Black Queer Love in an Empty Place

Black Queer Love in an Empty Place Terrance Wooten (bio) Robert Jones, Jr.'s The Prophets, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2021 The Prophets tells a gripping narrative about the struggle to find love in an Empty place. Centered around the queer intimacy and lifeworlds of two enslaved Black teens, Isaiah and Samuel, the novel attempts to reimagine plantation life in the Deep South by reading slavery through the analytics of gender and sexuality. Moving beyond gendered and sexual acts of violence, which is most often how we come to know the sexual lives of those who were enslaved—indeed, the necessity of gendered sexual violence to the making of modernity, the colonial landscape, the plantation, and what Cedric Robinson (1983) describes as the system of racial capitalism is taken seriously in this novel—Robert Jones, Jr. also asks us to consider how love and intimacy figure into the lives of enslaved Black people. The novel does not concern itself with historical accuracy but rather endeavors to help readers see and know Black queerness in those spaces and times constructed as otherwise incompatible: the plantation, precolonial Africa, early America, and the South. Jones Jr. makes Black queerness legible without reducing it down to a set of sexual acts or identities only knowable, searchable, or indexed and archived through what Michel Foucault describes as the psychoanalytic processes of confession as a form of truth sharing (Foucault 1990). Or, as historian John Howard puts it, the novel allows us to "read the silence" by not "privileg[ing] the spoken (or written) over the unspoken (or unwritten)" in the way that queer history has often been called to do (Howard 2001, 28). That is, it takes as historical fact the presumption that Black queer love has a history before the archive, rooted in the flesh, that does not always pronounce itself; the word "gay" or "queer" does not appear in the novel. Instead of trying to "prove" through archival records that Black queers are historical subjects and their [End Page 321] love is a historical object that can be analyzed, Jones Jr. uses the novel as a way to imagine how Black queer love might take shape in the scant presence of "official" documentation. What the novel brilliantly reveals is the value of fiction in recovering that which has been erased, that which seems to remain ineffable, and that which is often named as undiscoverable in the historical record: Black queerness. Indeed, even within the deeply attentive and much-needed edited collection by historians Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris, Slavery and Sexuality: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (2018), men like Isaiah and Samuel remain apparitions. At the same time, there has been a growing body of scholarship that has documented "same-sex" intimacies during enslavement. Increasingly, Black scholars have pointed out how elements of same-sex desire played out on slave ships and plantations, sometimes through rape and other times as consensual practices used for survival (Nero 1996; Tinsley 2008, 2010; Abdur-Rahman 2006; Foster 2001, 2019; Woodard 2014). Rarely, however, is slavery taken as a central site of knowledge production within studies of and literature about Black queerness (Sears 2018). Robert Jones, Jr. seems to be responding to that void, a void that perhaps only a novelist can fill. The Prophets settles on Samuel and Isaiah, two Black teen boys (sixteen and seventeen) who fall in love in the red-and-white barn under the heat and humidity of the Delta sun in Mississippi, in the place the enslaved call "empty," and among the mundane violence that structures the everyday life of enslavement. They are opposites, Samuel and Isaiah—"one black, the other purple; one smiling, the other brooding" (75). Samuel is often characterized as the more militant partner, plotting to escape the plantation and find a life outside of enslavement, whereas Isaiah wants to make the most out of what is given to him despite being enslaved. The boys share a love that is no secret to other Black people; though it is never attached to an identity category. These are not gay-identified men; they are Black boys who love each other, the living embodiment

Aesthetics · Art · Human sexuality · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Queer theory · Silence · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology