It took Robert Jones Jr. 14 years to write “The Prophets,” but almost no time at all to become an instant New York Times-bestselling author once it was published. His debut novel was released Jan. 5 and has been described as a new American standard, a love letter to both history and the Black, LGBTQ love it has so often ignored.
“The Prophets” introduces readers to Isaiah and Samuel, two enslaved men on a Deep South plantation who find sanctuary in one another’s arms. A historical fiction detailed through a contemporary lens, it addresses issues of race, religion, sexuality and more in ways that only Jones could.
The author founded “Son of Baldwin” in 2008, a thriving social justice community that pays tribute to James Baldwin, the Black, LGBTQ voice of a generation. Jones saw everything he wanted to become in the celebrated novelist and created it to fight for marginalized voices everywhere.
“A quote widely attributed to James Baldwin, but was, in fact, coined by Robert Jones Jr. … succinctly states the intention of Son of Baldwin,” the blog explains. “‘We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.’”
The community gives space to diverse voices from across the globe, among them continental Africans who would inspire Jones to continue his work on “The Prophets.” The blog exposed him “to people whose ideas about gender, sexuality and gender identity are wholly different from how I was raised in a Western culture to interpret them,” he says, directly influencing its narrative.
“Isaiah was Samuel’s and Samuel was Isaiah’s,” the novel is officially described. “That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters.
“But when an older man—a fellow slave—seeks to gain favor by preaching the master’s gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own,” the synopsis continues. “Isaiah and Samuel’s love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation’s harmony.”
Watermark interviewed Jones after the release of “The Prophets,” becoming the first LGBTQ publication to do so and receiving an exclusive in the process. Jones says he is now in talks to adapt the novel into a film or limited series – and discussed his career with us at length as his profile continues to rise.
WATERMARK: Why are dedicated spaces for Black, LGBTQ voices like “Son of Baldwin” still so important?
ROBERT JONES JR.: At that intersection of being Black and also being LGBTQ, you experience this weird dichotomy in terms of where you find community. You go into some Black communities and you’re unwelcome because of the LGBTQ+ part of yourself – then you go into some LGBTQ+ communities, and you’re unaccepted because of the Black part of yourself. So there needs to be a space where people who inhabit all of these identities combine. And at that intersection, have a place to talk, to learn, to grow, to laugh, to sing, to dance, where we don’t feel sort of left out or judged, or in danger from the people who for some reason can’t see the humanity in us.
What have you learned from the community?
What’s so wonderful about “Son of Baldwin” is that it’s global. The people who participate in it are from all over the world … for example, Esther Armah, who is a brilliant artist and activist, she’s from Ghana. She’s said, “If you asked my great grandparents, ‘what is the homosexual?’ They would have said, ‘I don’t know, we don’t have that here.’” People have interpreted that as to say that there are no homosexuals in her culture, in her tribe, and they would have been wrong.
If they had explained to her great grandparents, “this is what I mean by homosexuals,” they would have said, “Oh, I get it. Love. We have that, yes,” because for them, there was no reason to distinguish love between two men or love between two women, or even what we call transgender. There’s no need to give that separate categories; they were all considered part of the landscape. That was such an eye-opening moment for me because I thought that everybody in the world thought like Americans about these things – and no, they do not. There are other ways to approach these things and I would have never known that, if not for “Son of Baldwin” and encountering the people who participate in that space.
What influenced you to write “The Prophets?”
Well, in undergrad, my minor was Africana Studies – and it was the first time that I had encountered that many Black writers. In my education prior to that, I don’t think I was ever assigned a single book by a Black writer. But as an undergrad, I was reading all of these fantastic people … I was devouring everything that I was reading and found something to be curious.
I realized that the Black, queer figure, whether male or female, does not show up in Black history until about the Harlem Renaissance, when Wallace Thurman is writing in 1929, “The Blacker the Berry.” I said, “Okay, so we begin at 1929. Where were we before that? What were we called? What did we do? Where were we, how did we love?” I started scouring the canon to look for that information.
What did you find?
