The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

Maybe after so many times of being beaten in the fields by Massa only to return, scarred, to the shack to be beaten by her lover’s hand, she had finally decided to yield. Maybe she thought she could influence manhood in another way, shower them with a tenderness they could carry with them and share with other women they encountered, if they remembered. That was the problem. The desire for power erased memory and replaced it with violence. And Be Auntie had the bruises to prove it. Nearly every woman did.

“What you want, Dug?” He just smiled. It starts young, Puah thought before she retreated to the corner.

It wasn’t like Samuel to be rude, to say he’d be somewhere and then not show up. Then again, he never said he would show up. He was the only man on the entire plantation who ever cared about what she thought, who really, genuinely gave a damn and didn’t feign interest as an oh-so-transparent ruse to get in under her dress. He was the first man who wanted nothing but her company and conversation, who cheered her up when she was down by sticking daisies in his hair and walking around like a chicken. Big as he was, he never once shifted his weight in her direction or tried to block out her light with his shadow. Where she felt like Isaiah ignored or only tolerated her, she knew Samuel truly saw her and didn’t recoil at the notion of her grace.

Sometimes it was hard to endure Sarah’s truths, as unsweetened and thorny as they were. They had no roundness, no smooth edges, and every point was pin sharp. Still, from every pin-sized wound, only a little blood was let. In the small, manageable droplets, Puah could see the answers that even Sarah never intended to confront.

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

Tiny wounds, that’s all. Better hurt now in the company of sisters, than hurt later wearing the chuckles of men down her back.

“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.”

She didn’t answer. She was too busy cocking her head to the left, trying to bring the imaginary into focus. It shimmered upon fading into view. It was night there, too, and fireflies blinked a serenade. Beyond them, she saw two figures. They leaned into each other as they sat at the shore of a shiny river where fish that could fly took turns leaping into the air and then diving back down into the water. Then the two figures stood and walked toward the flurry of lightning bugs. The male figure, brawny and tall, took the curvaceous female figure into his arms and they twirled round and round to a music that Puah only scarcely heard. It was a cradlesong. Then all the flies lit up at once and illuminated the couple. It was the Other Puah and Her Samuel. She was smiling and looking into his eyes, deeper and deeper, and, to her surprise, there it was. Unmistakably. The door that had always been sealed was cracked open. There was a light coming from the opening, faint like from a candle, but light nonetheless. And the light spoke. It said, “Been waiting on you.”

“I can’t have no weaklings by my side.” “You know me to be weak?” “You know what I mean.” “Nah, suh, I don’t,” Isaiah said. He put the pails on the ground next to the pitchfork. “But it sound like you calling me weak because I remind you of a woman.” Samuel just stared at him. “But none of the womens you know is weak.”

When Isaiah snapped back to the barn, it dawned on him that he had been standing there the entire time and neither he nor Samuel had even attempted to touch the other. He moved a step closer and stroked Samuel’s cheek with the back of his hand, his rough knuckles finding comfort against Samuel’s smooth skin. Samuel closed his eyes, leaned into the rhythm of Isaiah’s motion before finally grabbing Isaiah’s hand and holding it in place against his face. Samuel kissed Isaiah’s hand.

“Sometimes I don’t even know you,” Isaiah said out loud, still looking at the barn walls. “You know me. I be the you you don’t let free.”

“Keep it behind the bosom,” Maggie had told her. “Maybe inside a cheek. Close, but hidden. It’ll be easy to reach when you need it. Trust that.”

She wasn’t insulted, then, by their choice to leave her without witnesses. That would perhaps mean that her name would eventually be lost to time, and the girls who came up behind her wouldn’t have her to show them exactly who came before. That was where the real shame found roots.

“We was always doomed, won’t we?” That was the last thing she said to Mary as they tied Sarah down and carted her off to Mississippi. There was no point in saying the things truly felt because they were already known. Instead, Sarah figured that the time should be spent looking at the face of her One, to study it so that in the deep, deep of night, which was the only time solace could be real,

She knew that Northern ways were slippery and could slither their way through any boundary given enough will. If the North had anything, it was that: will. Loud was what Northerners were, and hypocrites. The South was a constant reminder of their roots, these U-nited States that were neither united nor stately, but were some loose configuration of tepid and petrified men trying to remake the world in their own faded image. This wasn’t a framework for liberty; this was the same tyranny of Europe, only naked and devoid of baubles.

