The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  “’Zay! Come on over here and see this.” Samuel pointed out toward the woods.

  Isaiah ran up beside Samuel. “Ain’t you gon’ apologize for what you said to me?”

  “I did that. You just ain’t hear me. But look. There. That there. Moving.”

  “The trees?” Isaiah was quick with those words, distracted, wanting to discuss the other thing.

  “No, no. That thing there. Don’t know what . . . a shadow?”

  Isaiah squinted and he saw a flutter.

  “I don’t . . .”

  “You saw it?”

  “Yeah. Don’t know what it is.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  “And get whupped for being near the edge?”

  “Bah,” Samuel said, but he also didn’t budge.

  As they both peered into the edge, what had at first been black became white as James the overseer emerged from the army of trees. He was followed by three of the toubab in his charge.

  “You think they found somebody?” Samuel said, oddly relieved that it was James and not the shadow.

  “They say you can tell by they ears,” Isaiah replied, looking at James and his men. “By how the bottom part hang. But I can’t see from here.”

  “Maybe they just patrolling. Ain’t it time for the call to the field?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Neither of them moved as they watched the men work their way across bush and weed, still walking along the perimeter toward the cotton field, which stretched to the horizon and sometimes looked as though its clouds touched the ones in the sky.

  Empty began to show signs of life as other people emerged from their shacks to look the light in the face. Samuel and Isaiah waited to see who, if anyone, would acknowledge them. These days, only Maggie and a few others had kept them in their graces, for some reason.

  The sound of the horn startled Isaiah. “I ain’t never gon’ get used to that,” he said.

  Samuel turned to him. “If you right-minded, you don’t have to.”

  Isaiah sucked his teeth.

  “Oh, you happy here, ’Zay?”

  “Sometimes,” Isaiah said, looking into Samuel’s eyes. “Remember the water?”

  Samuel found himself smiling even though he didn’t want to.

  “And one gotta think and not just do to be happy,” Isaiah said, returning to the question Samuel asked.

  “I reckon we should get to thinking, then.”

  The horn sounded again. Samuel looked toward the sound, over by the field. His eyes narrowed. Then he felt Isaiah’s hand on his back. Isaiah held it there, calm and steady, the heat from it not making things worse. A moment, which would pass too quickly and yet couldn’t pass quickly enough. It was almost as if Isaiah were holding him up, pushing him forward, giving him something to lean on when the legs got a little weary.

  Still, Samuel said, “Not in the light.”

  Still, Isaiah kept his hand there for a moment more. He then started to hum. He would do that sometimes while stroking Samuel’s hair as they lay together in the dead of night and that would make Samuel’s sleep a bit easier.

  Samuel wore an expression that said, Enough now! But in his head, etched across his mind, in bright shining voice, was:

  Isaiah soothing. He always a soothing thing.

  Maggie

  She woke.

  She yawned.

  A burial place. This be a fucking burial place, Maggie whispered, before it was time to go to the other room, the kitchen that she was chained to even though not a single link could be seen. But yes, there it was, snapped around her ankle, clinking nevertheless.

  She mumbled the curse to herself, but it was meant for other people. She learned to do that, whisper low enough in her throat that an insult could be thrown and the target would be none the wiser. It became her secret language, living just below the audible one, deeper behind her tongue.

  The sky was still dark, but she lay in her hay pallet an extra moment, knowing it could cost her. The Halifaxes each had their own way of communicating their displeasure, some less cruel than others. She could tell you stories.

  She climbed out off of the pallet and rolled her eyes at the hounds that lay on the floor by her feet. Oh, she slept on the back porch with the animals. Not her choice. Though it was enclosed and provided views out onto Ruth Halifax’s garden. Beyond it, a field of wildflowers bursting with every color, but the blues were the ones that were perfect enough to hurt feelings. Several rows of trees marked the end of the field and gave way to sandy ground that opened onto the bank of the Yazoo River. There, the people, when permitted, would scrub themselves down in the sometimes muddy water under the watchful gaze of the man whose name Maggie stopped saying for a reason. On the other side of the river, which seemed farther away than it was, a mess of trees stood so close together that no matter how hard she squinted, she couldn’t see past the first row.

  She wanted to hate the fact that she was made to sleep there on the porch, low to the ground on some makeshift bed she piled together herself from the hay she got from Samuel and Isaiah, whom she referred to as The Two of Them. But so often the smell of the field calmed her and if she had to be in the damn Big House with Paul and his family, then it was best she was in the space farthest from them.

  The hounds were Paul’s choice. Six of them that got to know every living soul on the plantation in case any of those souls tried to drift. She had seen it before: the beasts chased people into the sky and managed to snatch them down no matter how high they thought they could float. Them dogs: ears just a-flopping, woofing in that gloomy way they do, sad eyes and everything. You almost felt sorry for them until they got ahold of your ass and bit it all the way back to the cotton field—or the chopping block, one.

