The Prophets

August 15, 2020
An epic attempt to imagine a history of Black queerness from the African past to the antebellum American South. In his debut novel, Jones--perhaps better known to readers as the blogger Son of Baldwin--delivers an ambitious tale of love and beauty in the face of brutality. Samuel and Isaiah are two young men enslaved on a Mississippi plantation known as Empty. Isaiah is haunted by fragmented memories of the mother he was stripped from as a child; Samuel became Isaiah's first friend on the plantation when he was brought there in chains, and their relationship has bloomed into a love affair that sets them apart from the other slaves and disrupts the plantation's functioning. The plantation's owner is Paul, a White man who forces his slaves into having sex so the women will produce new slaves. Samuel's and Isaiah's sexuality throws a wrench in Paul's cruelty, and the consequences of their love send ripples through the novel's vast cast of vividly rendered characters. There's Essie, for instance, the female slave Isaiah can't impregnate and who eventually is raped by Paul. She becomes pregnant with Solomon--whom she can't bring herself to love--and this infuriates Amos, an older slave who loves her and schemes to turn the plantation against Isaiah and Samuel for what he thinks of not only as their selfishness, but their unnatural love. "There was no suitable name for whatever it was that Samuel and Isaiah were doing," he reflects after seeing them coiled together in the barn they share. Jones spins a sprawling story of jealousy and passion that foregrounds Black queerness, asserting that queerness has always been part of the Black experience--not just in the slave past, but the African one as well. The novel stretches itself to the point of disbelief when Jones dips his toe into that African past, and there are too many balls in the air for the details of life on Empty to cohere into a satisfying plot. For all its faults, though, this is an inspired and important debut. An ambitious, imaginative, and important tale of Black queerness through history.

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Starred review from September 14, 2020
Reviewed by Edmund White, This is a first novel, but I hope it took years and years to write since it is so powerful and beautiful. It is an antebellum story of a flourishing Mississippi plantation some people refer to as “Nothing” and others call “Elizabeth,” the name of the owner’s mother. This is a love story of two gay enslaved men, Isaiah and Samuel (not their original African names), who’ve been assigned to look after the horses and who work together in perfect harmony in the barn., With astonishingly real details, Jones creates a convincing picture of slave life, everything from transportation in ships (where those captives who had died from hunger or wounds or disease were just thrown overboard) to the arrival, in this case, at a vast cotton plantation, where they are branded, forced with whipping to work harder and faster, insulted, mocked and, if they’re female, raped., Jones’s women are all sharply delineated, starting with the “king” of a tribe in Africa, a woman-warrior who lives with her several wives. The main women on the plantation—Be Auntie, Sarah, Puah, Essie—have their own clearly delineated identities and complex psychologies. What is unprecedented in this novel is its presentation of the two gay male slaves, each endowed with his own personality, which never merges with a stereotype., In fact, Jones’s compassionate understanding extends even to the whites (who are referred to as toubab, a Central African locution): “When they approached, she had figured out something that had been like a splinter in her foot: the easy thing to believe was that toubab were monsters, their crimes exceptional. Harder, however, and even more frightening, was the truth: there was no such thing as monsters. Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them.” Which is not to say Jones lets his slave owners off easily. They were hypocritical Christians, sadists who raped their chattel, who worked their slaves until they could do no more and called them “lazy”: “They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe.” Whites kidnapped black children and then called slave parents “incapable of love.”, The lyricism of The Prophets will recall the prose of James Baldwin. The strong cadences are equal to those in Faulkner’s Light in August. Sometimes the utterances in the short interpolated chapters seem as orphic as those in Thus Spake Zarathustra. If my comparisons seem excessive, they are rivaled only by Jones’s own pages and pages of acknowledgments. It seems it takes a village to make a masterpiece., Edmund White’s most recent novel is A Saint from Texas.

Starred review from November 1, 2020
The most horrific tales often inspire the most exquisite language. How else to explain The Prophets, a first novel of slavery's brutality, racism, misogyny, and homophobia recounted in prose of limpid beauty? On a Southern plantation eerily named Empty, Sam and Isaiah grow up as friends, then lovers under the watchful and protective eyes of their community. However, when fellow slave Amos decides to ingratiate himself with the plantation owner by becoming a preacher, he slowly yet methodically cultivates suspicion and division, with tragic results. Jones conveys powerful truths with well-chosen words in spare prose. After a night of love-making, Isaiah and Sam ""Reluctantly . . . swept the evidence of their bliss back into a neat pile, nearer to where their misery was already neatly stacked""; the poison of Amos' accusations against the boys ""jumped from one face to the next, like lanterns."" The horrendous hierarchy of oppression is made clear, such as when Puah, a young woman sexually abused by slave and slaver alike, wryly notes that ""Men and toubab [whites] shared far more than either would ever admit . . . They both took what they wanted; asking was never a courtesy. Both smiled first, but pain always followed."" A masterfully told story that will haunt readers from beginning to end.

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