Second, women endured a more lasting, thus a more brutal combat in merely trying to survive men. Whether men had seen battle or not, each of them, to one degree or another, came home from wherever it is men go to be with themselves or to do the things they would never admit to out loud, with the same intent to inflict whatever harms they endured from the world onto the women and children closest to them. Relation didn’t matter. Mother, wife, sister, and daughter were all equally targeted for the same rage. Father, husband, brother, and son all had the same blank disregard in their eyes—there, behind the glistening fury, was the thing that shook them so thoroughly that they felt the need to destroy anything and anyone who they believed could see it: nothing.

Whenever and wherever nothing encounters something, conflict is inevitable. She wondered if the figure in the light carrying the rifle was, then, coming to start a war with her. She took a step back. She blinked and the figure and the light were gone. Only unyielding blackness was there now and, strangely, it comforted her.

And all he had were the whispers without a guarantee to be found anyplace. But the message itself was too compelling to ignore: a man was offering up his only daughter, fire-headed and alabaster, at the first edge of womanhood, unspoiled. That last one she had to wonder about. How was that word defined? Did untoward paternal hands count even if they were fought against as regularly as evening prayer? And what of a mother’s silence? If the hands bruised one thigh, surely hush bruised the other. Children who had to contemplate such things were already denied what was theirs by right.

There. There it was: the requisite undressing. Her words had made them disrobe. They had taken off their arrogance and let it fall to the ground before them. She had done it without the use of the whip, which illustrated, for her, the difference between women and men. Men were bluster, endless, preening bluster that needed, more than anything in the world, encouragement through audience. For men, privacy was the most frightening thing in the world because what was the point of doing anything that couldn’t be revered? What difference did it make to stand on a pedestal when there was no one there to look up? Women, most women, did it differently. Privacy allowed them the power to be cruel but regarded as kind, to be strong and be thought delicate. It was crucial, though, that she be alone in this, for men were liable, even in these spaces, to snatch from her these tiny moments of a more balanced nature in bloom. Men, it seemed, were built for the sake of catastrophe and were determined to be who they were built to be.

“I choosy with who pain I feel,” Sarah said. “Some people pain is eternal. Some people worship they pain. Don’t know who they are without it. Hold on to it like they gon’ die if they let it go. I reckon some people want their pain to end, true. But most? It’s the thing that make they heart work. And they want you to feel it beat.”

To begin, we just need you to do one thing: Remember. But memory is not enough.

Here is what she did not know: She did not know that far beyond the green mountains where the lightning frightens, but does not strike, hundreds more of Brother Gabriel’s kind were making their way from the sea, emerging from great hollow beasts whose bellies craved only the darkest of flesh, dredging through seaweed until they met the unwelcoming rock of shore, armed with weapons that pulled the very thunder out of the sky. A journey so long that it was almost forgivable that their appetites were so ravenous and undiscerning. She did not know that they would devour not just her own people but would wolf down many other tribes as well. Friendly tribe or hostile tribe, these greedy people would not discriminate, could not, in fact, discriminate. To them, her people were all living pieces of ore: fuel for engines of the most ungodly kind but, bafflingly, in the name of a god that they claimed was peaceful. A lamb, they said. She could not know that was merely a costume.

And, of course, his most successful works were the most suffocating: the ones that captured the sorrow. He didn’t know that grief could have such a multitude of expressions—be resurrected similarly, yet uniquely, in so many different faces—until the first time he made a Negro sit for him. His hand quivered and he had nearly missed it. But there it was: wet in the eyes, trapped on the tongue, broken in the palms.

It dawned on him briefly that he had never seen a Negro in the South seated in a chair. On the ground, yes. On haystacks. In driver’s seats. But never in a chair. Maybe that was why the Negro continued to sit: to have a small idea of what it meant to be fully human, to rest a spell on a comfortable surface and to have support for your back. But he got up and Timothy watched him move slowly back to the river and collapse to his knees at the edge of it before bending forward to splash his face.

