THE PROPHETS by Robert Jones, Jr.

This book is a difficult read on several levels.  On the one hand, it waxes poetic in too lyrical and metaphorical a fashion and has too many internal soliloquies and musings.  All of these abstractions detracted from my appreciation of the characters and the plot.  On the other hand, it is a painful story of love and unbearable suffering on a Mississippi plantation with hundreds of slaves.  More specifically, this book is about two teenage Black slaves, Samuel and Isaiah, who love each other. Eventually, the white “Christian” landowners taint the overall acceptance of these two lovers, and even the other slaves are complicit in the physical torture that Samuel and Isaiah suffer.  The book also gives glimpses into an African tribe in which a woman is king and two men marry each other without any prejudice against their choice of partners.  Ironically, the slave traders are appalled when they witness this marriage but think nothing of kidnapping the whole tribe, putting them in chains and throwing them into the stinking hold of ship.  In other words, the author pulls no punches in this scalding story, and Samuel and Isaiah really don’t stand a chance.  The plantation’s young heir, Timothy, is also gay and forces Isaiah to have sex with him, not long after Timothy’s kooky mother wanders into Isaiah and Samuel’s sleeping quarters in the barn.  Her claim that they looked at her gives her husband an excuse to inflict a horrendous punishment on them.  Things come to a head in the last fifty or so pages, and I flipped through them as fast I could, given the excessive verbosity.  The ending, however, left me puzzled as to the fate of a number of characters.  Exasperating!