The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  Fold in, children. Fold in.

  I Kings

  The day the devils walked out of the bush, King Akusa was in her royal hut in the heart of Kosongo territory, in good spirits. Two of her six wives, Ketwa and Nbinga, had brought in her dinner: bowls of yam, fish stew, and enough palm wine to make her feel mellow.

  Her second wife, Ketwa, whom she favored, was much more adept at cooking than any of her other wives.

  “Did Ketwa prepare the meal?” the king asked. She knew that he did but liked the way a smile appeared on his face, tender and gently curled, whenever she asked.

  “Yes, my king. As always,” Nbinga replied.

  “Well, not always,” Ketwa corrected. “When we smell that burning scent, when the fish is too soggy, we know that I am not the cook.”

  The king laughed as she washed her hands in a bowl filled with water and sage.

  “And you will help prepare the feast for the ceremony? It is only a week away, you know,” she said with a wry smile.

  “Of course,” Ketwa said. “Kosii is my favorite nephew. But his mother is an even better cook than I. She is the one who taught me.”

  “I am sure she would appreciate the help in any event,” the king said.

  She reclined onto the smooth bundles of red, orange, green, and yellow blankets at her back. She looked up at Ketwa.

  “Are you not going to join me for some palm wine?”

  Ketwa looked at her. He felt drawn to her nighttime skin; her clear, bright eyes; and the silkiness of her breasts as they lay beneath her beaded necklace. He noticed her head as she tilted forward to reach for a cup: bald as her behind, clever in its shape, adorned with blue paint and red gems. She had a king’s head and a warrior’s mind inside of it.

  “Will the others be jealous?” Ketwa asked as he poured the wine.

  “Why? They will be joining us too,” said the king, and she smiled.

  “And who will tend to our children if I am here?” he retorted.

  “You are one of many.”

  She brought the cup to her lips just as young Reshkwe ran into the hut. He was panting heavily and fell to his knees at the edge of the bowls of food laid out before the king.

  “You dare enter without announcement?” Ketwa rebuked.

  Reshkwe’s forehead touched the ground.

  “Forgiveness,” he shouted between pants. “Forgiveness, King Akusa. But you must come! It is a nightmare. A nightmare has come to us!”

  What could have reached the village so far from the sea as it was: days and days of trekking through the savanna where lion and hyena lurk, not to mention across a river teeming with hippo and crocodile? The nearest neighbors, the Gussu, were days away and were respectful enough to come always bearing gifts, nothing nightmarish as the boy described. King Akusa wondered about the possibilities of a curse, but reminded herself of the wards: the village was large; the drumming was regular, sometimes loud enough to frighten birds from trees; and the ancestors were relentlessly respected with offerings of only the most magnificent bananas from the harvest. There was no reason to believe that they were angry and had sent some form of plague. If anything, they would be pleased by how the village thrived, populated with five generations of people upon whose faces the ancestors lived. And soon, they would have gate guardians for the first time since the war.

  The king reached behind her blankets for her spear and shield. Upon the latter was a carving of her family’s avatar: a jagged little warrior, shaped like a lightning flash, with their weapons raised high in triumph.

  “Shall I summon the guard, my king?” Nbinga asked.

  “Have them meet me on the way to the gate.”

  King Akusa darted out of the dwelling with incredible speed. She rushed past dozens and dozens of huts, a trail of red dust flowing behind her. The ground was dry because there were still at least two months before the rainy season. The sun was just beginning to descend behind the trees. She looked down to see her shadow, quick and long, beneath her. Soon, she heard the pounding of her guards coming up from behind. They moved in like a coming storm and eventually caught up to her. Together, they reached the village square. And together, they came to a screeching halt.

  One man gagged. Another vomited. Three women recoiled. Four men nearly retreated. King Akusa the Brave merely narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on her spear. The boy was right. Demons had somehow made it to their home.

  Not somehow. Next to these strangely dressed things, whose skin was like having no skin at all, was a Gussu. He stepped forward and knelt before the king. He had the apologetic eyes of a friend, but she did not trust him.