He wasn’t the first literate person in his family; Paul and Ruth read extensively: novels, contracts, and the religious text that was a combination of both. But he was the first to have taken his education this far, and so far north. He was bound to learn other things, discover in himself what Mississippi wasn’t wide enough to let prosper. A conscience, perhaps. And something less confined: a white thing with jagged wings that poked at his thighs at night and made the whole room hot.

As he turned through the pages of these documents, Timothy thought his father uncharacteristically sloppy: he didn’t write down any of the names of the Negroes he acquired, even though the first thing his father and mother always did was name the slaves upon their arrival. They said they did that to immediately gain mastery over them and erase whatever personality had been brewing on the passage over. In the ledger, Paul opted instead to identify them by ambiguous terms like “scar” or “watch,” so oblique as to be useless. How easy would it have been to write “Cephas” or “Dell” or “Essie” or “Freddy”? It didn’t matter in the end, Timothy supposed. Perhaps for his father, in the case of the record, the name of the tool was less important than its function.

They were together in a way he hadn’t ever witnessed, every separate motion building upon the other to form something that seemed to sway to its own music, back and forth, like the sea. For the first time, since arriving home, he felt like an intruder. He didn’t dislike the feeling, but the silence unsettled him.

If the South had taught him anything, it taught him how to hide his flaws, flatter his audience, feign deference even when he was clearly superior in every conceivable way, and be quintessential in the art of courtesy. This while holding vile and impure thoughts,

In the North, he was told that Negroes were free, but he hadn’t seen any during his entire time there. He imagined that the number must have been small and, therefore, sightings rare. He did, however, meet people who called themselves abolitionists. Curious folk, he thought; wanted to free Negroes from the drudgery of slavery, they said, but what to do after was always murky, always shapeless, always an exercise in inadequacy.

He struggled to determine the difference between North and South and concluded that they were more alike than not, the only discernible difference being that the South had thought all of their options through to their conclusions. The North, meanwhile, still couldn’t answer the questions of who would do the work freed slaves would necessarily leave behind and how those unfortunate souls would be paid once the position of slave was abolished. These men were bad at business, though there was every indication that they were just as greedy.

“There is choices. There is always choices. You just make wrong ones.” Isaiah felt that, just like it had been the fist that Samuel never raised at him, not the palm that had just before caressed his face after some coaxing. The rough-hewn but somehow still delicate hand that led down to the sinewy left arm, which was the protector of that troubled heart. Sometimes capable of such kindness—never forget the water carrier. But also, time had passed and no matter how hard you tried, this place crawled to a safe space inside you, leaving behind not just marks, but hatchlings to be warmed against your will by your own life’s blood. And it didn’t even give you the respect of telling you when they might hatch or if, when they did, the pain of it might show itself in the way you regarded a lover. Or, rather, in the way you allowed a lover to regard you.

“Timothy called for me,” Samuel mumbled again. Isaiah took a deep breath and held it. He let it out. Then, because what else could he do, he shrugged. Silently, grief shook his body. “Don’t,” Samuel said, standing still in the same spot, holding the cloth in his left hand. Don’t what, cry or shrug? Isaiah didn’t know and he was too tired to ask. But he did think about the ways in which his body wasn’t his own and how that condition showed up uniquely for everyone whose personhood wasn’t just disputed but denied. Swirling beneath him were the ways in which not having lawful claim to yourself diminished you, yes, but in another way, condemned those who invented the disconnection. He hoped. Maybe not in this realm, but absolutely in others—if there were others. Matching hard for hard did nothing but create wreckage. But being soft, while beautiful, was subject to being torn asunder by the harder thing. What other answer was there then but to be some kind of flexible? Stretch further so that there was too much difficulty in trying to pull you apart?

Neither of them spoke, but they each continued to eat, picking things from the cloth, slowly, carefully, one with grateful hands, the other with discerning ones, like ritual, but without prayer because they didn’t need one, and respect was freely given. But still, it was solemn-like, holy, as unto a last-last supper.

