The Prophets

by Robert Jones, Jr.

  So this is what it looks like, Kosii said to himself as the shifty, watery light began to fade. The view from the mountaintop; it hurts.

  Then, as the blackness took everything:

  Good.

  James

  James wandered the perimeter, kept himself at the edges, surveyed the middle spaces by walking around the entire border of the land, first alone, then with a few of his hands, like Zeke, Malachi, and Jonathan. There was no way to fortify what was already keeping the niggers at bay: the fence, the river, the woods rigged with traps and assassins, fear. Well, the last was the one exception. He could always employ indulgences that allowed them to ratchet the last up high.

  “When is Paul due back?” Malachi asked.

  “Not sure,” James answered. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and made more determined steps. He couldn’t locate the moon. Perhaps it was behind the trees preparing for its descent, leaving the inkiness of the sky for the sun to obliterate. He yawned and held his lantern out in front of him. Its corona wasn’t bright enough to do anything except show him how impenetrable the night could be. He kept it moving.

  His clothes were a bit more raggedy than he would have liked, but he had no means, not enough means to dress better. Like Paul, for example. He had no wife to stitch something together for him, no children to wash and fold his belongings as a part of their daily chores. No children that he would claim anyway, which was probably for the best since he had nothing to give them except hard hands and aching feet, which were useless. He didn’t even have his cabin to turn over to them; that belonged to Paul. He couldn’t even afford slaves.

  If James hadn’t looked so much like his mother and, therefore, like Paul’s mother, he was certain that Paul would have turned him away, accused him of fraud, and maybe called for the sheriff to lock him up for trespassing or vagrancy. But his face saved him.

  “You walk that-a-way,” he said to Zeke, pointing over toward a row of slave cabins, which sat ramshackle and simple, just beyond the weeds. “Holler if you see anything out of order.”

  He realized as soon as he said it the futility of the command. To be a nigger was to exist in a constant state of disorder, a darkness that could only be righted by light, a jungle that could only be untangled by machete, a chaos that could only be overruled by a slow hand and swift authority. Blood, James thought. Sometimes, he hungered for blood.

  And blood was plentiful among the slaves, flowed through them like passion—singing and dancing, beating in their tongues, pulsing through their lips, stretched into wide smiles. He could smell it. They had changed very little from the ships and he had to admit to himself how much that surprised him. He had expected that they would pull themselves up like he did, find possibility in the flourishing impossible, break chains like he broke out of the orphanage. But no. They had merely brought the belly of the vessel with them everywhere they went. It assailed the senses. Then again, who were they lucky enough to be kin to?

  They were of raggedy dress (his anger was fueled by the similarity of their attire and his) and little intelligence. They lived on top of one another, packed into dwellings by their own will as much as Paul’s. They were belligerent and smelled of a toil that couldn’t be washed away. They ate refuse and their skin bore the curse of wild. It was easier to think of them as animals, not so different from cows and horses, apes of great mimicry that managed to speak the language of humans. That they could sometimes inspire erections was no ill reflection on the bearer of such hardness. The fact of the matter was that they could pass for human and, therefore, trick the loins, if not always the mind.

  After a long while, Zeke returned to the fold. “Everything looks all right. Niggers accounted for,” he said.

  “All right, then. You three can wait for the next shift and then go,” James said.

  “Oh. You might wanna go see ’bout Miss Ruth,” Zeke said. “She out there. Wandering for no good reason.”

  James scratched his chin.

  “What she doing out there?”

  Zeke shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “Over by the river, just past the barn.”

  James shook his head. “Goddamnit. Keep watch. I’ll see to Ruth.”

  She was the one woman on the entire plantation worth her salt and that would make things difficult. Her pale skin, red hair, and tight bosom hurt his feelings so deeply that masturbation only picked at the wound. She did nothing to hide her offense, not even the decency of a shawl on cool evenings in autumn.

  He remembered how it was back then. It was a year of debilitating heat that emanated from everywhere, of him crossing his legs or squatting to contain it or keep it away. He pulled his hat down low over his eyes whenever Ruth would pass. He stuffed his face with any food that was near so as to occupy his tongue. He was barely able to resist smearing manure under his nose to prevent the smell of verbena from reaching him. He thought he would collapse from longing if he didn’t do something.

  One sticky twilight, a nigger was bathing down by the edge of the swamp when she should have been in the kitchen. She stood in the path of the setting sun as it reflected off the water’s skin and caused a bright beam of light to obscure her body. She thus appeared not-nigger, was revealed as a figure he was able to hold in his mind until the deed was done. In that crimson light, her nigger tangles became golden locks, her black face, a coy blush—just like the women back home in Merry Old.

  And she proved just as feisty. She bit him. She scratched his neck, leaving a mark that was still raised there. For that, he punched her timid face repeatedly until the blood ran down her mouth and covered the lower part of her face like a veil.

