The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. A Top Ten Contender This Early in the Season

What is a reviewer to do when words fail to describe the beauty of a new work of fiction? How to explain to readers the joy of discovering a writer who touches your very soul with his words? The influences are there, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, certainly James Baldwin, but the voice of Robert Jones, Jr. is all his own. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2203463/robert-jones-jr

In the opening pages of “The Prophets,” Mr. Jones remarkably channels an enslaved woman giving birth to and immediately being separated from her first-born child. The anguish is palpable. Jones writes her shame at having to beg for a glimpse of her baby before he’s sold away, and the despair that comes from blessing this boy with a name that will ultimately be replaced with the moniker that better reflects the white man who will own his physical being.

This child, now Isaiah, will live in a barn on a plantation in Mississippi sharing the duties of caring for the horses, pigs, and chickens with Samuel. These two desperately lonely boys grow up together, sleeping in the haystacks, washing up in the river, and comforting each other to sleep each night. They are best friends. They become lovers.

Their closeness is accepted by all the other enslaved workers as natural. Their relationship, their lovemaking, is exquisitely rendered. The ancestors, shades of black who resemble a Greek chorus, guard them, until the day that Amos decides to bring a bible and the twisted teachings of the Lord into their Sunday ritual and they hear the word “sin” for the first time.

Incredibly strong female characters grace this plantation, Maggie, Sarah, Essie, are all subject to the brutality of slave life yet still could find the strength for insurrection. Jones even paints the evil-doers, Paul and Ruth, the landowners, and their son Timothy, the catalyst for the inevitable downfall, with a trace of compassion. In a recent interview the author expressed the view that no one is born despicable, we are all informed by life’s circumstances, but as difficult as those may be, they do not absolve us from responsibility for our wrongdoing.

In wondrously lyrical prose Robert Jones has created a world of devastating horror tempered with amazing grace. This is by far the finest piece of fiction I have read in months and it will undoubtedly make my top ten for 2021. I can’t wait to see what his brilliant mind will come up with next.