The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

You do not know who you are. How could you possibly reckon with who we are?

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.

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.

retreat so that it could protect the body from what it was forced to do, yet leave the mouth babbling.

It would be considered theft here, he knew, but to him, it was impossible to steal what was already yours—or should have been.

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.

When she felt her shape, it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most.

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?

ignorance wasn’t bliss, but degradation could be better endured if you pretended you were worthy of it.

Nevertheless, a snake was still a snake and its bite hurt whether it was poisonous or not.

She would stand around after she had set the table and listen to the family give, in unison, thanks to the long-haired man whose gaze always turned upward—probably because he couldn’t bear to see the havoc wreaked in his name.

Given enough time, betrayal—no matter how tiny—makes its way up the steps and sits on the throne as though it had always belonged there. Maybe it did and it was actually surprise that had no place.

But the windows were gleaming, and the shutters that framed them were delicate enough to make him question whether anything horrible could possibly occur behind them. Would ivy cling so closely to a lover who failed it?

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.

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.

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.

“What I can tell you is hold on as long as you can. Nothing but pain is guaranteed. But hold.” She pointed east. “I shoulda.”

She swayed a little, almost as if this was a kind of worship like the kind she had claimed or, rather, was given and told it was where she belonged—there, in the secondary space where she, due to the curves of her sex, could only ever be partial and two steps behind. Head down. Not a whole body; merely a rib.

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.

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?

It matters to know who was first because it should be noted who didn’t prevent a second. Not that he could be blamed. That was too large for any one person to manage on his own. And death was only heroic after it was done.

Feigning ignorance hurt as much as the lash. It was the pretending that all he was good at was toil, and not the chains, that threatened to break him.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

That is why you try to make home a paradise instead of a place where life can take root.

Home is the beginning of every possibility and here you are trying to ruin it with your limitations.