Since their first meeting as children on Empty, a plantation in the American South, Isaiah and Samuel have been inseparable. Working together in the barn, they tended the animals and tended each other, growing into young men, negotiating the rituals and retributions of slave life with each as the other’s pole star. In the life of a slave everything is a commodity, and when fellow slave Amos sees a means to secure the object of his desire by preaching the master’s Gospel, Isaiah and Samuel’s love becomes a source of danger for everyone.
Blessed be the quiet ones. Even when those quiet ones have no business being quiet at all, when there’s such a fire raging in their pages your neighbours should be able to hear you reading through the walls. This is Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets: quiet and tender and brutal and glorious and you really, really, really have to read it.
I guess it’s hard not to read any story about slavery in relation to other stories about slavery you’ve read. One of the things I really enjoyed about Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets is that it’s a love story, and it very much feels like it’s a love story before it’s a story about slavery. For me, it’s the way Isaiah and Samuel revolve around each other. It’s so acutely drawn, so vivid that you could pick them up and put them in a factory in the twenties, or an office in the nineties or anywhere at any time and the magic of them would ripple out and ruffle the world around them. It’s a little like a love letter to love, too. Robert Jones Jnr seems to revel in the possibilities of that transformative power without shying away from any of the consequences of their particular situation. The author is astute regarding what love looks like, and what looks like love but is not, bringing eloquence to what uplifts, and what degrades. Like any moment of love in effect, it makes you want to pick them up and keep them safe from everything. Of course, that can never happen, and those consequences will have their day.
The characterisation is sublime, driving action and reaction across enslaved and owners alike. Even the plantation takes on an air of mutability according to the eyes it’s seen through. It’s the tensions between the slaves of Empty that really bring the characters and the novel to life. Robert Jones Jnr’s grip on all the intertwining character arcs is tight and precise, and as a reader there’s nothing like watching on as each one reasons through what’s tradeable against their claim to some semblance of joy or comfort. There’s a powerful underlining of identity too, a very deliberate focus on what’s been stolen in that brutal separation from the homeland, on what’s half-remembered and what’s lost to time. There’s a fine line between what’s clung to and what’s idealised or invented, but there’s no doubting the strength of ‘the circle’ and their stating that what they recall is ‘in the blood’.
What I did find really interesting with Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets is how I found myself considering the impact of slavery today, how that wilful dehumanising of black people shaped attitudes, and how that shaped commerce, and how that shaped legislation, and how that’s a bell that tolls and tolls and tolls through generations so that albeit I grew up a working class kid my chances were still mine, and those chances were different to those afforded to many of the working class kids growing up around me. I don’t recall any other slavery novel I’ve read prompting such a specific line of focus in me up to the present day.
Robert Jones Jnr’s The Prophets is a captivating read. Joyous, exuberant and unexpected, relentless and devastating, it’s a very human story that connects the before with the now and the soon to come. Put on your TBR pile, right at the top.
The Prophets was published by riverrun on 5th January 2021 ISBN:9781529405705
You can find Robert Jones Jnr on Twitter @sonofbaldwin
My especial thanks to Elizabeth Masters at Riverrun for allowing me to review this exceptional book.
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