  They whined and she detested the sound. Why they kept the animals enclosed was beyond her reasoning. Animals belonged outdoors. But then again, the Halifaxes were indoors so that meant all of creation had some right to be inside as well.

  “Go on,” she said to the hounds, unlatching the door that led out to the garden. “Go find a hare and leave me be.”

  All six of them ran out. She inhaled deeply, hoping she took in enough of the field to last her through the day. She kept her hand on the door so that it would close quietly. She limped over to another door on the opposite side of the porch and went into the kitchen. It could have been its own cabin given that it was twice the size of even the largest of the shacks people lived in at Empty. Still, she felt cramped in it, like something unseen was pushing her down from every direction.

  “Breathe, chile,” she said aloud and dragged her hurt leg over to the counter that ran underneath a row of windows that faced east and looked out onto the barn.

  She grabbed two bowls and the sack of flour stored in the cupboards beneath the counter. She removed a jug of water and a sifter from the cabinet left of the counter. Once combined, she began kneading the ingredients into dough for biscuits: a heavy thing that, with heat, time, and her bruised knuckles, became yet another meal that failed to satisfy Halifax appetites.

  She moved over toward the front of the kitchen to get some logs to heat the stove. There was a pile of them under another window, one that faced east. During the day, that window allowed her to see past the willow tree in front of the house, down the long path that led to the front fence and intersected with the dusty road to Vicksburg’s town square.

  She had only seen the square once, when she was dragged from Georgia and hauled off to Mississippi. Her old master had loaded her up onto a wagon, chained her feet, and sat her among some other frightened people. The journey took weeks. Once they got past the lumbering trees, the road opened up upon a great number of buildings, the kind of which she had never seen. She was marched from the wagon onto some platform, where she stood before a great crowd. A toubab, filthy and smelling of ale, stood next to her a
nd shouted numbers. The people in the audience looked at her, none raised their hands in pursuit of her—none except Paul, whom she heard tell his young charge that she would make a good kitchen wench and companion for Ruth.

  She picked up two logs and headed for the stove, which sat near one of the doors. The kitchen had two doors. The one closest to the stove faced west and led to the covered porch where she slept. The other, facing south, led into the dining room, beyond which was the foyer, the living room, and the sitting room where Ruth entertained when she was up to it. One of the windows in the sitting room faced the cotton fields. Ruth often sat and stared through it for hours. On her face, a smile so delicate Maggie couldn’t be sure it was a smile at all.

  At the back of the house was Paul’s study, which contained more books than Maggie had ever seen in one place. Glimpses of the room only intensified her desire to be able to open one of the books and recite the words, any words, as long as she could say them herself.

  On the second floor, four large bedrooms anchored each corner of the house. Paul and Ruth slept in the two rooms facing east, adjoined by a balcony from which they surveyed most of the property. At the back of the house, Timothy, their only surviving child, slept in the northwestern room when he wasn’t away at school in the North. Ruth insisted that his bedsheets be washed weekly and his bed be turned down every night despite his absence. The last bedroom was for guests.

  Perceptive folks called the Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.

  Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky. Maggie sweated so profusely that the scarf wrapped around her head was drenched by the time she began gathering the cookware. She would have to change it before the Halifaxes got up to eat. Her neat appearance was important to them, these people who didn’t even wash their hands before they ate and who didn’t clean themselves after leaving the outhouse.

  With powdered hands, Maggie rubbed her sides, content with how her figure—not just its particular curves, but also how it never burned and became red under a beaming sun—separated her from her captors. She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties. For she was the kind of black that made toubab men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark.

  When she felt her shape, it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick. There were only the four dull corners of the kitchen, where sorrow hung like hooks and rage leaped in from any opening. It came in from the spaces between floorboards, the slits between doorjambs and doors, the line between lips.

  She threw the logs into the belly of the stove, then grabbed a pan out of the cupboard above. She went back to the counter and removed the dough from the bowl. Tenderly, she molded. Properly, she spaced the shapes into the pan. Then into the oven. But that didn’t mean she could rest. There was always more to do when serving people of invention. Inventors for the sake of inventing: out of boredom, solely to have something over which to marvel, even when it was undeserved.

  Their creativity puzzled her. Once, Paul called her into his room. When she arrived, he was standing near the window, the sun rendering him featureless.

  “Come here,” he said, his calm laced with venom.

  He asked her to hold his manhood while he urinated into a bedpan. She thought herself lucky considering the other possibilities. And when he ordered her to point its slit at her chest, she left the room splashed yellow and drawing flies. She counted her blessings, but still: how confusing.