  When he pushed himself inside of her—when he pumped and twisted and jabbed, bringing to already scarred spaces new contusions—he discovered that what he heard about these wenches wasn’t true after all: there were no teeth on the inside of their cunts, no hooks that would hold the cock inside, bleeding it dry while the man hooted and howled in pain. He didn’t feel his soul being sucked from him. No, sir. It was just as smooth and proper as all the prim white pussies that escaped England just like he did.

  But she was spirited, and not even his massive slugs to her top lip or to the edge of her chin could stop her stark raving. So, after he released his thick spray, he, with his pants trapped around his ankles, clutched her throat and smashed her head under the water. And she kicked and kicked, bruising his jewels and darkening his inner thigh. She kicked for what seemed longer than any human being could feasibly hold her breath. Then he remembered that he wasn’t dealing with a human being and that perhaps those things—her hell-fury and her gumption, her animated arms and legs—were the teeth and hooks of which they spoke. One final blow to her hip to keep her legs at bay and he heard something snap. He let her go.

  Drenched, he stumbled back to drier shore. And up she rose: bent to the side from where he struck her, soaked in blood and river water, staring at him with black, glowing eyes. Then suddenly, she looked past him and he swore that he felt a razor slice his shoulder as her eyes moved over it toward the distance. He felt himself loosening. It started in the pit of his stomach and worked itself outward. He lost control of his bowels. Urine trickled down his legs, to the ground, and toward the river; shit dropped into his pants. His breathing slowed. He felt light and empty. It was as if his body was turning to air. Was he dead? He looked at his feet and he seemed to be floating, like a haint. It made him laugh. The one magical nigger in the whole place and he had the misfortune of choosing her.

  Ain’t that just dandy?

  The next thing he remembered, he was back in his shack, facedown on his bed. For a moment, he felt well rested. Afterward, however, he could sleep only in fits, and his walk was suddenly bowlegged. There wasn’t a nigger on the plantation who didn’t make him want to vomit—especially the females. The resolve it took for him to overcome t
he sudden bout of nausea he would experience when one of them came near and, perhaps, stood too close, or when one of them would speak his name and drag it out a few seconds too long as the slow-witted were wont to do. And if James tried to say her name, the name of the one had he desecrated, tried to pronounce even the first letter, M . . . mm . . . mm, he found himself, again, coming undone, like at the river. So he kept his mouth closed and avoided her. No more dinners at Paul’s, not even when a place was set for him. No, I’ll eat in my cabin. It’s fine. I can keep my eye on the niggers better from there. Just in case. His rifle became a crucial border. And from the safety of that demarcation, he learned a great deal more about them than those who ignored the line.

  Trying to find where Ruth could be, he walked through the darkness as rock and weed crunched beneath his boots. The only song was the click of crickets backed by the river’s rush. He was listening for other footsteps, looking for other imprints, sniffing for perfume, but detected nothing. He slipped on the mud of the bank and caught a glimpse of a figure in the periphery. He turned quickly only to see the frilled edge of a gown pass by a tree. He followed it.

  He walked along the bank and then through the trees. His lantern flickered and then from behind him, a voice.

  “Late for a swim.”

  He couldn’t see her face even when he held up the lantern because she wore the shadows like something given to her by an old friend.

  “Impolite not to speak.”

  He wanted to, but she had caught him by surprise.

  “You must be the one who stole the moon, eh?” he said finally.

  She smiled. He intentionally denied himself the opportunity to.

  They walked across the plantation, neither of them speaking. He was amazed by her ability to go out in the darkness without stumbling, without uncertainty, without a lantern. He tried to provide her the benefit of his light, but she refused it, retreated into the thickness, laughed at the mere suggestion. And he wanted so badly to see her face.

  “What you creeping around for, Ruth?” he asked, hoping to draw her out.

  She twirled in her nightgown, praising the coolness that rushed underneath it, and hummed a melody. By the time they reached the fence, she was already under it and skipping up the stairs to his cabin.

  He thought her a puzzle missing more than a few pieces. But maybe those were the best kind. Those were the ones that required a bit more from those putting them together: a bit more time, a bit more patience, a bit more imagination. The last was the most fertile of grounds, where mastery was sown, and he had planned to patiently await what might grow.

  She walked into the cabin and danced around it.

  “This place is a mess,” she finally said. “Nobody ever taught you to keep house? You need to get hitched, maybe.”

  He smiled. He thought she might have, too. He put the lantern down on a small table with only one chair tucked under it. It was the first time he had ever even given that any consideration—Me? A wife? Who would? My manner ain’t exactly roomy for another. He was distracted, though, because her hair was fire.

  Ruth turned and went toward the door. He didn’t want her to leave.

  “I hope your cousin comes home soon. He’s going to sell those niggers that looked at me, you know.”

  “I know.”

  He looked at her as she walked past him. “Ruth, ain’t safe for you to be wandering the plantation at night. You should get back home, you hear?”

  “Why should I be scared of what’s mine?” She looked at him, puzzled.

  He removed his hat for the first time in her presence. As he had said before, his manner wasn’t roomy. He leaned his head to the side. “If only it was yours.” He held his hat to his chest to express respect and sincerity.

