistances’ carved into sentences:
‘White table linen, sharp at the corners, napkin rings strangling, cutlery already its own kind of deadly.’
This is writing which is epic, expansive, exacting. Writing which reflects its own narrative theme and inherited truths: that how you name, and the words you have been given, is a question of not only memory but power – ‘language undone by the threat of violence’. Early on, Amos wonders of Paul ‘what it must have been like to wake up each day and greet the morning with the tongue of your mother’s mother’s mother?’; mirrored in a harrowing scene of the Middle Passage where one man calls out to others held captive below deck ‘does anyone here speak my tongue?’
There is reclamation here, then. In the text, white people are almost always ‘toubab’. We are informed simply that Beulah is ‘now Be Auntie’, a person of two spirits. Amos speaks Paul’s words to damn Samuel and Isaiah’s love, even while he knows it ‘inspired everything around them to dance’. Maggie’s stubborn unsaying of a tormentor’s name has power that is only revealed in the novel’s climax.
What names, then, can the reader use for this debut? ‘Literary historical novel’ is too dry, insufficient, and fails to account for the hints of magical realism, the queering of time and space, and the warnings which seem to speak out to today’s ongoing injustices and harms. From the outset of the novel, only the reader and one other carry the secret to Isaiah’s true name: his journey to find this and freedom with Samuel, will bring him, and us, full circle. Perhaps we should just sit with that circle for a time, bear witness, and listen.
The Prophets is published by riverrun on 5th January, 2020