I could only find references to Black, queer people in the context of sexual assault or rape. I said, “These are heterosexual people writing about queerness as something despicable, disgusting and depraved. Where are the stories about Black, queer people in loving situations or even lustful but consensual situations?”
So I said, “Let me start reading and writing” and I could not find it anywhere, so something told me I was going to have to write this. The late, great Toni Morrison said, “If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it,” and I was terrified to do so. There was no template, there was no infrastructure for me to imagine what it must have been like to be Black and what we now call queer, in the conditions of something like antebellum slavery, which is the period in which I wanted to discuss it.
How did you begin the process?
When I went to grad school, one of my instructors gave me an assignment to find objects that a character we’re thinking about might possess – and I found a pair of shackles in the garbage on the streets of Brooklyn. I immediately took that as a sign that this is that enslaved character that I was afraid to write about, telling me to please tell his story. That character turned out to be Samuel, and that semester, October 2006, I began writing the first sentences and sketches of what would eventually become “The Prophets” 14 years later.
How did you begin shaping the novel’s characters?
I began with Samuel after I found those shackles. I started to sit down to sort of sketch him out: who he was, what he looked like, what he loved to eat, those sorts of little human details. Initially, “The Prophets” was going to be told from a singular point of view, the character who eventually became Isaiah. Then I thought, “No, maybe I think I should tell it from Samuel’s point of view since he’s the first character that I imagined,” so I tried that and it didn’t work.
Samuel did not have the scope or the perspective to talk about all of the things I wanted to discuss in this novel. So I thought that the heart of the story is the love between Samuel and Isaiah, and that love needed witnesses. The first thing I had to do is really establish the passion, the love and the intimacy between Samuel and Isaiah – and then I had to imagine characters who would be inspired by that, who would be terrified by that, who would be disgusted by that and who would want to either protect it or smash it. That is how the community came about around them, each of them having perspectives about Samuel and Isaiah’s love.
Who are The Prophets?
As I was writing and rewriting “The Prophets” I kept coming back to the break – not just in the book, but in the research I did – the point at which Black people suddenly saw queerness as something disgusting. And that point was with Christian indoctrination. So I went back to pre-colonial African societies to look at how they looked at gender. What we now call queer and trans were normal parts in many of the societies of Africa and it did not change until European colonization and Christian missionaries came into their territories and essentially brainwashed them into believing that these behaviors, these states of being, these identities, were sinful.
How did you approach that?
I needed to represent how that break occurs in a literary fashion, and one of the ways was with names. Often, enslaved Africans were stripped of their real names and given biblical names by the white people who owned them, and so I thought, “that’s another way that this break occurs: you’re robbed of your culture and given another one.”
The propaganda is so strong that you begin to believe these beliefs as your own – and so, the reason why I entitled the book “The Prophets” is because one, these characters are renamed as biblical characters, and are also giving testimony in the same way that biblical prophets do. And two, because the ancestral voice that comes in to talk to the reader … is serving as a kind of prophecy in which they’re trying to tell these enslaved people and the readers, “This is not how we should be with one another. There was another way before you were indoctrinated, let us tell you.”
Did you have concerns about sharing that?
I was terrified to write the book because I was so afraid that people would see it as a sacrilege. Here I am saying that Black, queer people have always existed, which is something very contrary to what many people believe. Many people in Black communities believe that queerness is a result of trauma, that Europeans defiled us and made us queer, not that you could possibly be born queer or that you become queer as a natural part of nature.
So I feared a lot of backlash from Christians, from homophobes and anti-LGBTQ people and thought that people would find it farfetched, because we don’t really talk about this at all. Wonderfully though, since writing and during the process of writing this book, other Black authors have broached this topic … I no longer feel alone, I feel like I have community. So that gave me courage to go ahead and continue writing and getting this book out into the world.
It’s out there in a big way. How did you find out it was an instant New York Times Best Seller?
