Robert Jones Jr. biography

Interview

In a letter to his readers, Robert Jones Jr. discusses the driving force that led to his debut novel, The Prophets, about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation.

Dear Reader,

There is often a sense in writers that their work is There is often a sense in writers that their work is never good enough, can never be good enough. But we continue to write because it is beyond our control. I didn't know if the story of The Prophets could be told. Or rather, I didn't know if I could be the one to tell it. Not only was the subject matter too uncharted but the psychic weight of it felt too heavy to dredge up.

But I kept hearing whispers.

In my dreams and in my waking: calls not just from somewhere, but from some time, beckoning, laughing, scolding, demanding to be heard. It was the singing, however, that I heard most clearly. And in the event that I decided to ignore the pleas of the dead, they spoke to me through living words, in the voices of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and others telling me to ask the question because because then I must write down the answer and share it.

As a Black queer person who has felt so cut off from my lineage, the question I wanted to ask: Did Black queer people exist in the distant past? Of course they did, but it's often the way of a traumatized people to erase the past, shun excavation of it, deny it ever existed, or pretend that it looked some other erroneous ...