The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  Essie refocused her eyes on Isaiah and Samuel. Samuel looked at Isaiah.

  “I told you,” said Samuel.

  Isaiah didn’t respond. He looked down at Solomon sitting in his lap. “Not doing what you should be,” he whispered. He smiled at Solomon, raised him in the air, which made the baby kick and giggle and chew on his own hand. Then he brought him back down and looked over at Samuel.

  “Sorry,” Isaiah said, still whispering.

  Samuel shook his head and moved deeper into the barn. In front of the horse pens, he lifted himself up on his toes, calves taut, ass high, and arms outstretched like he was reaching for something that he knew he couldn’t reach.

  Essie looked at Isaiah. “What he doing?” she asked quietly.

  “This place too small,” Isaiah said, his eyes trained on Samuel’s back.

  “Oh,” she said, interpreting “this place” as “this life.”

  Essie smiled anxiously. She looked at Samuel’s back. She had been sent to make an opening but had only succeeded in making the pursued retreat even farther in. She got up from the stool and stuck out her arms to take Solomon back from Isaiah.

  “I hold him,” Isaiah said as he stood with the baby. “I walk y’all to the door.”

  They moved slowly. “I almost don’t wanna put him down,” Isaiah said.

  “I don’t know that feeling,” Essie replied before stretching out her arms for the baby just as they reached the frame of the door.

  “Listen. Isaiah. Come on by. Make your case. He ain’t finna listen. But . . .”

  She looked at them, Samuel’s back and Isaiah’s face, tilted back as though signaling his openness to receive glory. Her lips parted, but the words remained on her tongue.

  I ain’t never gon’ say this out loud ever, but I name him Solomon because he half mine and half ain’t. Ain’t that terrible?

  She focused on Isaiah’s mouth before looking at the baby in her arms. He put inside me whether I want him there or not. He come out of me raising hell behind him. And I gotta be the one to nurse him. I gotta be the one to bounce him on my knee when he cries too long. While Amos just sit across from me watching that I don’t do nothing of what he call “silly.” But what silly about me having say over what I am?

  Essie stepped outside. She saw the pigs in their pen and it was the first time that she ever noticed that they were the same kind of pale as Solomon. She heard Amos’s voice: “But the fence, Essie. Remember the fence!”

  What for? she thought. ’Cause it lets the things through anyway. ’Cause wood rots. And fences come down. All you need is a bad storm. And ain’t that where they come from to begin with? Ain’t the truth right there in the way they spin and destroy everything that get any kind of close to them? Ain’t they just creek waters God willing to rise?

  Essie turned away from the pens and began walking slowly toward the gate. I came here with a pie I didn’t wanna make because Amos is the best I can do. He see me. Don’t you understand?

  She turned back to look at Isaiah and Samuel, who hadn’t yet moved from their spots. Amos make a bargain, even if in his own head, that so far hold up and I won’t let that just fall apart and become broodmare again. Where were y’all when I needed some good, huh? In here carrying on, I reckon. Now here I am, carrying my burden in the flesh and Amos tell me I supposed to love it because that what the blood of Jesus demands. Small price to pay, he say. But who paying? He don’t bring that up because he already know the answer.

  Solomon looked up at Essie as the tears began to form in her eyes. She wiped them away quickly. She blinked and came back to herself.

  “Y’all be good now,” she yelled out as she began to step backward.

  Isaiah waved. Samuel stood motionless, transfixed, a humming in the air that seemed to come from both him and not him, which frightened her. She turned and walked toward the gate and stood briefly at its opening. It framed her like a picture and continued to do so until she walked beyond it and headed due north.

  Amos

  Amos had seen strange things before: living babies retrieved from the taut-faced corpses of their mothers; beat-down men talking out loud to shadows; bodies swinging high from trees. One body in particular was that of a man named Gabriel, a friend of Amos’s father. There wasn’t much he remembered about Gabriel; it was, after all, so long ago. There wasn’t much more Amos remembered about his father, either—except his name, Boy, and his ever-stooping silhouette in the field, sometimes against a red horizon.

