The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

There is, however, an answer. There is always an answer. But you have not yet earned it. 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. They gave away all the symbols that hold sway. The penance for this is lasting. Your blood will have long been diluted by the time reason finally takes hold. Or the world itself will have been reduced to ash, making memory beside the point. But yes, you have been wronged. And you will do wrong. Again. And again. And again. Until finally, you wake. Which is why we are here, speaking with you now. A story is coming. Your story is coming.

Lies are more affectionate than truth and embrace with both arms. Prying you loose is our punishment.

You like your people. You is like your people. I hold on to that and let that fill the empty space inside me. Swirling, swirling like fireflies in the night. Holding, holding still like water in the well. I’s full. I’s empty. I’s full, then I’s empty. I’s full and I’s empty. This must be what dying feels like.

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. I ain’t nothing here. And ain’t never gone be.

Samuel rolled his eyes. There was no need to be as obedient as Isaiah always was. 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.

When the darkness returned to itself, Isaiah touched his own body to make sure he wasn’t a child anymore. 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.

“I know my mam and my pappy, but all I remember is their crying faces. Someone take me from them and they stand there watching me as the whole sky open up on them. I reach my hand out, but they only get farther and farther away until all I hear is screams and then nothing. My hand still reaching out and grabbing nothing.”

Samuel had told Isaiah earlier in the morning to let himself lie, let himself rest, remember the moments. It would be considered theft here, he knew, but to him, it was impossible to steal what was already yours—or should have been.

A burial place. This be a fucking burial place, Maggie whispered, before it was time to go to the other room, the kitchen that she was chained to even though not a single link could be seen. But yes, there it was, snapped around her ankle, clinking nevertheless.

She mumbled the curse to herself, but it was meant for other people. She learned to do that, whisper low enough in her throat that an insult could be thrown and the target would be none the wiser. It became her secret language, living just below the audible one, deeper behind her tongue.

Perceptive folks called the Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.

With powdered hands, Maggie rubbed her sides, content with how her figure—not just its particular curves, but also how it never burned and became red under a beaming sun—separated her from her captors. She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). 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.

But that didn’t mean she could rest. There was always more to do when serving people of invention. Inventors for the sake of inventing: out of boredom, solely to have something over which to marvel, even when it was undeserved.

Maggie was young then and couldn’t know the price. How dangerous to be so accepting. The dress could have been reclaimed at any moment, accompanied by an accusation. And, indeed, when it was said that Maggie stole it, after Ruth had been nothing but kind to her, Maggie didn’t deny it because what would be the use? She took her licking like a woman twice her age with half the witnesses. Oh, Ruth cried her conviction, imagining that it would make her sincerity indisputable. The tears looked real. She also spoke some silliness about a sisterly bond but never once asked Maggie if it was an arrangement she desired. It was assumed that whatever Ruth wanted to piss, Maggie wanted to cup her hands under and drink. So Ruth cried and 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. What, then, was the point of asking, So why didn’t you tell the truth?

No, those boys risked more than was necessary searching each other’s faces, again and again, for the thing that made rivers rush toward the sea. Always one smiling and always the other with his mouth angry and ajar. Reckless.

Maggie suspected Essie knew about The Two of Them and never said a word. That was good, though, because some things should never be mentioned, didn’t have to be, not even among friends. There were many ways to hide and save one’s self from doom, and keeping tender secrets was one of them. It seemed to Maggie a suicidal act to make a precious thing plain. Perhaps that was because she couldn’t imagine a thing—not a single thing—worth exposing herself for. Whatever she might ever have loved was taken before it even arrived. That is, until she crept up and saw those boys, who had the decency to bring with them a feeling that didn’t make her want to scream.