  Ruth chuckled and then she left. When he went to the door to see which direction she was traveling, she was already gone, swallowed up by a night she felt comfort in, which he didn’t understand. He saw four overseers off in the distance, talking to Zeke, Malachi, and Jonathan as the shift exchange began.

  James went back into his cabin. He sat down on his bed but didn’t remove his shoes. Eaten through as they were, it really didn’t matter if they were on or off. He threw his hat onto the floor. He reclined. He put his rifle next to him, in the place where his wife would have slept had he the inclination or the space. He put both of his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling. The lantern glowed and the flame made things in the dark move, but it also made James not want to. Heavy as his eyelids had gotten, he just let them do what they were asking.

  When he entered the dreaming, he was in the field and the niggers were picking cotton. But the cotton was alive and shrieked with every pluck. Then suddenly, the slaves stopped, all of them, at once. Like a flock of birds, they turned in unison. They raised themselves from their prostrate positions. Old and young, they all faced him. None of them had eyes, but somehow they could still see. And there was a noise coming from in between their legs: the sound of something moving, buzzing; listen closer: voices: beating. And the niggers started toward him and he had his gun, but there were too many of them and each of them had a pitchfork in his hands. He opened his eyes just as the first points were coming toward his forehead.

  He swung his legs around to the side of his bed and kicked over the spittoon.

  “Goddamnit.”

  He got up and surveyed the room for a rag. He avoided the mirror. The plank wood walls closed in on him. Four walls, blank, darker at the tops and at the bottoms, dyed black by mildew and fungus. The low ceiling sloped upward but granted no room to breathe, stretch, or stand tall. Just one room and very little furniture: a bed, a small table, and, yes, only one chair; atop the table the lantern still alight. Over in the corner: a washbasin, and next to it an extinguished fireplace with a small black pot hanging within.

  He found a used rag on the floor by the window. The glass reflected the flickering flame of the lantern. Outside was blackness, but still, shapes: the trees, the Big House, the barn, the nigger shacks on one side, and twelve or so others on the other side of the field. His own cabin was only a smidgen larger. How dare they do that. Give him a cabin that small. Let the niggers build ones almost as large. And on the other side of the fence. The fence that he couldn’t even see the shape of because it was so close. The fuckers. All of them: the propertied, their niggers, and the chasers.

  He wiped his saliva from the floor. In it, lumps of chewed tobacco that made him frown. He threw the rag into the fireplace, underneath the pot, into the ash. There was a stain on the floor where the spittoon had spilled. The brownness of its contents seeped into the wood grain. It would always be there now.

  He patted the pocket of his overalls. There was still half a plug of tobacco left. He pulled it out of the pouch, broke off a piece, and shoved it into his mouth. He sat in the only chair in the room and stared at the dying light in the lantern: how it shrank and dimmed but still made the whole room jump, inhale and exhale in its light, casting shadowy auras around everything. It made him long for evenings on the London plains, as foggy as they were, but not for its people.

  The promise of riches, he thought, was a damn lie. It had rendered his journey—his long, arduous journey on ships with gaunt, diseased men—a mockery. But he didn’t have the resources to return, not that things were much better in England. There, he would have the same sallow face and necessity for chewing tobacco. At least here his pockets were not as empty. But they were still not full enough, and that wasn’t what his cousin Paul had promised him.

  Paul didn’t tell him how disagreeable this land would prove to be, how it would harden him further, that even his voice would change. No one told him that the women here would scoff at him and that, as a result, his beauty—the one thing he could count on across the sea—would fade from disuse. Paul had called him vain and he thought Paul gluttonous. Linked by sins, he realized that
they were family not merely because the same blood ran through their veins, but because the same blood stained their hands.

  James’s father died first; his mother, moaning and coughing up something dark, shortly afterward. He was four and he had not yet learned how to bathe himself. So when two tall men finally came to the broken-down house of festering and insects, claimed him, and brought him, on horse, to some place where the mist hid everything, they scrunched their noses, and James blended into the mass of messy-faced, disheveled orphans forever dressed in gray.

  As he chewed on the tobacco, he thought, Dirty children should remain dirty for as long as they can. Clean ones attract too much attention. At the orphanage, busy hands were as much a workshop for the devil as idle ones. And because he was such a good student, he learned to do interesting things with his own. Picking locks and pockets, and sometimes women, was what he resigned himself to until he reached the age of nineteen and learned that his mother had a sister.

  There was no other way across the ocean than to rent himself out to the slavers. He was astounded by how many niggers they managed to squeeze onto the ship. They were filed away in the hull like documents, carefully stacked upon one another, barely enough room to wiggle their toes. Hot and funky, they were jammed into the space, chained together in a prostrate position, weeping and moaning, praying in their gibberish languages, surely begging their black-ass godlings to grant them the gift of being able to stretch their arms and breathe.

  Every day, James had the task of entering the space to feed them whatever slop was in the pot he was carrying. The food smelled almost as bad as the niggers. Each day, he entered and each day he left wishing he never had to see any of that ever again.