Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Android | Google Podcasts | RSS
Robert Jones Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets” centers around the refuge that two enslaved young homosexual men find in each other on a plantation in the antebellum American South. It’s “an often lyrical and rebellious love story embedded within a tender call-out to Black readers, reaching across time and form to shake something old, mighty in the blood,” said The New York Times. Jones took a long and searching route to his acclaimed debut novel. He went back to Brooklyn College at 31, stayed on to earn his MFA in creative writing and began a long-running social justice blog called “Son of Baldwin.” He spent nearly a decade and a half writing a novel from his soul. “Toni Morrison said, ‘If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it,” Jones tells Joe Tirella on this episode of Book Beat.
Related Links
Robert Jones Jr. Is Son of Baldwin, and More (The New York Times)
Episode Transcript
Joseph Tirella: With the publication of his critically acclaimed debut novel “The Prophets,” Robert Jones, Jr., a Brooklyn College alumnus, has written a different kind of love story. “The Prophets” centers around the loving relationship between two enslaved homosexual Black men in the antebellum American South. As far as he knows, it’s the first novel to deal with the personal lives of Black gay men attempting to find some semblance of normalcy amidst their tortured existence on a plantation. Jones, who for years has written the social justice blog Son of Baldwin, weaves together a number of disparate narrative threads: The lives of plantation’s other enslaved people, the spirits of their collective African ancestors who address the reader as an otherworldly chorus, and the white slave-owning family who control every aspect of their lives. He even conjures up the tale of King Akusa, a fierce female African warrior with six wives, to create a story-within-a-story in a symphonic novel that wrestles with America’s blood-soaked racist legacy. Like the multi-faceted story he has written, Jones has traveled a long road to get to this point in his life. After more than one attempt, he returned to Brooklyn College at 31 and stayed on to earn a graduate degree in creative writing. It was another decade before he realized his dream of becoming an author. The Prophets is a bold and audacious debut from an exciting new voice in American fiction.
Robert Jones, Jr., welcome to Book Beat and congratulations on the success of your debut novel, “The Prophets,” which has been published to rave reviews. Could you discuss how long it took you to write “The Prophets” and what that process was like for you?
Robert Jones Jr.: Absolutely. It took me from start to finish 14 years. Fourteen years from the moment I put pen to paper, to the moment my editor said we are done with revisions was 14 years. And it started when I was at CUNY. I attended Brooklyn College for both my bachelor’s degree, which I received in creative writing, with a minor in Africana Studies, and my master’s degree, which I got in fiction. And I was sitting in class, on my first semester of being a graduate student at Brooklyn College, and my fiction tutorial instructor Stacey D’Erasmo said to the class, here’s your assignment, go out into the world and find objects that a character you’re thinking about would possess. And flitting around in my head was this not really concrete idea that I had for a novel. And I happened upon on the streets of Brooklyn, in the garbage by the curb, a pair of shackles. And it is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen in the street. But it was providence because it sort of gave me permission to put down onto paper this idea that I was afraid to write about, which was dealing with Blackness and queerness during a particular part of history, that is antebellum slavery in the South during the 1800s. I wanted to write about what it must have been like to be both Black and queer during that time, because I could not find anything written about it to any great extent. And I wanted to sort of investigate and dream up what that must have been like as a means to sort of put back into the historical narrative a part that has been erased.
JT: I’m glad you mentioned that. I’d like to go right into that because “The Prophets” centers around a love affair but a marriage, really, if we’re being honest. It’s a marriage between two male slaves in the American South before the Civil War. And I mean, you’ve talked about this a little bit, but could you elaborate about how that story came about? That this was the time period you wanted to discuss and Blackness and gay men loving each other.