  But what remained clear about Gabriel was the missing thing: a bloody, discarded clump at the base of the tree. Amos cursed himself even now for mistaking it for rotten fruit, for wanting to claim it for his mother so that she could use it for jam or a pie. To this very day, the thought of what might have happened made him grab himself and wince.

  He arrived at Empty full-grown with his head fastened inside something that looked almost like a rusty birdcage because a toubab woman in Virginia said something untrue, and death was too expensive. With no space to fly, the bars sliced his vision to pieces, permitted him to see only in thin slices. A smiling face here, a sobbing one there, but he couldn’t put it all together for the obstacles in between. Coming down off that creaking wagon, shackled to twenty other people, holding up a boy because he made his mother a passing promise. The metal chains roared as they slid from wood to dust, heavy feet stirring up orange clouds that made them all cough as they were rushed onto a patch of land and then, in the morning, out to the cotton field. It all appeared before him in fragments: safe, manageable fragments that made him think that perhaps the birdcage wasn’t so bad after all. It wasn’t good to think about the past because thinking about it could conjure it up. Sometimes, the past was gracious. Loneliness had hands, but it was much more than wanting a steady piece. Piece wasn’t even on his mind when he first saw Essie in the field, crouched and sweating, a scarf holding her hair up like a hill. His gut told him that they should be cleaved together, smile together, endure trials together because that is how they belonged: together. And there was nothing in The Fucking Place that could ever make that untrue. So when Paul chose him out of the nine lined up, Amos knew it was a sign.

  Amos sighed. He had seen strange things, so he closed his eyes. The first time Paul demanded Essie, Amos pleaded until he was hoarse, promised unthinkable favors that only managed to make Paul angry. It was only after Paul threatened to whip him that Amos became silent. He didn’t think of that as cowardice, just futility. When Paul finally took Essie and left, Amos choked on her quiet obedience, stumbled over the impasse. He imagined actions that he knew he could never indulge in without great cost, and not just to himself. Breaking Paul’s bones would have been simple, but grinding them into dust for the paste that Amos would smear on his own face for the dance, shaking a staff, and calling out forgotten words to ancestors who he wasn’t exactly sure could hear: that would be the hard part because there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t remain alone.

  He sat in that dark shack for hours. He saw the darkness turn in upon itself, churn, and spasm. He watched it reach out for him, felt it first caress, then clutch and fondle him. When Essie finally returned—eyes bruised, hair awry, limbs weary, bleeding, and missing something—he wanted to handle her like he would a newborn. Instead he whispered to her viciously against his better judgment. He couldn’t help it. She had become a looking glass for his incompetence and he had no courage to place the blame where it actually belonged.

  “They earlobes always tell their intentions. I don’t know why, they just do,” Amos said as though it mattered. Spoken like a true fool, he let the words trip out, jagged from being dragged over his teeth, thus sharp on Essie’s skin.

  “You coulda killed him,” he added after he got no response from her. He had the nerve to say it because it was dark and he couldn’t see her. Essie’s quick inhalation startled him. She must have intended for him to fe
el the scolding in it. The words he knew she left behind her lips: You coulda, too.

  The next morning, in the picking field, his hands had curved into the position ripe for killing (it wouldn’t be murder because the laws saw no humanity in his kind). He saw how his fingertips touched and bled from the spines, but never had his hands been so strong. With a little gumption, he could strangle at least one of the overseers, starting with James, with little effort. It wouldn’t be so different from pulling cotton: pluck the life from people just as mean, in the same hot sun, stooping, too, into the ache of bones. What would it be to watch another person drop dead for the wages of their condition? For this, he could be of great assistance.

  It boiled inside of him, troubled his mind. He entertained, for a moment, suffocating James, shoving the seventy pounds of cotton he had picked thus far right down the man’s throat. Briefly, his lips crept into a grin.

