Yet the goodness of creation transcends the brutality of the circumstances. During an ordeal of humiliation and physical pain, the enslaved young men Samuel and Isaiah are still aware how birds, insects, the natural world go on with their lives amid the beauty of field and forest. Forced since childhood to work and sleep among the farm animals, Samuel "the strong one" and Isaiah "the sensitive one" have turned to each other for love and understanding. Their embrace of each other is described rapturously, and their relationship is known and honored throughout the community, at first.
Their world is also suffused with the voices of the ancestors, beneficent spirits who talk to us, speak through elders in the story, and who appear fleetingly to characters, giving encouragement and magically healing. The ancestors laugh at our limited perceptions: "You thought you were the living and we were the dead? Haha" (2). In chapters interspersed throughout the novel, we follow a parallel story of ancestors in a previous century who call a woman "King" and who celebrate the marriage of two young men who are privileged to be appointed "guardians" (187).
The different chapters bring us the voices of different characters, some of them tangential to the story of Samuel and Isaiah. Some of these particular narrators were obscure to me, or just not so interesting. Happily, I remembered a famous author's advice (Virginia? Flannery? I forget) that there's no rule that you have to read every chapter.
What brought me back to the novel time and again was this underlying confidence and joy, suggesting to me that Hebrew phrase from Genesis tov mahov: creation is very good. Love of and between "the two of them" is Edenic in the setting of a stable where the stars shine through a skylight, and the maturing of that love under duress is gripping to experience. The ancestors and the elder women among the community who channel them recall the Bible's "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12.1) and the ministering of angels.
But everything good is twisted by the state of slavery. Under the slave owner Paul, love is reduced to what happens at a clearing known as the "F---ing Place," where he commands couplings with and between his slaves, to rear a new generation of slaves to increase his wealth. Black mothers have borne his light-skinned sons, and his wife Ruth also tries to fulfill her desires with black men.
Paul weaponizes the Gospel. A self-righteous man, sure that his ownership of these people is a sign of God's approval (250), he charges his black disciple Amos to preach the Gospel to the workers with stress on obedience. Paul is appalled when he learns that his young workers Samuel and Isaiah love each other, not just because of passages in Leviticus and Romans that forbid sex between men: Paul had planned for the young men, brought to "the peak state of brawn" by their work in the stable, to sire hardy workers for use and for sale (259). When they don't respond to the women he sends to them, Paul charges Amos to push the community to shun the young men. In the parallel story of the ancestors, it's a cross-brandishing Portuguese captain who introduces the notion that the marriage of the two guardians is unnatural and detestable; the tribe laughs at him.
Under the distortion of slavery, the comfort that the Gospel offers is that of excluding "the two of them" (76). During the sadistic ordeal imposed on Samuel and Isaiah, members of the community jeer, finding "some kind of happiness... in seeing someone else being humiliated for once" (143).
Paul's son Timothy, an artist described as "not a man man," pushes the story to a crisis. We see how he found freedom to express his homosexuality at Harvard and imbibed Yankees' ideas about the wrongs of slavery (202). At home, taken by the beauty of Isaiah and Samuel, he commands them to pose for portraits. He imagines that Samuel and Isaiah will both be flattered and enriched by his attention. He considers that he's doing them a favor when he invites each to his bedroom. Instead, he causes jealousy, hurt, and fury.
"Redemption" in this situation isn't going to be the same thing as a happy ending. There comes with pain a deepening of love (215 ff). Without any spoilers, I can attest that the feeling at the end is of a kind of restoration of wholeness in the embrace of the ancestors. There's also an unforgettable and comforting vision of a man who dissolves into a thousand swirling fireflies (238).
The arc of the story, from creation through sin to redemption, is one that repeats throughout the Bible, and, I believe, in our lives.
Jones, with his Biblical connections, challenges us to a guessing game: How do the titles fit? The first chapter in the voice of the ancestors he calls "Judges," as in, judges of the story. A chapter that depicts the playful banter between Samuel and Isaiah, that ends with them lying side by side, that deepens into their sharing painful memories, Jones calls "Psalms." Being the songs of David, "Psalms" perhaps recalls the intense love of the youthful David for Jonathan, or the lyrical expressions of joy and pain in the Psalms, or both. The chapter chronicling the ordeal imposed on the young men is called "Babel," perhaps because of the babbling mockery of the crowd; the chapter that follows in which the women heal them is appropriately called "Balm in Gilead." Some of the titles are playful, as when the throwback chapter of two guardians in Africa is called "II Kings."
Likewise Jones's choices of names for his characters. The eponymous prophets would be Samuel, instrumental in ending King Saul's reign, and Isaiah, harbinger of Israel's restoration through the trials of a suffering servant. If we remember that the apostle Paul was also known as Saul, then Samuel's readiness to fight the plantation owner makes the name a good fit. Seeing Isaiah as harbinger of a restoration is harder to do in a literal way. But in his gentleness, unwilling even to make a fist (145), and in his suffering, he may fit the theme of suffering servant.
The other prophet among the characters' names is Amos, known for his call to justice, and that seems ill-applied to the servile character hand-picked to preach. But when we see into Paul's mind, we read how he envies the black man's spiritual visions, causing the slave owner to concede that black people "have souls" (258) and to doubt the rightness his life's work. He finds comfort in Christ's dictum, "Render unto Caesar" and St. Paul's admonition that slaves are to be obedient.
From first to last, however, Jones gives another name paramount importance. Isaiah knows that his mother and father gave him an African name and yearns to know what that is. We already do: the second chapter of the book, called "Proverbs," is a pro- (forward) verb (word) sent out from Isaiah's mother to the son taken from her, whom she calls Kayode. By this name, and the emphasis on Judeo-Christian names, Jones suggests that the spiritual world of the African ancestors is a reality behind and through the one codified in Scripture. I don't take that as a denial of Scripture, but a denial of how the slave owner adapts scripture to his own weaknesses and desires. By extension, Jones indicts the whole white supremacy project.
In an interview on Atlanta's NPR station WABE, the author said, as if it were common knowledge, that African tribes were far from "binary" in their view of gender. That's news to me, but a cursory look through sources on the internet confirmed what he said, mostly in the context of refuting African regimes that justify brutal persecution of gay men as patriotic push-back against sin brought to their continent by decadent Europeans.
Jones also writes a couple of passages, apt for the time of the story, that encapsulate the mindset and method of white supremacists. When Isaiah sighs, "I get tired. But I wanna live," (301), Samuel thinks:
That was the way of the world as remade by toubab [whites], and Samuel's list of grievances was long: 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.
In a parallel passage some pages later, Paul's overseer James, resentful to be dressed in raggedy clothes (319) and beholden to his cousin, considers the black people he oversees:
They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul's. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn't be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans.
Yet in this same chapter, he recalls his desire for a black woman who resisted him fiercely. How can he reconcile his desire for her with his belief that she was an "animal?" He rationalizes:
The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind. (321)
Jones, building on Christian and African tradition, telling in a poetic way his story from a different century, is also speaking to our times, and to the future.
In that passage of Samuel's thoughts about his white masters, Jones writes
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.(321)
Probably writing that well before the summer of 2020, Jones could have been looking back on George Floyd's death, the rising up that followed, and the continuing reaction of Trump and his ilk. It also describes the racist attacks in Chicago in the summer of 1919 (see my post about a poet's book 1919 (08/2020).
With the beautiful and heartbreaking story of love and a community, The Prophets also tells of racial injustice and exploitation of all kinds, a story that was and is. How can we ensure that story is not still to be?
No comments:
Post a Comment