RJ: Yes, indeed. Well, as an Africana Studies minor, I had devoured so much work of Black authors and Black scholars, and happened to understand something that was missing. Prior to the Harlem Renaissance period in America, there was nothing I was finding in the canon that talked about what it was like to be Black and queer. And that was just a question for me, being Black and queer myself is what is my lineage? Like what is the lineage for people who are like me? And I, you know, found James Baldwin, and before James Baldwin, Wallace Thurman, who was writing in 1929 about these issues. But prior to that I couldn’t really find anything except in the context of sexual assault. There was “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Harriet Jacobs, which is a slave narrative, she talks about how a white master sexually assaulted a male, enslaved person. And then also in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” one of her characters, Paul D, there’s a scene where he is sexually assaulted by a male overseer. And I thought, yes, but what about love? And that led me to do all sorts of research that I didn’t think I would do, such as going back even further than antebellum slavery to kind of understand what life was like for black people living on the continent of Africa prior to European colonization, and the [advent] of Christian missionaries, and discovered some absolutely wonderful things about how indigenous Africans thought about gender and gender identity and sexuality in a way that was so different from how I had been raised to think about it here in Western culture in America. And that was that for some of these indigenous Africans, there was no need to distinguish what we know as homosexuality, or queerness, or transness, all of it, to them was part of the landscape, part of the culture, part of their tribal understandings of existence. And once I discovered that, it was so freeing. It gave me the confidence to write about something that I had not seen written about before. And of course, Toni Morrison herself said, If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it. And though I was terrified, I set about writing it.
JT: That’s very interesting. I don’t think I’ve done anywhere near the amount of research you’ve done into that but in my own background, being Italian American, studying a little bit about Rome, in Greece, in ancient times, what we would call homosexuality wasn’t necessarily seen as anything wrong. Somewhere along the line of humanity, a switch seems to have gone off where what was acceptable and recognized as completely normal and just like you said, part of the landscape changed.
RJ: Yeah, and all of my research points to the spreading of Christianity as the point at which societies that normally saw that as normal suddenly saw it as sinful.
JT: Well, that would explain a lot. I want to go back to what you were saying about James Baldwin and Black male, gay writers in the Harlem Renaissance. I believe the writer’s name is Claude McKay, and books that he wrote, with more explicit love between men, which he wrote at the time but was never published, and I think they were just recently found, it’s very interesting to me in my learning of the Harlem Renaissance, it just seems so much more complicated and free and bohemian than it’s been presented to students in the decades afterwards.
RJ: I would utterly agree with that. You cannot look at the Harlem Renaissance without looking at its inherent queerness. These Black artists were gay and bisexual and maybe some of the earliest we understand as transgender artists in working during this time period. But subsequently because of the way our society is structured in that heterosexuality is considered default, or normal, or the standard, maybe unconsciously people who study this period sort of skip that part, or try to excuse it or erase it and to focus on the parts that make them feel more comfortable. Because it’s almost impossible to talk about somebody like Langston Hughes without talking about the fact that he was what we now call bisexual. But often our educational institutions do just that, they talk about him and his work without talking about something that was an intrinsic part of him. And I’m hoping that changes as we go along and as we discover and become more comfortable and familiar with these ideas around LGBTQIA plus and such that we sort of look at this time period in a new way.
JT: Well, from there I’d like to talk about how you did some of this research. I believe that’s what led you to add this other thread into the novel’s narrative. The one about King Akusa, who is this female warrior with six wives, who does not recognize homosexuality as anything out of the ordinary, much to the chagrin of the European missionaries who come to her village and murder and enslave her people. I know you did a bunch of research but could you talk a little bit about that character, and how you decided to add that thread and weave it into the tapestry of the novel?
RJ: One of the reasons why I wanted King Akusa and her people to be included in this novel was because I wanted to present these ideas about gender identity, and gender and sexuality in a way that was removed from what we call the white gaze or the Western gaze. Because let’s face it, I grew up in America with very particular ideas about all of those things, gender, sexuality, gender identity, operating on a very binary scale–man, woman, straight, gay, so on and so forth. But when I started reading the works about pre-colonial Africa, including oral testimonies and oral histories, I began to understand that the way I looked at things or the way that I was taught to look at things was not universal. And it wasn’t also just, it didn’t just spring up out of nature, these are constructed ideas. And I wanted to kind of share that revelation with others who might not know that in pre-colonial Africa, kings could be men or women or other because King was simply a title that was not attached to one’s genitals, or one’s gender or gender identity. It was simply a profession or title. And so I learned about women kings, and I thought, wow, this is blowing my mind and I absolutely love this idea. Let me meditate on this for a moment and see if there’s a way in which this history that I’m learning about can be incorporated and juxtaposed against the history that I already know. And it was kind of an inspiration because I had a dream, where a sentence came to me from whom I’m claiming are the ancestors, and it said, “You do not yet know us.” And I started to incorporate sort of this ancestral voice into the narrative, and that ancestral voice led me to go back even further in Black history to these pre-colonial African societies, to investigate and talk about and witness those practices and beliefs and cultures. And sort of give the reader a precursor to Samuel and Isaiah, the two main characters, and establish that their love has its own history, has its own lineage.
