![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() One of them, Amos, has newly found Christianity and sees Isiah and Samuel as people to be saved. How Isiah and Samuel’s relationship unfolds is seen through the eyes of a sprawling cast, including the other slaves on the plantation, who respond in different ways to this relationship in their midst. Their love is a quiet rebellion, a deliberate choice in which they can, however briefly, escape the physical and spiritual deprivation the White slave owners inflict on them. The novel is told from the perspectives of several characters, principally Isiah and Samuel, two young enslaved men whose relationship grants them an almost Edenic sweetness against the daily terrors of slavery. Set on an antebellum plantation in the deep south of Mississippi, The Prophets is Jones’s answer to the question: ‘did Black, queer people exist in the distant past?’ The answer is of course they did, and in this exquisite imagining, he explores what that existence could have been like. Though we’re only at the start of 2021, Robert Jones Jr.’s debut The Prophets already feels like one of the big books of the year. ![]()
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