The Prophets (2021) is a work of historical fiction set in the antebellum American Deep South on the Halifax plantation—called Empty by the enslaved men and women who work there day and night. In his debut novel, Robert Jones, Jr. imagines a love story set during America’s slave past: two enslaved young men, Samuel and Isaiah, fall in love in the relative privacy of Empty’s barn. But it doesn’t stay private for long.
The story follows the couple through the changes in the plantation set in motion by their relationship. By choosing to love each other, Samuel and Isaiah defy Paul, the plantation owner, and his plan of forcefully breeding the two with their female counterparts. When Amos, a fellow slave, approaches Paul in hopes of bringing Christianity to the plantation’s slaves, tensions peak and conflict is set in motion.
Jones weaves in tales of pre-colonial Africa and Biblical references to address themes of race, spirituality, and sexuality. The chapters are alternatingly titled with references to books of the Bible and the characters’ names to express the correlation between spirituality and self. As a slave narrative, the novel confronts the inhumane treatment and brutality that characterized this era of history. The Halifaxes are manipulative and ruthless owners who act as the symbol of the racialized violence in American history that persists today.
The Washington Post remarked, “The greatest gift of this novel is its efforts to render emotional interiority to enslaved people who are too often depicted either as vessels for sadistic violence or as noble, superhuman warriors for liberation...Jones’s debut novel is an important contribution to American letters, Black queer studies and the present moment’s profound reckoning with the legacy of America’s racialized violence.”