This simply confirmed what Maggie’s spirit had told her all along. Peace was tricky. There was a matter of sacrifice involved, but rarely did the peacemaker sacrifice themselves as much as they were willing to sacrifice some other, lead them up to the stake to get burned, comforting them as they were about to be lit up so that everything on earth and in the heavens could see, telling them, Don’t worry; glory’s next. Fuck glory! Give us what’s ours by right, and what’s ours by right is our skin tint, skin, our breath scent, breath, our eye blink, our feet steps! Who broke the covenant with creation such that a person could be a cow or a carriage? Release yourself from that low-down place where another’s pain is your fortune. Get up, you hear me? Cleanse your outhouse spirit and set yourself to leave us be! Otherwise, you leave us no choice.

They, the ghost cannibals, had burned everything: Semjula’s canes, Mother’s drums, Father’s blankets. The royal jewels and metals from the tips of spears they stole: adorned themselves in profane ways with them, carried them in their mouths, intended to melt pieces down to use as teeth. Gaudy displays of ignorance, no respect for the age of the items, how they had been passed down for hundreds of years from mother to son, father to daughter, each holding a piece of those who held them, blue, red, gentle, strong, shimmering once, but now stripped of their luster, debased in the grimy hands of thieves, victorious criminals who had crafted great vessels, traveled from the distant universe, but didn’t have the good sense to wash their hands before they ate. Shameless.

There was a line that ran down the middle of Adam. It was so thin that no one could see it, not even Adam. But since he could feel it, like a wire that had been held over the fire until orange and then laid upon his most sensitive spaces in the center of him, from his forehead to his crotch, he knew it was there. It ached. Sometimes, it throbbed. Even though he appeared whole in everything he did, whether he was cleaning the coach or driving it, the line split him in two. Inside him, it erected a border, a wall, that separated his lungs, which had longed for each other but were trapped on either side of it, making breath short always. It cut off his heart from the right side of thinking, so the left side often made decisions without it. Acts without compassion to balance them were the genesis of cruelty.

It was no longer safe to remember his mother. Doing so might bring her back to the same place and in the same condition in which she left. He didn’t want to be cruel. But most of all, he thought that the woe she would bring with her, which could, he was sure, level the ground they stood upon, wouldn’t only be a danger to Paul. He was tempted, though, to take the risk even if it meant ruin. Just to see her and see if he could see his face in hers. The mouth, he already knew.

Isaiah moved slowly toward Samuel and put an arm around his waist. He pushed against him. Samuel threw an arm around Isaiah’s neck. They pressed their faces together. For long moments, they breathed heavily into each other. One of them coughed. The other choked. A sob and its refusal. They rubbed their foreheads together. Finally, Isaiah put his hand on Samuel’s jaw and they looked each other in the eyes. They kissed. It was neither gentle nor rough, but it was full. Something had been exchanged.

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.

But Isaiah. Isaiah had widened him, given him another body to rely upon, made him dream that a dance wasn’t merely possible, but something they could do together, would do together, the minute they were free. A dreadful thing to get a man’s hopes up that way. Hope made him feel chest-open, unsheltered in a way that could let anything, including failure, make its home inside, become seed and take root, curl its vines around that which is vital and squeeze until the only option was to spit up your innards before choking on them. Foolish Isaiah. But how tender his affection.

“When my father dies, I inherit all of this.” Timothy looked around the room and seemed disappointed. “All of it. The house, the land, the Negroes, everything.” He stared at Samuel as if expecting a response. Samuel stood unmoved. “You know the first thing I’m going to do when it’s all mine? I’m going to set every single slave free. Well, maybe not every single. I will still need some to do the housework and harvest cotton, but I know I don’t need as many as my father has now. He’s overcautious.” Samuel made no gesture. “Manumission, Sam. That means I’ll set you and Isaiah free—that is, if you want to leave. I imagine it will be much harder out there than it will be on the plantation with me in charge. I don’t want the responsibility, to tell you the truth. I’d much rather be somewhere earning a commission for my artwork. But my father is depending on me, you understand.”

Freedom, he imagined, could be some fancy thing if done correctly, papers in hand, watching, quietly, in deference, the disappointment on the faces of the catchers after he told them that his massa had let him be a person, finally. Joy was never meant to be boxed in. It was supposed to stretch out all over creation, like the snow Timothy had just finished talking about. Just like that. A burning sensation shot through him. He was unsure how the word let had slipped its way into his most private of places, places even Isaiah had only glimpsed. He was too close; that was the problem. For too long, the edge had rubbed right up against him, grabbed his stuff, and licked his cheek for salt. These were the channels for contamination, and he wasn’t sure that a split could reverse the ailment. He had already been exposed. There was no one to tell him how to cleanse the body or gather the right herbs for a healing ritual, no one to show him how not to be a danger to himself or those he loved. It wasn’t his fault, though. He didn’t choose this. It chose his mother, so his selection was umbilical. And he didn’t even have the pleasure of knowing her name. So he gave her one, too: Olivia. Yes. He liked that.