  She turned to see the guards in various states of disarray. She banged the dull end of her spear against the ground and suddenly, they all came to attention. She cautioned the guards not to go near the strangers and to avoid touching them. Grateful for her wisdom, they surrounded her in a protective half circle and pointed their spears at the intruders.

  “Are they dead?” Muzani, the tallest, asked.

  “Move away,” the king ordered, not at all masking her irritation at their forgetting she was the greatest warrior among them and could readily protect herself, even against the unliving. She looked down at the Gussu who knelt before her.

  “I’m confused,” she said as she dug her spear into the ground. “Your position indicates respect, but you brought pestilence to my village. Explain yourself immediately or you and these demons shall suffer together.”

  She would have expected such things of the mountain people with no name, who had once come down from their perches in the clouds and attacked her village unprovoked. She was a girl then but remembered them clearly because of their sharpened teeth and the white paint that garishly adorned their faces. The no-name mountain people more than liked war; it seemed for them a kind of religion, the thing that defined them. To remove war from their hearts would be akin to removing the ancestral bonds from her own people. They would merely dissolve and all that would be left would be smoky wisps and a foul odor. But none of that meant that the Kosongo wouldn’t fight back. On the contrary, the king’s mother led the charge against them, her spear held high as though she had grabbed lightning from above.

  “Not demons,” the frightened man said in serviceable Kosongo tongue. “Friends.”

  He signaled for the demons to bow and they did. They were less ugly in that position. The king ordered the guards to lower their weapons but to also exercise caution. With an easily understandable hand gesture, she instructed the intruders to stand. She couldn’t stop staring at them. They had hair the color of sand. She looked each one in the eye. One wore a curious object over the eyes that made them look small and beady. And her initial assessment was correct: all three demons were missing skin. One of them opened its mouth to speak. Broken as it was, she recognized it and suspected bad magic.

  “Greetings,” it said. “I am Brother Gabriel. And I am here to bring you the good news.”

  Beulah

  Wide as two women, Beulah—now Be Auntie—had the space to dream when everyone else on Empty knew better. The smile on her face wasn’t permanent and it wasn’t an indication that she was witless. Rather, it was a kind of armament against the sorrow that bending over in the cotton field, and in other places, rubbed into the skin. It wasn’t a perfume, and yet it had its own scent. Smelled like something buried for a long time and then dug up. Now exposed to the sun, the thing didn’t begin to resurrect itself, but it did unfurl its stench—old, rotting, sharp—inspiring gagging and heaving, but also telling you something about itself, about whoever put it there, and about who uncovered it.

  She felt like she was that buried thing. Covered up against her will. For so long forgotten. Left to decay. Discovered too late, but still useful to thieves who fancied themselves explorers. All of this left her in a very delicate condition. The forbidden dreams that had once been
the source for the jubilation of she didn’t know how many people, singing in a key that made her feel fine, had begun to fracture such that they sat side by side with some other discordant thing that likewise doubled her. Not just her body, though, but also her mind, heart, and, she would like to believe, soul (she had one—two!—despite toubab telling her she had none). What choice did she have but to burn every slight until it shined like a comfort?

  She didn’t mean to give herself to Amos, not at first. Essie was with child and they still had her out in the field. Essie couldn’t sing to keep everyone on rhythm; it was just too much. Be Auntie told a rhyming story to make up for it. Something about a town down in a valley and how the people were going to prepare a banquet even when they knew a storm was a-coming. Not only that, but Be Auntie (or maybe it was Beulah) picked her share of cotton and half of Essie’s too so that Essie would avoid the lash. Yes, ma’am, they would even whup a girl plump with child, which made no practical sense. If the goal was to magnify your glory, why would you take your blessings out two at a time?

  “You still trying to climb on top of her, after what she been through?” she was bold enough to ask Amos after the horn sounded and the sun mellowed.

  “She my woman. I do anything for her. Trying to make her forget. Trying to make her know tain’t a ounce missing of her beauty.”

