The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

You do not know who you are. How could you possibly reckon with who we are? You are not lost so much as you are betrayed by fools who mistook glimmer for power.

Our responsibility is to tell you the truth. But since you were never told the truth, you will believe it a lie. Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms. Prying you loose is our punishment.

Innocence, we have discovered, is the most serious atrocity of all. It is what separates the living from the dead.

It ain’t no use. No use in hollering at folks who won’t hear you. No use in crying in front of folks who can’t feel your pain. They who use your suffering as a measuring stick for how much they gone build on top of it.

Maybe it wasn’t that Isaiah was obedient, but did he really have to give them so much of himself and so readily? To Samuel, that spoke of fear.

Isaiah smiled at Samuel’s unwillingness, his grunts and sighs and head shaking, even though he understood the danger in it. Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.

He was himself, he was sure, but what had just come to him, from a pinpoint in the dark, proved that time could go missing whenever and wherever it pleased, and Isaiah couldn’t yet figure out a way to retrieve it.

The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties. For she was the kind of black that made toubab men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark.

Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman’s tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft.

And sometimes, that’s what toubab reminded Essie of: children of everlasting tantrums, ripping and roaring insatiably; stomping through fields with boundless energy; finding everything curious and funny; demanding mother’s teat; falling, finally, into rest only if gently swayed.

Being forced to do their own work only made toubab doubly vicious, made them feel unsteady and revealed them as . . . regular, which was another way of saying it killed them. Therefore, they wanted everything else to be dead, too.

womens had to look after womens—particularly when refusal meant death.

Everywhere a girl existed, there was someone telling her that she was her own fault and leading a ritual to punish her for something she never did.

Puah knew that the secret of strength was in how much truth could be endured.

“I don’t wanna be up in here talking ’bout no mens, no way. They take up too much space in us as it is. Leave no room for ourselfs to stretch a bit or lay down without being bothered.”

Girl was the alpha. Even in the womb, the healers had said, the start was there before anything might change. Circles came before lines; that was what had to be honored. When the babies arrived, they were girls irrespective of whatever peace blossomed between the legs. Girls until after the ceremony where you could then choose: woman, man, free, or all.

Girl is the beginning, damn it. Everything after is determined by soul.

Nothing this calm should have such capacity for terror.

The key to every man’s lock was going along with the untrue assessment of himself as worthy.

“I don’t hate men. I hate y’all making me have to consider them.”

They looked into each other’s eyes and, despite all of Samuel’s efforts to the contrary, something opened. How blessed Adam felt to be a witness to pure intention!

Scared men always had silver tongues,

They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.

Do not be afraid of the dark. For that is what you are.

It seemed that it had always fallen upon the women to be the head or the heart, to throw the first spear, to shoot the first arrow, to clear the first path, to live the first life. It was a thing that took much energy and that was why they needed so much rest now.

Woman is the lonely road. It is at the dead of night, crossing through untamed breezes, and off to the side are the deep bushes that separate the road from the wild. In that wild, eyes ever peer, voices ever howl, and what thoughts remain are not fit for articulation. Thus no woman should ever be unarmed. As long as she had teeth, she had a weapon, and the toothless could find a pointy enough stick or sharp enough rock to bear witness.

Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place.

They stood there facing each other, ebony and midnight blue in the faint light of the moon and stars. Their breath came hard and their chests heaved in unison. They were too tired, scared, and hungry to smile, but their lips curled in that direction anyway.

This was the burden of the soft ones: to suffer in all but silence because the whimpering that slipped through the lips was inevitable.

Blessèd be the ones who gaze upon the night and holy are the ones who remember.