Isaiah’s breath smelled like milk and his body curled snugly into Samuel’s. Moonlight did all the talking. It just happened. Neither of them chased the other and yet each was surrounded by the other. Samuel liked Isaiah’s company, which had its own space and form. Samuel knew for sure because he had touched its face and smiled, licked every bit of calm from its fingers and giggled. Then, without either of them realizing what had happened, it snuck up on them—the pain. They could be broken at any time. They had seen it happen so often. A woman carted off. Tied to a wagon screaming at the top of her lungs and her One risking the whip to chase after him, knowing damn well she couldn’t save him, but if she could just stay near him for a few more seconds, his image wouldn’t fade as quickly as it would have had she not challenged death. No one was the same after the Snap. Some sat in corners smiling at voices. Others pulled out their eyelashes one by one, making their eyes seem to open wider. The rest worked until they collapsed, not just collapsed in the field, but collapsed in on themselves until there was nothing left but a pile of dust waiting to be blown away by the wind.

This is why Isaiah and Samuel didn’t care, why they clung to each other even when it was offensive to the people who had once shown them a kindness: it had to be known. And why would this be offensive? How could they hate the tiny bursts of light that shot through Isaiah’s body every time he saw Samuel? Didn’t everybody want somebody to glow like that? Even if it could only last for never, it had to be known. That way, it could be mourned by somebody, thus remembered—and maybe, someday, repeated. Well, shit. If their fate was to be found in two piles of dust that would be swept up and scattered, then damn it, let there be a storm beforehand. Let the blood run down and the heat, too. If the Snap was to come, at least they would have known what it was like to be each other, be really in each other, before the brokenness was brought to bear.

This was the balm. And this was the thing that made the ax necessary even though silly ol’ Isaiah didn’t wish to carry his own. Everything was worth it for just a few more seconds of Isaiah’s sing...

“Did you hear me, Sam? I said that once my father is dead, I will set you and Isaiah free.” But this was a trick of surrender and Samuel refused to buckle. What would they have to wait, forty, eighty seasons? Hope that they survived, intact, the hours; weren’t sold off, maimed, or murdered, whimsically, beforehand? Worst of all, trust a toubab to keep his word—in exchange for what? How many times must they lie with him, endure his affections, however sweet, rise with the smell of hound upon them for a time that might be mirage or fleeting? Whoa, then, man. Whoa! “I admit,” Timothy whispered to him, “I have much to learn still. But I know this: You are a people. Love is possible.”

“I understand. If nobody else understands, I do,” Timothy said. He touched Samuel’s face. Timothy’s smile was telling. It confirmed for Samuel everything that his intuition had already revealed: he didn’t have to be able to read to know that toubab were blank pages in a book bound, but unruly. They needed his people for one thing and one thing only: To be the words. Ink-black and scribbled unto the forever, for they knew that there was no story without them, no audience to gasp at the drama, rejoice at the happy ending, to applaud, no matter how unskillfully their blood was used. The first word was power, but Samuel planned to change that. He bent his fingers to tell a tale that would make the audience scramble for cover.

Samuel turned away. He knew that Timothy, in his last moments, was confused, needed to have an answer, and Samuel would ensure that he would never get one. In that small way, this charming young man who fancied himself blameless would know a fraction of what it felt like. Haints did. Countless people whose voices could be heard even if their bodies were nowhere to be found, who followed them all around and would give them no rest because they, themselves, couldn’t rest. The tiny word left on their lips made rest impossible and so they pecked at them not realizing that they had the same question, too.

There was still so much to know. Like where did Isaiah learn how to cornrow? And why? The singing. How far back in Isaiah’s family did it go? Was the kink in his hair proof that his mother was a warrior?

A separation from your suffering requires a separation from yourself. The blood has been maligned, which means that conflict courses through your very veins.