The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

We weep for you. You are the children we had fought for and lost. You are the offspring betrayed and bemoaned. The regret, however, is not on your behalf. It is because of what we unleashed. In damning you, we doomed ourselves. First the external war, then the internal one. The latter much more bloody. But there is hope.

She walked through it anyway because what choice did she have? Up the stairs and into Massa Paul’s room to start at the core, as fire should cleanse from the inside out. She held the torch to the bed and only looked long enough to see it ignite. Then she went back outside, torch in hand, and headed to the fields.

She walked up and down, quicker even than her injury would allow, possessed as she felt by something very old beside her, running in unison, spears pointed forward. She thought, What it look like if it were them, for once? If they had been split from their children; if they had to toil for no wages and meager sustenance; if they backs had been mangled for the slightest offense or none at all; if they fingers were stripped to the bone picking and picking and, damn it, picking; if it was they heads that had been placed haphazardly on spikes for a stretch of miles. How it feel if they were under? They might not know soon, but eventually, they would know. And they knew, too. That was why they cradled guns like offspring.

Isaiah exhaled. He wondered what he and Samuel could have been, would have been, if they hadn’t come of age in chains. There was no need for tears. Not when the feelings were still fresh and tucked inside his folds, moist and safe beneath the foreskin, accessible by memory and caress. This could only be destroyed if he, too, was destroyed. And even then, the destruction would only serve to bring them closer, hand in hand in that next place, wherever it was, where his parents and theirs found permanent escape from the people whose bodies were covered with nothing. Not Heaven, certainly not that dreadful place. But somewhere else, where the first songs could be sung without interruption.