  One hundred pounds, finally, when he could have picked double that. But it was important to manage their expectations. Give them your peak and then the moment you don’t perform at that level, the fools want to split your back open and deny healing. Unconcerned with the blood splatter, they would send your sick ass right back into the field and ferret out hundreds of pounds from you at gunpoint. He kept it easy for just that reason.

  But Amos felt the managed drudgery dull his mind, close the world in on him, collapse the sky and the ground into one indistinguishable whole. He longed to stretch out his arms, maybe take a deep breath, but the squeeze, the push, the tightness roped around him like he was swinging from a tree. Just a little air, that’s all he needed. And he wouldn’t even take it in through the mouth. Give him some, and he’d be happy to inhale and exhale through his nose. They wouldn’t even know he took it.

  But maybe rest, of a kind, was on the horizon.

  Seven days later, he made a promise to Essie.

  “Never again. I swear it.”

  Just as her morning vomiting let them know that, flat stomach or not, she was with a child whose pappy would be unknown until they saw the baby’s skin, Amos went about the business of securing Essie’s refuge. He was loading his final sack of cotton onto the awaiting wagon when the pink sky signaled an end to one dreary day but never tomorrow. He removed his straw hat, which Essie had weaved for him herself, held it to his chest, and looked down at his feet. This was the only way ever to approach a toubab, but especially if you intended to ask for something. They didn’t appreciate gumption; they saw it as arrogance. Amos waited until the others were on their solemn walk back to their shacks, slumped over and sweating, weary and death-glazed. He hoped that the sight of their misery would satiate at least some of the malice in Paul’s heart and leave room for mercy, however minute.

  Paul and James were on the other side of the wagon, talking about Isaiah and Samuel. Amos heard the word “bucks” and Paul asked if James watched them in The Fucking Place or not, and James said, “Yeah,” and Paul replied, “If yes, then where are the nigglets?” James had huffed that if they were lame in some way, maybe Paul should consider “replacing them with any manner of good nigger,” but Paul said, “It makes no sense to sell the best two.”

  Amos crept around the wagon.

  “Massa,” Amos said, shuffling up to them, hoping his insolence would pale in comparison to his suggestion. “I beg your pardon. I don’t means to interrupt. Neither do I means to hear your’n business. But I hope you hear me as I ask: Maybe us niggers need Jesus, too?”

  It was the first time Amos had ever used either word—nigger or Jesus—and he had decided that the betrayals would be worth it given that he had already given Essie his word on the seventh day. Paul removed his hat and looked to James.

  James chuckled, removed his hat, fanned himself with it, and swatted away some flies.

  “Cousin, you look like you could use a drink.”

  Amos watched their backs as they walked away from him to the barn, took hold of the horses led to them by Isaiah, and rode off together, leaving him standing in the middle of the cotton by himself. The question high above his head.

  He knew better than to ask again. So he waited. His patience was true. For not two weeks later, Paul sent for him. Amos was going to go around the back of the Big House, but the messenger, Maggie, led him to the main stairs. Typically, people weren’t permitted to step foot in the Big House at all, much less enter where toubab usually entered. Other than Maggie, Essie, and a few others, people knew to respect the boundary represented by the stairs that led to the massive front doors. Because of that border, there was room to imagine what was inside. Some people thought it might be a cave or a canyon. Others thought it might be the end. Amos said, “Naw. Just greed, I reckon.” He was right. But it wasn’t that he had some second sight, not yet anyway. It was because he had been such a good witness for Essie.

  During the months prior to their bliss being torn up, Essie told Amos that the Big House was too much for three people and that they hung animal heads on the wall like art. “Right next to their own faces and you can’t tell the difference,” she said with a sweet chuckle.

  She said that she didn’t realize three people could make so much mess that it took days to make right. Over and over, they demanded order only to wreak havoc and then demand order anew. She said people as cutthroat as they didn’t deserve beds so soft, though she allowed Timothy to be an exception because he evinced a gentle nature.

