The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

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.

Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place.

Nearly twenty years old now and so much had remained unspoken between them. To leave it in the silence was the only way it could be and not break a spirit in half.

Who, after all, was foolish enough to show wounds to folks who wanted to stick their mouth-sucked fingers into them?

The quiet was mutual, not so much agreed upon as inherited; safe, but containing the ability to cause great destruction.

He thought that maybe this was the witlessness that he saw take hold of a person, because the plantation could do that—make the mind retreat so that it could protect the body from what it was forced to do, yet leave the mouth babbling.

She could keep passing her misery back onto its source. Maybe that could be a mending.

People liked pride. Mistook it for purpose.

She found herself molded into the shape that best fit what they carved her into. Water done wore away at her stone, and the next thing she knew, she was a damn river when she could have sworn she was a mountain.

In the corners of her eyes, the only thing that threatened to form, ever, was anger. But in the shape of her body, which marked her as vulnerable from every direction, with danger lurking in the company of anybody, she kept her vengeance pillowed and well blanketed in the nest of her soul.

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 hadn’t always been this way. Blood memory confirmed this and women were the bearers of the blood.

Maybe Be Auntie had no choice. 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.

was particularly struck by Samuel’s tone: not exactly coarse, but definitely the sound of a man who had been thinking about it, had allowed it to roll around his head, and in his mouth, had grown tired of keeping it locked away in his chest, and could only find reprieve in its release.

“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.”

What she knew for certain was that being in open nature was where she felt most like she was a whole body and not just a stolen piece.

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.

Failure of memory prevented the empathy that should have been natural. Samuel knew, though, that it was selective memory, the kind that was cultivated here among the forget-me-nots.

See? That was why she didn’t like children. Their very existence foretold. They were walking warnings of the impending devastation. They were the you before you knew misery would be your portion. She was dreading having to be a witness yet again, a healer yet again. Damn it all!

She ignored the pain in her hip in favor of theirs. That couldn’t become habit.

“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.”

“This ain’t your disgrace,” Maggie assured him. “This belong to someone else.”

Yet, do not imagine that royal blood is of any significant import. It is not. Often, it is the most impure, arriving at its creation through vanity and more than a little cruelty.

You are of the common folk. By common we mean dancing, singing, weaving, speaking: the ones who could have held their heads high but chose to hold their hands high instead. For they knew that all the universe wanted was their reverence, not their pride.

Pride is what leads people onto ships, across seas, into forbidden lands. It is what allows them to desecrate forbidden bodies and stamp them with the names of reckless gods. Pride is at once haunted and unbothered by ...

Fierceness should always be tempered with kindness; that was wisdom.

These colorless people had the strangest system of grouping things together by what they did not understand rather than by what they did.

was humorous to observe someone who did not know the terrain but refused to admit it, stumbling around, bumping into trees, then asking who put them in their path so suddenly.

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.

No Kosongo elder magic or ancestral intervention could turn a woman into an animal, but these Portuguese, she would soon discover, had access to all manner of craft that was remarkably tailored for performing just such a feat.

She did not know that she would not get to hear the skinless curse one another because they wanted to take her alive, but in all her glory she denied them the chance to desecrate her with future abuses, ones that she would have had to be living—and screaming—for them to gratify. Instead, she, unbeknownst to her, would only give them eternal silence, which was, in its way, victory. In the spite of their defeat, they would ravage her children instead, to whom she could offer no solace. But the not knowing, here, would be a wondrous thing. King or not, what mother should live to see her children spiked and mounted?

“Don’t be mad. Never mind what I say ’bout Puah. I . . . I didn’t wanna die. To you, I freely come.”

Shame was a sturdy master with strong legs and clinging embrace.

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.

You sought the nature of something that occurred by accident so has no nature at all. Things without a nature always seek one, you see, and can only obtain one through plunder and then consumption. They have a name. They all have a name: Separation.

He was forbidden from engaging in the practices that drew him away from his people and into the lair of his demise, but he was arrogant and refused to heed the warnings. He took women and subjected them to things without their consent. These were among the very first rapes. Born of these colossal blasphemies were children without our marks upon them. This was not their fault, but the blight was undeniable. As horrific as all of that was, that was not even the difficult part. The difficult part was in realizing that all abandoned children seek vengeance. And most will have it.

They were each leaving footprints on a shore he knew none of them would ever see again, and the womb water wouldn’t even give them the decency to leave their footprints untouched so that the land would always remember the shape of its children.

“My son, some people’s hearts, they just . . .” He pressed Kosii’s hands against his chest. “They just beat the wrong way.”

“This is everything,” Jonah said, looking out at the land that was his because—because God willed it.

His parents were comfortable; they had provided him a decent life and he couldn’t remember a single hungry day. But they were never this, not even with full access to the law of the land—and beyond the law, the very ethos of it—that said, No one can stop you; take as much as you damn well please!

Would it have been astute to point out that the expanse of the land itself—which stretched from river to woods, from sunup to sundown—was living proof of his righteousness? That ownership was assuredly confirmation? Of what? Of things being precisely the way they were supposed to be.

He had cultivated the most curious art form, and Paul was, in spite of himself, impressed by the divine hand his son showed. But that was just it: there was no mention of God. And there was no veil upon him that might have evinced contemplation of such matters. The North had done its job, perhaps too well.

Not that Timothy didn’t already have sisters, but he meant one whom he and Ruth could claim; whose skin was not tainted, not even a little; who sprang out of love, not economy.

He wouldn’t question God’s will, for it was almighty; anyone who knew Him knew that. And there was a crown for anyone who let that knowledge be his portion. Yes, then, he conceded. Niggers had souls. Which, in itself, introduced new troubles. If slaves had souls, if they were more than beasts over which he and every other man had godly claim, then what did it mean to punish them, and often so severely? Was their toil in the cotton fields on Paul’s behalf also the wages of his visited sin? He returned to the Word and was comforted. For God had said, plain and clear, render unto Caesar, first, and, also, slaves shall be obedient in order to one day find reparation in that exquisite cotton plantation in the sky. The clouds were evidence.

To bring things forth from the abyss was no easy task. The land had its own mind. So did niggers. Only by wresting the control either believed they had from their hands with yours—and more than hands, will—could you claim ownership over things that imagined themselves free.

Before him stood a creature who, under all the grime and drenched in the smell of grudge work, imagined itself possessing a glimmer of worthiness. This was vanity and it explained so many things.

He took the ladle from Samuel and sipped, secure in the knowledge he held in both hands. He wasn’t thirsty, but it was necessary for them to see how elementary his power was, that there was no need to raise voices or hands and yet, with only a few words, reality had knelt to his bidding, and so simply, illustrating the only order under which it could function. He smiled.

“Bleeding is so easy. The body gives up its secrets at the slightest provocation. Man is only separated from the rest of nature by his mind, his ability to know, even if that knowing was born in sin,”

Acts without compassion to balance them were the genesis of cruelty.

If they noticed him now, barely able to hold his head up straight because the night struck him, they would say niggers were lazy, but they would be incorrect. Niggers weren’t lazy; niggers were tired. Bone tired. And when they finally weren’t anymore: fire.

Adam thought his entire life a gamble. His freedom or captivity reliant upon something as fragile as which toubab parent was shameless.