She looked around the room and then back at the table again. She wondered if she had the strength to flip it over because she already knew she had the rage. She placed her hand on a corner of it and gave it a little tug. “Heavy,” she mumbled to herself. She heard the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs. She knew it was Paul because of how deliberate each step was. He’d come in the dining room and sit at the head of the table and watch her, like her wretchedness brought him joy. He might even have the nerve to touch her or stick his tongue where it had no business being. She wished she knew a spell that could slit his throat, but alas, that would require her hands to be used and she wasn’t certain that she could take him. “Shit.”

Essie felt like that now: dead, but somehow, walking—playing, smiling, cooking, picking, clapping, shouting, singing, and, in the nighttime, lying down—just like a living person, so all were fooled. Or maybe none were because the dead recognized one another, in scent if not in sight. She wondered then what Isaiah might see, if the reason they were no longer friend-friends wasn’t because Amos occupied all her time and kept her fastened to the clearing, but because the living and the dead could never mix without some grave omen coming to pass.

She wanted to know: Did it all still clutter Isaiah’s days like it did hers, both the kindness and the humiliation, each liable to show up in full form at any time—whether plucking in that confounding cotton field or after having found the perfect log on which to sit in the clearing? Sometimes, it got mixed in with Amos’s morning messages; hovering right next to the Jesus talk was the image of James’s grin. Maggie said the way to get rid of anyone from the recesses of the mind was to never speak their name again, not even think it. Which is why James seemed to avoid Maggie wherever she showed up. But how not to think a name when the mind was already so hard to control?

“You ever imagine that? Two mens raising they own baby?” Essie, leaning forward, whispered. Isaiah laughed nervously. “I seen two or more womens do it plenty. Only thing stopping mens is mens.” “That the only thing stopping them?” Samuel asked Isaiah. Isaiah didn’t respond. The baby tugged at him and he broke off another small piece of pie and fed it to him. Then he took a small bite of the pie himself. Isaiah smiled at Essie and nodded his head.

I ain’t never gon’ say this out loud ever, but I name him Solomon because he half mine and half ain’t. Ain’t that terrible? She focused on Isaiah’s mouth before looking at the baby in her arms. He put inside me whether I want him there or not. He come out of me raising hell behind him. And I gotta be the one to nurse him. I gotta be the one to bounce him on my knee when he cries too long. While Amos just sit across from me watching that I don’t do nothing of what he call “silly.” But what silly about me having say over what I am?

Where were y’all when I needed some good, huh? In here carrying on, I reckon. Now here I am, carrying my burden in the flesh and Amos tell me I supposed to love it because that what the blood of Jesus demands. Small price to pay, he say. But who paying? He don’t bring that up because he already know the answer.

There wasn’t much more Amos remembered about his father, either—except his name, Boy, and his ever-stooping silhouette in the field, sometimes against a red horizon.

It all appeared before him in fragments: safe, manageable fragments that made him think that perhaps the birdcage wasn’t so bad after all. It wasn’t good to think about the past because thinking about it could conjure it up. Sometimes, the past was gracious. Loneliness had hands, but it was much more than wanting a steady piece.

His gut told him that they should be cleaved together, smile together, endure trials together because that is how they belonged: together. And there was nothing in The Fucking Place that could ever make that untrue.

“You coulda killed him,” he added after he got no response from her. He had the nerve to say it because it was dark and he couldn’t see her. Essie’s quick inhalation startled him. She must have intended for him to feel the scolding in it. The words he knew she left behind her lips: You coulda, too. The next morning, in the picking field, his hands had curved into the position ripe for killing (it wouldn’t be murder because the laws saw no humanity in his kind). He saw how his fingertips touched and bled from the spines, but never had his hands been so strong. With a little gumption, he could strangle at least one of the overseers, starting with James, with little effort. It wouldn’t be so different from pulling cotton: pluck the life from people just as mean, in the same hot sun, stooping, too, into the ache of bones. What would it be to watch another person drop dead for the wages of their condition?

