Robert Jones Jr, The Prophets

 

- This book will shake you to your bootstraps, it is so powerful and majestic. In fact it is extraordinary.

- While measured and restrained, with deliberate opacity rather than clarity, Jones powers his prose with the drumbeat of poetry. The style is oblique and mythic, conveying a sense of ritual in the events and movements, no matter how simple and ordinary. 

- But his focus is sure. Set in Mississippi in the mid 19th century before the Civil War he paints the world of slavery, a world of cruelty and oppression. 

- There are constant depictions of the raw ugliness of racism. This is a prime example:

They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy.They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple.They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love.They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.

- Young slaves Samuel and Isaiah (given new Judeo-Christian names of course) are at one point chained and forced to pull a wagon while being whipped, after being suspected of having indulged in perverse homosexual acts. Relentless cruelty is an everyday occurrence.

- Jones reaches deep. In the middle of the book he portrays in detail some ancient African tribal rituals that are rich in meaning, community, love, friendship and generosity. King Akusa, a woman, confronts the ignorant Portuguese Brother Gabriel and his refusal to acknowledge the sacred union of two males. It's a critical chapter comparing rich ancient religious/cultural practices and desiccated protestant Christian traditions. He could see bodies, but it was clear he could not see spirits. 

- And these 'niggas' were invaded, plundered, abused, raped, starved and shipped by the white skinless ‘ghost cannibals’ who were weak, inadequate, pompous, self-entitled men. The nigga babies were snatched away, to be forever motherless and fatherless. 

- There is a conflagration at the end, a reckoning. 

- I have no doubt that this novel will be deemed a classic. And Robert Jones Jr will be our generation's James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. 

- A must read.