ON A MISSISSIPPI plantation known as “Empty,” two young enslaved people work and live in the barn, tending to the animals and each other. Despite opposing personalities, Isaiah and Samuel fit together: Where Isaiah is soft and accommodating, Samuel is hard and unyielding. As Samuel actively fights the system that seeks to bend him, Isaiah bends to survive, even as he mourns the name that was stolen from him. While Empty constantly seeks to erase their humanity, these young men find a quiet peace in their love, which touches the community around them.
In The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr. richly renders the perspectives of the enslaved and their enslavers, allowing for a complexity that a story with a single point of view would miss. The novel contains multitudes, among them a love story, an epic, an origin story, and a spiritual journey. This formidable debut weaves the ancestral past with the characters’ present to illuminate histories, realities, and possibilities that are just beyond reach. In his testament to Black queer love and storytelling, Jones confronts questions of gender, power, and consent in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade.
As the owner of Empty, Paul’s priority is to breed more slaves, and Isaiah and Samuel’s union poses a threat to these goals. In his own attempt at survival, the slave Amos proposes a solution: In exchange for “being learned in the ways of Christ, which meant being learned in ways forbidden by law,” he would preach to his fellow slaves and instill that “docility was treasured over rebellion.” For Amos, a glimpse of freedom means access to doors that have been closed to him. But for Amos to succeed, Samuel and Isaiah must give up their ability to choose who they can love.
Despite Amos’ attempts to turn the others against Samuel and Isaiah, the pair’s love possesses a force not unlike gravity, pulling in those who seek respite from the cruel demands of Empty. While Empty and the world takes and takes of their personhood, the enslaved find their humanity: They find it in caring for their skin, washing away the day in the river, and plaiting one another’s hair. Sarah finds it in memory, a story only she can tell. Maggie finds it in her connection to the ancestors and her ability to hold power over a man by never speaking his name. Even Be Auntie, who has been “molded into the shape that best fit what they carved her into,” finds it in her desire for the men who are thrust upon her. In this way each claims love, skepticism, rage, spite, dreams, and memory.
How can memory be prophetic, Jones asks throughout the novel. There is no simple answer, but we find a confluence of light and shadow, a place where past, present, and future meet. Here, Samuel and Isaiah’s love takes form—a solid presence with a voice, a history, an identity. We could call this resistance. Because despite all that Empty strips away, their love belongs to them.
Elinam Agbo earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Ghana, she grew up in the U.S. Midwest.
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