Once Paul crossed the threshold, Amos knew that he would have no choice but to cross it, too. There was still time to turn back. It would cost him skin, but it would heal. Maybe that was why toubab perpetuated the cruelties that they did: people seemed to be able to take it, endure it, experience and witness all manner of atrocity and appear unscathed. Well, except for the scars. The scars lined them the same way bark lined trees. But those weren’t the worst ones. The ones you couldn’t see: those were the ones that streaked the mind, squeezed the spirit, and left you standing outside in the rain, naked as birth, demanding that the drops stop touching you.

From his distance, it looked to Amos as though it might be a depiction of the Halifax cotton field itself, at high noon, when the sun is at its peak and the pickers are under the strictest surveillance, when the throat threatens to collapse and crumble from lack of water, and yet the overseers look at you as though taking a natural human pause is unthinkable, reminding you that it could be worse: you could be chopping cane at an increased risk of severed limb; you could be at the docks with men who hadn’t seen civilization in quite some time and wouldn’t discriminate one hole from the next; you could be pulling indigo, which meant your work would forever mark your hands as tools. Or you could be the property of doctors who needed cadavers more than they needed anything else. All of that to say: Be thankful that you’re a cotton picker and an occasional bed warmer. It could be worse.

Amos observed something more: how Paul was delighted by his ability to connect these words of accumulation, dominance, and piety in the language of his birth. And not for the first time, Amos envied him. What must it have been like to wake up each day and greet the morning with the tongue of your mother’s mother’s mother? Hell, to even know who your mother’s mother’s mother was!

What Paul committed was an act against his own humanity, and no manner of expertly tailored clothing or well-enunciated diction would change that.

Amos watched as he muffled a covenant with despair. But the sound, not as mellow as birdsong, nor as thunderous as a midday storm, could be heard, resting somewhere between the two, and made Amos long for the old place—Virginia. The longing was misplaced. That wasn’t home and neither was this: not these shores, certainly, but which ones, exactly, he knew he would never know, and that was where the pain was.

Isaiah walked outside. He looked down briefly. Amos could see in the slump of his shoulders that the boy whom he had once lifted up was now pressed under the weight of Amos pushing him down. And no matter how necessary, Amos felt a little broken himself for this.

“Y’all mean to tell me you would have us all beat, leaned on, sold, maybe even put in the ground because y’all won’t bend a little?” Then he said, but not with his mouth: Don’t you know us all gotta bend, got to, if we want a little bit of anything that might be shaped like serenity? Nobody don’t like to give Massa want he want, but we like even less to give him a reason. And here y’all are giving him all the reason in the world. Before I found Jesus, I understood you. I felt the praise of y’all’s together time and rejoiced. But now, mine eyes have been opened and I see, I see. I tumbled for this. I tumbled and I made a deal to keep a small hush for Essie and for me and for y’all. Take it. Why won’t y’all take it?

But the majority of those whom Amos invited in remained silent, turned to one another with a look that Amos had seen only on the faces of toubab. It jumped from one face to the next, like lanterns being lit in quick succession. Instead of too much resistance, Amos found a frightening commonality between toubab and his own people that could be exploited quite easily. The idea that they could be better—more entitled to favor than others, have a kind of belly breeze of their own—hadn’t really occurred to them.

We have names, but they are names you can no longer pronounce without sounding as foreign as your captors. That is not to condemn you. Believe us: we know the part we played in it, even if just through our ignorance and fascination with previously unknown things. Forgive us. The only way we can repay that debt is by telling you the story that we give to you through our blood. All memory is kept there. But memory is not enough.

You can never be an orphan. Do you understand? The night sky itself gave birth to you and covers you and names you as her children above all others. First born. Best adorned. Highest thought. Most loved. And despise not the dark of your skin, for within it is the prime sorcery that moved us from belly-crawl to tall-walk. From the screaming, we brought forth words and mathematics and the dexterity of knowledge that coaxed the ground to offer up itself as sustenance. But do not let this make you arrogant.