  Essie never saw so many candles lit at once, she said, the soft light coming from so many points, casting the most joyful shadows on every wall, growing and growing until, oddly, they became menacing. At which point, what flooded her mind, and Maggie’s too, she reckoned, was that all it would take was a delicate tap to tip one of the candles over, and maybe the resulting blaze would, likewise, begin as splendor before it became tragedy.

  Paul stood outside at the bottom of the stairs. He ascended them slowly, occasionally glancing back to see a stunned Amos, lost in the thoughts put into his mind by Essie. This was the closest he had ever been to the Big House. The four white columns at the front of it never seemed this huge before. He was afraid to take a step forward. He had the distinct feeling at the nape of his neck that once he passed through them, he might not make it back out.

  In a sense, he was correct. He stood there at the bottom of the steps, between the two stone pots of red roses that anchored them, and wondered if he had made a terrible mistake. The sun was setting behind him. He couldn’t see the blood orange his back had become under its shrinking light. It had been other colors before: black, purple, red, blue, but this time honeyed enough to seem without pain.

  “AMOS!”

  Paul’s sharp tone shocked Amos back to life and he took to the steps two at a time, careful to remain bowed and behind.

  “I beg your pardon, suh.”

  He wondered if he should add a compliment, tell Paul that he had been taken by the house’s beauty. The white wasn’t pristine; Amos noticed some of the paint chipping, and a bit of mildew grew at the bases where wall met ground. And just now, a couple of leaves descended and scraped themselves against the floor of the front porch before coming to a complete stop in the company of a pair of oak rocking chairs. But the windows were gleaming, and the shutters that framed them were delicate enough to make him question whether anything horrible could possibly occur behind them. Would ivy cling so closely to a lover who failed it?

  Once Paul crossed the threshold, Amos knew that he would have no choice but to cross it, too. There was still time to turn back. It would cost him skin, but it would heal. Maybe that was why toubab perpetuated the cruelties that they did: people seemed to be able to take it, endure it, experience and witness all manner of atrocity and appear unscathed. Well, except for the scars. The scars lined them the same way bark lined trees. But those weren’t the worst ones. The ones you couldn’t see: those were the ones that streaked the mind, squeezed the spirit, and left
you standing outside in the rain, naked as birth, demanding that the drops stop touching you.

  With all the reverence he could muster, he moved his legs past the doorway and suddenly felt small and unclean. Forgetting himself, he looked up. Even if he were to stand on his toes, he wouldn’t be able to reach the ceiling. And no matter how hard he tried, and he tried hard, he couldn’t spot a speck of dirt anywhere.

  “Move faster,” Paul said, interrupting his thoughts. “Why are you all so slow?”

  But any faster and Amos would have surely crashed into Paul, or worse, wound up beside him, which was also a crime. So Amos shuffled a bit, turning his one step into two quicker but smaller ones. That seemed to please Paul.

  In the periphery, Amos saw Maggie dusting a piece of furniture, a chair with a cushion that had a scene embroidered into it. From his distance, it looked to Amos as though it might be a depiction of the Halifax cotton field itself, at high noon, when the sun is at its peak and the pickers are under the strictest surveillance, when the throat threatens to collapse and crumble from lack of water, and yet the overseers look at you as though taking a natural human pause is unthinkable, reminding you that it could be worse: you could be chopping cane at an increased risk of severed limb; you could be at the docks with men who hadn’t seen civilization in quite some time and wouldn’t discriminate one hole from the next; you could be pulling indigo, which meant your work would forever mark your hands as tools. Or you could be the property of doctors who needed cadavers more than they needed anything else. All of that to say: Be thankful that you’re a cotton picker and an occasional bed warmer. It could be worse.

  Amos wondered if it was him Maggie was cutting her eyes at. Their interactions hadn’t been enough that he would deserve such regard. He knew she was a good friend to Essie, so she had to know that all of this was for her.