  “And you doing that by going to her instead of letting her come to you?”

  Be Auntie knew it was futile by the confusion on Amos’s face. She knew men, ones in heat or ones who had something to prove, were senseless. They would rearrange land and sea to get them both to lead to satisfaction when one was enough already. Afterward, when their minds returned to them, the kind ones experienced regret, the cruel ones sought more cruelty, and the two were indistinguishable to her. It didn’t have to be some grand act. All they had to do was look at her like they were disgusted by her for the act they just committed. They get on up from the pallet and walk out of the shack without so much as a “thank you” or “evening,” not even a “beg your pardon.” She thought they could at least act like they were forced to sometimes and give her the redress she was rightly due. Instead, they left her to lie there in her own stink and theirs like doing so was the gift she was waiting on. And so often, she was just there crying on the outside and hoping that what they left inside her didn’t catch, and if the blood came, then mercy somewhere had heard her.

  What was most insidious about it all was what the repetition did to her. At some point, in spite of herself, she started to enjoy the rhythm. The sly smile. The cool words. The giddy sway. The pressing down. The steady pump. The last thrust. The slap. The kick. The punch. The forgotten gratitude. The lost good night. She found herself molded into the shape that best fit what they carved her into. Water done wore away at her stone, and the next thing she knew, she was a damn river when she could have sworn she was a mountain.

  Mountain to river was a place. More than a place, it was a person. Beulah was a mountain. Be Auntie was a river. In between, fertile or arid land, depending on the location. The others judged her harshly, she knew, for being the first of them to go from up high to down low. But she was just the first, and her sacrifice, one of them anyway, was this: she made it so that there would be more grace waiting for them when they, too, made the descent.

  And it wasn’t like she climbed down all of her own volition, carefully navigating the peaks and slopes, securing her footing so that she didn’t slip on any smooth and icy crevices. Nah. She was pushed. It mattered not whether she smiled or screamed as she plummeted. Some tumbles were worthy of pity regardless.

  Because look what had become of her in the bottom-bottom: she was men’s rest stop and peace of mind; she was their cookhouse, flophouse, and outhouse; she bore them children for whom they could bear no attachment and collected the children not of her blood to replace the ones snatched away on a whim or a bill come due.

  She knew she could spare Essie (not stop, but slow her fall) because womens had to look after womens—particularly when refusal meant death. Yes, she opened her arms wide to Amos, legs too; let him not only laugh, talk, rock, bump, grind, hit, and fail to say sweet dreams or farewell, but she also let him do it over and over and over again until it felt like something divine—if just for the ritual of it.

  Another thing defined her worship. See, Maggie was wrong: if you get them early enough, they won’t be corrupted. You might just could turn boys’ natures such that when they see a woman, their first instinct ain’t to tame her, but to leave her be. You could coat them in enough salve that when they started preferring the outdoors, to be around the older men—who didn’t have the benefit of what they call “womanly things” precisely because they wanted the right to be reckless and pilfering; if they had embraced their whole mind instead of half of it—the error of their ways would be revealed to them, and they knew they couldn’t see that and survive intact.

  Be Auntie (not Beulah) doted over every boy-child—especially the ones whose color had been meddled with. Every girl-child, particularly the ones whose skin was raven, she lorded over or left to fend for herself (as Beulah wept). Womens had to look after womens, yes. But first there had to be trial and she refused to interfere with that sacred passage for any woman, young or old.

  She got Puah after the mother and father were both sold off. Puah wasn’t even walking yet and still in need of milk, which Be Auntie gave to her only sparingly, supplementing it with pieces of bread and hog parts she knew the baby to be too young to be eating. When Puah’s stomach pained her all night and her cries wouldn’t cease, Be Auntie blamed the child for her own condition and just let her scream until her throat was raw, after which she would just whine gently. It’s a wonder the child had any voice at all.

  The baby was too young for grown-up food and also too young to have sown such resentment in Be Auntie, but there both of those things were, sitting uncomfortably in one tiny little body, futile but resolute.