You must know that you come from the place where fathers held you and mothers hunted for your pleasure. Holding great spears and dancing, carrying you shoulder-high and celebrating victory. You still do the dance. We see you. You still do the dance. It is part of what you are.

We know that you have questions. Who are we? Why do we only whisper to you? Why do we only come to you in dreams? Why do we dwell only in the dark? Answers soon come. We, the seven, promise. Fold in, children. Fold in.

“Not demons,” the frightened man said in serviceable Kosongo tongue. “Friends.” He signaled for the demons to bow and they did. They were less ugly in that position. The king ordered the guards to lower their weapons but to also exercise caution. With an easily understandable hand gesture, she instructed the intruders to stand. She couldn’t stop staring at them. They had hair the color of sand. She looked each one in the eye. One wore a curious object over the eyes that made them look small and beady. And her initial assessment was correct: all three demons were missing skin. One of them opened its mouth to speak. Broken as it was, she recognized it and suspected bad magic. “Greetings,” it said. “I am Brother Gabriel. And I am here to bring you the good news.”

Be Auntie knew it was futile by the confusion on Amos’s face. She knew men, ones in heat or ones who had something to prove, were senseless. They would rearrange land and sea to get them both to lead to satisfaction when one was enough already. Afterward, when their minds returned to them, the kind ones experienced regret, the cruel ones sought more cruelty, and the two were indistinguishable to her. It didn’t have to be some grand act. All they had to do was look at her like they were disgusted by her for the act they just committed. They get on up from the pallet and walk out of the shack without so much as a “thank you” or “evening,” not even a “beg your pardon.” She thought they could at least act like they were forced to sometimes and give her the redress she was rightly due. Instead, they left her to lie there in her own stink and theirs like doing so was the gift she was waiting on. And so often, she was just there crying on the outside and hoping that what they left inside her didn’t catch, and if the blood came, then mercy somewhere had heard her.

What Be Auntie did know was that one day, Puah would be of use. It would either be as a sword or it would be as a shield, possibly both, but whatever the form, it was inevitable. Maggie wasn’t the only one who knew of the deep and hidden things.

Puah and the other children all huddled even though it was too hot to do that, but they seemed as though they didn’t want to take up too much space, which was wise because shrinking down kept you out of the minds of toubab, and if you weren’t sturdy enough to withstand what their minds could do (who was?), then it was best that you just be smaller than you had ever been before.

She held on to her sack with a grudge, snatched it from spot to spot as she robbed one plant after the next, thievery on behalf of a man who, if she could, she would pluck the hairs from, one by one, even the eyelashes, in the same way.

At the end of the day she threw her pickings in the wagon, watched by James, whom she never looked in the eye, for Maggie, yes, but also because she wanted to deny him the courtesy of her gaze. Her wide eyes, bushy eyebrows, and long lashes would be for her own offering and hers alone. And the only people to stand at her altar would be those of her choosing. These were the things she told herself in places where she could afford to be resolute.

They stood there just breathing and not saying anything. Samuel couldn’t look her in the eye, and Puah couldn’t look anywhere else but in his. Samuel had the kind of eyes that invited people over, greeted them, and then quietly shut the door in their faces. And for some reason, standing out there on the wrong side of it, people felt compelled to keep banging on that door until, by some mercy, he opened it.

Be Auntie told her to forgive them, that beat-down people did beat-down things. Toil made them hot and cruel, but mostly hot, and sometimes the best a woman could do was be a sip of water. That was how Puah knew that Be Auntie could never be her real mother, no matter how many lullabies sung or pains rocked. Her real mother would never ask her to be a sacrifice to ungrateful, nonreciprocal fools. Her real mother wouldn’t baby every boy no matter how grown and chastise every girl no matter how sweet.

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.

It was worse when the cruelty came from other women. It shouldn’t have been; after all, women were people, too. But it was. When women did it, it was like being stabbed with two knives instead of one. Two knives, one in the back and the other in a place that couldn’t be seen, only felt.