The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  “I think she sweet on that there Samuel. That’s the bigger one name, ain’t it? The purple one, not the black one?”

  “The one that keep his mouth open, yeah.”

  “Hm. All right then.”

  Be Auntie pulled on Amos. Puah and the other children all huddled even though it was too hot to do that, but they seemed as though they didn’t want to take up too much space, which was wise because shrinking down kept you out of the minds of toubab, and if you weren’t sturdy enough to withstand what their minds could do (who was?), then it was best that you just be smaller than you had ever been before.

  She looked at Amos. “Come on.”

  He had interrupted the beat of their song. They couldn’t do their dance if the music stopped.

  “Let me.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and pressed her plush into his.

  “Can I tell you ’bout the thunder?”

  She wasn’t the singer Essie was, but she could tell one hell of a story to keep time.

  Puah

  Puah hated the way the cotton got stuck beneath her fingernails. She hated even more what the picking did to her fingers: made them raw and heavy, made her feel like she had something in her hands even when she didn’t. She was thick with grievance, which she had to continuously tuck back into her crevices, inhale to give it more room and hold it in place.

  She held on to her sack with a grudge, snatched it from spot to spot as she robbed one plant after the next, thievery on behalf of a man who, if she could, she would pluck the hairs from, one by one, even the eyelashes, in the same way. In the corners of her eyes, the only thing that threatened to form, ever, was anger. But in the shape of her body, which marked her as vulnerable from every direction, with danger lurking in the company of anybody, she kept her vengeance pillowed and well blanketed in the nest of her soul.

  At the end of the day she threw her pickings in the wagon, watched by James, whom she never looked in the eye, for Maggie, yes, but also because she wanted to deny him the courtesy of her gaze. Her wide eyes, bushy eyebrows, and long lashes would be for her own offering and hers alone. And the only people to stand at her altar would be those of her choosing. These were the things she told herself in places where she could afford to be resolute.

  She lifted her dress by its hem, exposing the obsidian of her calves, and started back toward the shacks. She wanted to bathe in the river, but the men were there. She would find a bucket and fill it with river water and wash herself in the night, behind Be Auntie’s shack, instead.

  She pulled on her hair, touched the roots of it, noticing the new growth that had made her braids puffy and fuzzy. It needed a good washing and greasing before being tied up before bed to keep it pressed against her mind. As she brought her hand back down to her side, she noticed movement in the distance. She walked over toward it, toward the barn. She stopped at the wooden fence circling it and saw Samuel leading a horse toward the pens and wanted to catch him before he went inside.

  “Samuel,” she shouted, impressed by how far her voice carried.

  He turned and smiled. He walked over to where she was standing on the bottom rung of the fence. He pulled the horse along with him.

  “Oh, y’all done in the field?” he asked.

  “Well, you see me right here in front this barn,” she said, putting her hand on her hip.

  “All right then,” Samuel said with a laugh.

  She swung her leg over the fence, then the other, and sat on the top rail.

  “What you got planned for your rest day?” she asked, looking beyond him and into the barn. She saw a figure moving around inside and knew it had to be Isaiah even if she couldn’t see him clearly. She returned her focus to Samuel and grinned at the way the tender sun and dawning starlight had lit his skin so that the pitch of it was obvious.

  “Ain’t nothing. Gon’ be right here with ’Zay.”

  There was a moment of silence between them that gave her the chance to notice the moist of his lips. She forgave him for not asking her about what she would be doing with her Sunday.

  “Probably going over by Sarah to have her plait my hair. She do plaits so nice.” She touched her hair and pulled a braid down over her forehead and held it by its tip.

  “Where Dug?” Samuel asked after her pretend baby brother.

  Puah sucked her teeth. “Somewhere up underneath Be Auntie, I guess. Boys shouldn’t follow behind they mamas like that.”

  Samuel looked at the ground and gripped the reins of the horse a little bit tighter.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” Samuel interrupted. He kicked at the weeds and bent down to pick up a pebble. He threw it over the fence. Puah watched it travel and land in the distance.

  “You throw far.” Her lips parted for a smile, which Samuel returned.

  “You should come with me to Sarah tomorrow,” she said.

  Samuel twisted his lips at the idea.

  “What? You don’t like Sarah?”

  Samuel laughed. “I like Sarah just fine. But what I supposed to do, just sit there and watch her plait your hair?”

  Puah jumped down off the fence.

  “Yeah,” she said and moved closer to Samuel. She reached up and touched his hair; it was beady and dusty.

  “And maybe she plait your’n.”

  They stood there just breathing and not saying anything. Samuel couldn’t look her in the eye, and Puah couldn’t look anywhere else but in his. Samuel had the kind of eyes that invited people over, greeted them, and then quietly shut the door in their faces. And for some reason, standing out there on the wrong side of it, people felt compelled to keep banging on that door until, by some mercy, he opened it. His hair coiled in her fingers and Samuel closed his eyes just as Puah’s mouth parted.