  She tried to remember something Cora Ma’Dear—her grandmother from Georgia who taught Maggie who she was—said to her. She was just a girl then, and their time together had been so brief. But some things printed on the mind cannot be erased—made fuzzy maybe, but not gone. She tried to remember the old word from the other sea that Cora Ma’Dear used to describe toubab. Oyibo! That was it. There was no equivalent in English. The closest was “accident.” Then it was simple: these people were an accident.

  Maggie didn’t much mind their brutality, though, because it was what she had come to expect from them. People rarely deviated from their nature, and although it pained her to admit, she found a tiny bit of comfort in the familiarity. Their kindness, however, sent her into a panic. For it, like any trap, was unpredictable. She rejected it and risked the consequences. Then, at least, the retaliation took on a recognizable form and she wasn’t rendered a fool.

  When she first arrived at Empty, years ago, she was greeted so warmly by Ruth, who looked to be about the same age as she. Both of them still girls despite the newly flowing blood.

  “You can stop crying now,” Ruth said to her then, eyes cheerful and thin lips pulled back into a smile, revealing crooked teeth.

  She rushed her inside what was the biggest house Maggie had ever seen. Ruth even took Maggie upstairs to her room, where she pulled a dress out of the bureau. Maggie had the nerve to adore it. She was seduced by its pattern of orange rosebuds so tiny they could be mistaken for dots. She had never had anything so pretty. Who wouldn’t quiver? Ruth was with child at the time—one of the ones who didn’t survive—and used her body’s new shape as justification for giving away such a fine thing.

  “They say I’m due in the winter. Terrible thing to have a child in the winter. Don’t you think so?”

  Maggie didn’t answer because any answer damned her.

  “Well, we’ll just have to make sure the death of pneumonia don’t reach here, now won’t we?” Ruth said to fill in the silence.

  Now that was a safe one to answer. Maggie nodded.

  “Oh, you’re going to look so pretty in this dress! You so shiny. I always thought white looked better on niggers than it did on people.”

  Maggie was young then and couldn’t know the price. How dangerous to be so accepting. The dress could have been reclaimed at any moment, accompanied by an accusation. And, indeed, when it was said that Maggie stole it, after Ruth had been nothing but kind to her, Maggie didn’t deny it because what would be the use? She took her licking like a woman twice her age with half the witnesses.

  Oh, Ruth cried her conviction, imagining that it would make her sincerity indisputable. The tears looked real. She also spoke some silliness about a sisterly bond but never once asked Maggie if it was an arrangement she desired. It was assumed that whatever Ruth wanted to piss, Maggie wanted to cup her hands under and drink. So Ruth cried and Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman’s tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft. What, then, was the point of asking, So why didn’t you tell the truth?

  Winter came and Ruth gave birth, a girl she named Adeline. She brought the child—pale and discontent—into the kitchen and said to Maggie, “Here. I’ll help you unfasten your dress.”

  Maggie had seen other women submit to this and had feared this day for herself. Only with a great deal of restraint could she act as a cow for this child. It had dull eyes and eyelashes so close to the color of its own skin that it might as well not have had any at all. Maggie detested the feel of its probing lips on her breast. She forced herself to smile just to keep f
rom smashing its frail body to the ground. What kind of people won’t even feed their own babies? Deny their offspring the blessing of their very own milk? Even animals knew better.

  From then on, all children disturbed Maggie, including her own. She judged harshly all people who had the audacity to give birth: men who had the nerve to leave it inside; women who didn’t at least attempt, by hook or by crook, to end it. She regarded them all with great suspicion. Giving birth on Empty was a deliberate act of cruelty and she couldn’t forgive herself for accomplishing it on three out of six occasions. And who knew where the first or the second were now. See? Cruelty.

  Chirrun, as she called them, didn’t even have the grace to know what they were, and neither did many of the adults, but that was on purpose: ignorance wasn’t bliss, but degradation could be better endured if you pretended you were worthy of it. The youngins ran around the plantation, in and out of the stables, hiding in the cotton field, busy as manure flies. Their darting, knotty heads were unaware of the special hell tailored for each of them. They were foolish, helpless, and unlovable, but whatever loathing Maggie felt for them was mitigated by what she knew they would one day endure.

  Toubab children, however, would be what their parents made them. She could do nothing to intervene. No matter what kindly tricks she employed, they would be the same dreary, covetous creatures they were destined to be, a blight their humorless god encouraged. For them, Maggie could only muster pity, and pity only served to magnify her disgust.

  It had occurred to her early on to rub nightshade petals on her nipples just before being forced to suckle. Against her skin, purple was disguised. It worked. Adeline died for what appeared to be inexplicable reasons. She foamed at the mouth. But this created no suspicion because Ruth had miscarried once and had a stillborn child just prior.