Oh my goodness. My husband and I were sitting on the sofa, watching “Vikings.” (Laughs.) It was maybe five or six o’clock and my phone kept buzzing. I looked and I see all of these messages from my agent, PJ Mark, my editor, Sally Kim and my publicist, Katie McKee. I called them back and they put themselves on three way and we’re all talking and they’re like, “Robert, Robert, you won’t believe this.”
How did it feel?
I did not expect it. I wrote this literary novel that’s about this really specific population of people, and I thought, “who’s going to want to read this in the mainstream?” I was not expecting to chart at all – so when they said it, I could not absorb it. I couldn’t absorb it.
The entire Putnam team and I got on Zoom, everyone was applauding and then at some point, it hit me: “This book is on the New York Times Best Seller list.” I just broke down into tears … Any success that this book experiences is because of two groups of people, the Putnam publicity and marketing team and independent booksellers that went to bat for it. I am eternally grateful for that.
Why do you feel “The Prophets” is important for white readers, particularly those who are LGBTQ?
I think it’s a good book for white people, and specifically white LGBTQ people to read, because just like in the rest of society, there is a kind of persistent anti-Blackness in white LGBTQ spaces.
White, LGBTQ people often don’t think they can be racist because they are also marginalized as LGBTQ, and so they do not recognize it or self-reflect about it. It shows up in myriad ways, including in some sexual ways. Not just with the profiles that say “No Blacks” but also in the fetishization of Blackness … dehumanizing terms coming from white LGBTQ people who think that they’re paying us compliments … that are actually anti-Black/racist.
So if they read “The Prophets,” they can see for example, the ways in which Timothy, one of [the white] characters also fetishizes the two main characters, and the problematics that causes.
When you fetishize someone, you are stripping them of their full humanity and making them into an object of desire, “object” being the operative word. So maybe we can begin to have a confrontation.
Why is it important to have?
As Americans we always want to move on without reckoning with what is hurt. You can’t heal unless you heal the wound, and you have to expose the wound to clean it. You can’t just put a Band-Aid over it and let it get infected, and that’s what we do in the country.
So hopefully, white readers get that sense out of the book, a renewed sense of humanity, not just for Black people, but for themselves. When you are anti-Black, when you are a racist person, you are not demeaning Black people, you’re demeaning yourself. You might be harming Black people, but you’re diminishing your own humanity by doing that.
I just want us all to look at each other as human beings, say, “I respect you because you exist, period, the end, whatever your identity is, and I have no rights to dominion over you, or control over you, or to do you any harm.” That’s what I’m hoping not just white readers but all readers get from “The Prophets.”
On that note, what do you hope Black, LGBTQ readers might take from it?
Their glory. For so very long, Black, LGBTQ people have been subject to untold horrors that results in not just violence and death, but in a profound self-hatred. We do things to harm ourselves and to harm others in our community because we’re perpetuating what we’ve been taught about ourselves and lies.
I’m hoping that “The Prophets” helps Black, LGBTQ people – and Black people in general – realize that those things are lies, so that Black, LGBTQ people can reclaim their glory. And therefore, open a path for other people to reclaim their glory too, by recognizing Black, LGBTQ people as fully human. As a part of the community worthy of dignity and respect.
What’s next in your career?
The moment I can sort of put “The Prophets” to bed, at least in my creative mind, my intention is to write as many more novels as I possibly can … I have an idea for another novel, which I was 40 pages into before I had to turn in my “Prophets” manuscript. It takes place in the 1980s, here in New York City, and I am anxious to get back to those characters to see what they have to say, what they have to tell me. I have ideas for at least two more beyond that, but we shall see.
What else should readers know about your work?
This is a difficult book in terms of its subject matter, in terms of structure and language. I ask that people take their time with it, because it is not something to be read like a mainstream book might be read.
I also want to say to LGBTQ writers, please write, please tell your stories. You need to be out there. People need to be reading things that happened to us and to see the world from our perspective, which has been ignored for so very long. I know it’s difficult and you might have a lot of opposition but write anyway.
Robert Jones Jr.’s “The Prophets,” published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, is available wherever books are sold. To order your copy and to learn more about Jones and “Son of Baldwin,” visit SonOfBaldwin.com.