  Over his shoulder, she saw Isaiah leaning against the barn door. His arms were folded and one of his legs was raised so that his foot was flat against the door. He didn’t have a frown on his face, nor did he have a grin. He seemed to be lingering in the middle of both, looking outward, but seeing inward. Now and again, he shooed away flies, but other than that, he didn’t move. She stopped playing in Samuel’s head and waved at Isaiah, but he didn’t seem to notice. So she called him. He uncrossed his arms and moved away from the barn. He seemed hesitant to come over to them. He looked at Samuel and Samuel turned to look at him. If they said anything to each other, she didn’t hear it. But it certainly seemed like there was some sort of exchange. Isaiah walked toward them slowly. He came up from behind Samuel, touched his back as he moved beside him. The horse took two steps and then was still again.

  “Hey, Puah,” Isaiah said in such a reassuring voice that she nearly felt welcomed in a space that usually felt shut off from everything else. Under that, though, she detected something in the calmness of his tone, a prickly thing that made her scalp itch. She looked at him and saw something quickly flash across his face.

  “I was just telling Samuel he should come with me to Sarah tomorrow and get his hair plait. Won’t he look good?”

  She didn’t say that to hurt Isaiah’s feelings. She meant it genuinely. Isaiah looked at Samuel from head to toe.

  “I reckon he look good either way. Up to him how he wanna show that good,” Isaiah said, grinning. He put his hand on Samuel’s shoulder. “I gotta finish up, Sam. Let me take this here horse back in the pen. Come on, boy. Good evening to you, Miss Puah.”

  “Just Puah,” she said. Isaiah nodded his apology and strolled off with the reins of the horse in his hand, pulling the buck along. Puah watched them walk into the barn and then returned her attention to Samuel.

  “He right. You look good either way. Still, I hope you choose plaits.” She smiled and turned to climb back over the fence.

  “Night, Sam-u-well.” She winked. Then she jumped down and headed to her shack.

&nb
sp; Puah was one of two of Be Auntie’s girls; the other, still a toddler, named Delia, a child that Puah swore Be Auntie named with spite in her heart because the baby and Puah shared the same midnight color.

  They all slept on one pallet. Puah didn’t like lying down next to her imitation brothers. For some of them (irrespective of their age, and that surprised her), the mere acts of closed eyes and the rumble of snoring were calls to actions she never authorized. Most nights, she slept curled in a corner, the edge of her dress tucked under her soles, creating a kind of tent in which she could hide her body from those who would dare pry.

  Be Auntie told her to forgive them, that beat-down people did beat-down things. Toil made them hot and cruel, but mostly hot, and sometimes the best a woman could do was be a sip of water. That was how Puah knew that Be Auntie could never be her real mother, no matter how many lullabies sung or pains rocked. Her real mother would never ask her to be a sacrifice to ungrateful, nonreciprocal fools. Her real mother wouldn’t baby every boy no matter how grown and chastise every girl no matter how sweet.

  “Shameless,” Be Auntie mumbled at any girl within earshot, and Puah didn’t like the way it was hissed at her. It was like no matter what she did or didn’t do, any evil would be laid at her feet and regarded as the product of her own belly. “Grown,” she heard Be Auntie say when any kind observer would have said “growing.”

  There was no one else in the world, she thought, cursed to carry such a burden. Everywhere a girl existed, there was someone telling her that she was her own fault and leading a ritual to punish her for something she never did. It hadn’t always been this way. Blood memory confirmed this and women were the bearers of the blood.

  It was worse when the cruelty came from other women. It shouldn’t have been; after all, women were people, too. But it was. When women did it, it was like being stabbed with two knives instead of one. Two knives, one in the back and the other in a place that couldn’t be seen, only felt.

  Maybe Be Auntie had no choice. Maybe after so many times of being beaten in the fields by Massa only to return, scarred, to the shack to be beaten by her lover’s hand, she had finally decided to yield. Maybe she thought she could influence manhood in another way, shower them with a tenderness they could carry with them and share with other women they encountered, if they remembered. That was the problem. The desire for power erased memory and replaced it with violence. And Be Auntie had the bruises to prove it. Nearly every woman did.

  That was why Puah despised Dug so. She knew all the attention, all the energy, all the titty milk Be Auntie was giving him was a complete waste of time. No matter what she did—no matter how blessed the kisses to the cheek or how mellow the song sung, even deep into the night—his hands would still grow to a size that could snugly grip the throat and easily crimp into a fist tight enough to smash teeth.

  Men and toubab shared far more than either would ever admit. Just ask anyone who had ever been at their mercy. They both took what they wanted; asking was never a courtesy. Both smiled first, but pain always followed. And, too, both claimed they had good reason for this absurd behavior: whatever forces in the sky had declared that this act had to take place, that what could have been pleasure if both parties were willing had crumbled into a gagged and lying thing, it was as much beyond their control as sunshine; it simply wasn’t and couldn’t ever be their fault. Nature was stubborn.

  Whatever. Puah had a plan to escape Be Auntie’s fate, the whims of false brothers, and toubab. She had a place to retreat to.