  What Be Auntie did know was that one day, Puah would be of use. It would either be as a sword or it would be as a shield, possibly both, but whatever the form, it was inevitable. Maggie wasn’t the only one who knew of the deep and hidden things.

  One sticky night, Be Auntie was lying with Amos. He had come into her shack in a huff, complaining about how he tried to be reasonable with Isaiah and Samuel, but they just wouldn’t submit.

  “Submit to what?” Be Auntie asked rather innocently.

  Amos looked at her as though she had cursed. “A nature grander than they own! You ain’t been listening to what I been trying to tell you?” he said loudly before lowering his head to allow his voice to reach that level. He sighed. “Some folk will never understand that the part ain’t more important than the whole,” he said to her darkly. “But you hear me, Be. Huh?”

  Amos’s eyes were kind. He had an open face. His tones were not unlike a story being told around a fire at night. You had to lean in, and not even biting mosquitoes could distract you once you were there. She had that, too, the voice for story, but people only wanted to hear hers as comfort, not as inspiration. But Amos also had a breezy touch. He brought himself down with her, down the mountain and into the stream. He touched the water. He slid his hand right between her thighs and she didn’t flinch at all. She knew he cared about her pleasure, but that her pleasure wasn’t the point. Still, she squirmed a little at what he had tickled. They were close together, him smiling, her with drowsy eyes.

  “You need me to do what?” she whispered.

  Amos sat up and looked over to the side of the shack where the children lay, piled together like refuse somebody had swept up (and perhaps someone did), and he looked at a trying-to-sleep Puah.

  “How old Puah is now?” Amos scratched his chin. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “Just about.”

  “And you manage to keep her still locked up in here with you? Massa or nobody don’t come ’round to mess
with her?”

  Be Auntie looked at Puah with an envious eye. What guts this girl had to first survive whatever Be Auntie put in her belly and then to live on Empty still full. Nah, maybe that wasn’t as much guts as luck. Luck that had escaped everyone else on the plantation except Puah, it seemed. Lucky people were of no use to anyone but themselves. (Sarah was another story, but Be Auntie didn’t have that much fight, or yearning turned ’round to face itself, in her to do it Sarah’s way.)

  “Hm,” Be Auntie said. “What you asking about her for?”

  “I need her. For them.”

  The twinge of pain she felt in her temples was for her, not Puah, she told herself.

  “What for?”

  “You know what for.”

  Be Auntie knew Samuel and Isaiah as not-hers. They were two children who she was never able to incorporate into her tribe—one, in particular, for good reason. They weren’t raised by anyone but looked after by everyone, vagabonds of a sort, but beloved ones. They were the ones who were in the barn and had to have had good natures because they took care of the animals, of life, didn’t just plant it, pick it, and put it in a sack. But one of them was also the one with the ax. Sometimes, she heard a pig squealing. Pigs somehow always knew what was coming. They fidgeted on the day of. They would try to run, but Samuel’s hands were firm. There was no expression on his face before or during. But after, when he was down at the river, washing the blood from his hands, his bottom lip would droop, and his drool splashed into the water’s rush. Boy not boy, she thought. Boy now man.

  Amos kissed Be Auntie deeply. He brought his lips down to her neck. He looked at her and rubbed his nose against her.

  “Let me see what I can put in her head,” she said. “I gotta be careful about it. That girl always do the opposite of what I tell her.”

  It pierced Be Auntie’s heart that despite her disobedience, Puah walked through Empty relatively unscathed, as though she had taken all of the advice and cues Be Auntie offered, rather than tossing them to the ground and kicking them away. It meant that perhaps Be Auntie had erred and that Puah’s scorn and her hope, rather than the advised split then submission, could be a way, too. Oh, well. It didn’t make much difference anymore. Here it was, and Be Auntie knew it would come sooner or later: the time for Puah to know the grace that none of the others had the foresight to show Beulah, which was Be Auntie’s dawn. Don’t matter who do or don’t like it. At least I got to choose my own name.