  In the imaginary—where the Other Puah lived, which wasn’t too far, which sat right up against where This Puah lived, parallel, but crisper in color, more textured in sound, only seen by This Puah when she tilted her head in just the right position and paid close attention to the rhythm of her heart—there was enough to eat.

  The Other Puah feasted lazily on strawberries and other sweet-smelling fruit, licked honey from her palms, and used a knife and fork to eat roasted chicken, which fell delightfully from the bone. There, her laughter was a mask for nothing and the tingling at the tips of her fingers came from how willingly they were kissed. She frolicked, the Other Puah, because there was no one lying in wait, anxious to take advantage of her kindness, misuse it, and leave it squirted on top of her like a shooting-star-shaped stain, drying and, in time, flaking, to be lifted off by breeze or troubled water.

  Her suitors walked on black-sand beaches, skin like they had been made from the substance upon which they stood, each more loving than the next. They each sang songs about her, using words that she didn’t recognize but knew to be charming because of how smoothly they left their lips. And in the imaginary, just like in the Empty place, she chose one above all others, the one who had eyes like gently closed doors and made everyone who looked into them conjure up a masterpiece to knock. But like all dreams, these too were interrupted by the sharp point of toil.

  Dug’s crying brought her back. He fussed like he knew it would snatch her into the now, dissolve the imaginary in the palm of her hands. She cut her eyes at him.

  “What you want, Dug?”

  He just smiled.

  It starts young, Puah thought before she retreated to the corner.

  * * *

  —

  Sarah’s shack always smelled like outdoors. She kept dandelions tucked in corners and stuffed some inside her pallet. As big and sturdy a woman as she was, with skin that Puah thought could be shadow’s substitute, she did little dainty things like that; that, and she would also adorn her head with baby’s breath. She said she did it to trick herself into thinking she wasn’t trapped, that when she closed her eyes, she could think of herself gallivanting with nowhere in particular to go, wide as a meadow and unchained, and not a single toubab face for a thousand miles.

  Puah walked through the cloth that hung, dirty, in Sarah’s doorway.

  “Can you do it up?” Puah asked her. “So it ain’t touching my neck. Cooler for when I in the field.”

  Sarah sucked her teeth. “Hello to you, too.”

  Puah smiled. Sarah looked at her head.

  “Gal, you wouldn’t be asking me that if you just wrapped it when you was out there like everybody else do.”

  “Chile, I can’t be bothered with all that. Besides, wrapping makes it even more hot.”

  Sarah shook her head. “This why your braids never stay long. You wild with your head.”

  Puah put both hands on her head, shook her hips, and walked around the shack on her tippy-toes.

  “What you call yourself doing?”

  “Missy Ruth. Don’t you see how dainty and delicate I is?” Puah batted her eyes. Sarah rolled hers but couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Gal, you is a fool,” Sarah said, and she pulled a stool from under the table. She flopped down on top of it. “So, you wanna be her?”

  Puah came down onto her heels. “No’m!”

  “Stop conjuring that up, then.” Sarah rubbed her temples. “Quit all that foolery and let me fix your head.”

  Puah sat down on the floor between Sarah’s legs. She drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them, the hem of her dress safely underfoot. Sarah began to undo her braids starting from the back.

  “Your hair growing,” Sarah said during the unfastening.

  “I feels like shaving it all off is what I feels like.”

  “You must be remembering an old thing,” Sarah whispered, staring at the back of Puah’s head. “Like I can remember old things.”

  Puah yawned and scratched a spot behind her ear.

  “Stop moving!” Sarah scolded.

  After a moment of silence Puah spoke.

  “I had asked Samuel to come on over to get his hair plait, too.”

  Sarah stopped undoing. “And what he say?”

  “He ain’t say no.”

  “But did he say yes?”

  “No.
”

  “Mm hm!”

  Puah shifted. It was the first time that she had considered that he might not come, might not want to come, might be prevented from coming because . . . It wasn’t like Samuel to be rude, to say he’d be somewhere and then not show up. Then again, he never said he would show up.

  He was the only man on the entire plantation who ever cared about what she thought, who really, genuinely gave a damn and didn’t feign interest as an oh-so-transparent ruse to get in under her dress. He was the first man who wanted nothing but her company and conversation, who cheered her up when she was down by sticking daisies in his hair and walking around like a chicken. Big as he was, he never once shifted his weight in her direction or tried to block out her light with his shadow. Where she felt like Isaiah ignored or only tolerated her, she knew Samuel truly saw her and didn’t recoil at the notion of her grace.

  “I hope you ain’t letting Amos fill your head with no foolishness,” Sarah said.

  “No.”

  “Hmph. Just like Amos to send you out to that barn to cause havoc.”

  “I ain’t causing no havoc, Sarah. And Amos ain’t send me.”

  “Who send you, then?”

  Puah rolled her eyes.

  “You need to go on ahead and leave them boys be.”

  “Samuel is my friend,” Puah said, her eyebrows bending into her frustration.

  “How many of your ‘friends’ make your neck-back goosebump like it is now?”