I wanted the ancestors to function as kind of this chorus that’s speaking not just to me as the author or to the reader who picks up the book but also to the other characters, connecting all of us in a way that sort of attempts to heal the divisions between African diasporic people. So myself as an African American born in the United States, connecting to descendants of Africans born in Brazil, connected to continental Africans, connected to Africans who live in the UK, that we are separate, but we are connected not just by blood, but by spirit. And the ancestors sort of function as a way to talk about that. Because you’ll know that they talk about memory, and how memory is, is we must always remember but memory is not enough because they they’re calling us to action, we have to do something, we have to do something that’s a verb like love. And that is what’s going to bring us back together. So the ancestors sort of function as kind of that bridge, trying to get us over troubled waters, so to speak.
JT: Can you tell us about your upbringing? You grew up in New York City, you went to Brooklyn College.
RJ: I’m a nontraditional student. My story is weird. Because, okay, I was born in Manhattan, raised in Brooklyn. I did not finish high school, I dropped out of high school because I was bullied. I was going to Lafayette High School in Gravesend. And I dropped out of high school and then immediately took my GED and scored almost a perfect score on it. Started working, I was working for Toys r Us at the time. And always had this feeling in me, though, that working wasn’t enough, that I needed to develop the scholarly or academic parts of me in some way. And I applied to CUNY and got into Brooklyn College and that was like in 1992. And I did really, really well the first semester. But then the second semester, I faltered, because I was dealing with a lot at home, I was coming to understand myself as a Black queer person, and all the troubles and shame and difficulties that come along with that. And I could not focus on my studies. And so I decided to focus on work. Then I tried again, in 1997, I came back to Brooklyn College, to try again to develop the academic parts of my life and again failed for the same reasons. I could not reconcile all of the disparate parts of my life. So I wound up moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, for a job with Bank of America. That did not work out after a couple of years and I was at a crossroads. And I said, What is it that I want to do? And I had known deep down inside that I always wanted to be a professional writer. But I never had the confidence because no one ever told me that I could do that. Until I was watching a show, Oprah Winfrey. And she had a guest on who said, “Don’t be afraid to follow your purpose. And you know what your purpose is already, you’ve been avoiding it your entire life. But don’t think about the last step, think about the next step you have to take in order to make that dream a reality.”
And so at the unemployment office, I’m looking, I’m on line, and I’m waiting to speak to a customer service person. And there’s this big sign right in front of me that says, “If you want to be a …. then you have to. . . ” And they had professions listed on one side and what you had to do next listed on the other. And so I went down the list and I saw writer, and then I went across and it said, Get your degree in writing. So I said I have to go back to school. And I was a little bit ashamed because here I am 31 years old in 2002. And I’m going to be going back to school with kids who are fresh out of high school. And I’m going to feel like the odd person out. And they’re going to think, you know, I’m not a good person because I waited so long to go to college. But what I realized, and what really happened was I found my community. Because I wasn’t the only student coming back as an adult to college at Brooklyn College. And I was at the point of maturity where I knew exactly why I was there. So there was going to be no funny games and no funny business and I was going to do precisely what I wanted to do because I had discovered my purpose, a purpose that I didn’t know when I was 21 years old at Brooklyn College the first time. Ten years later I knew why I was there. And the lowest grade I got my whole second tenure was an A minus. Because I knew exactly what I wanted. It became my ultimate priority to be a good student. And because Brooklyn College has such great faculty. George Cunningham, who was in Africana Studies. Roni Natov, who was in the English Department. These are people who are to this day my mentors who email me and call me and check in on me to make sure I’m still doing okay. It was like nothing I had ever expected from a college experience. I expected it to be all business. And it was actually family. And that was just amazing.
JT: Speaking of family, you talked about in the Times article, I believe, on one side of your family was Nation of Islam. And on the other side, Southern Baptist, which didn’t I assume leave a lot of room for you to be yourself and the person who you are. How did you eventually reconcile that?
RJ: I don’t know if I ever reconciled it. I think what I did was I rejected it. My mother, she would not call herself a feminist but she absolutely has feminist principles. And she rejected both the Nation of Islam that she grew up in, and the Southern Baptist that she married into because she refused to be considered secondary, she refused to be thought of as somebody else’s property, she refused to cover up in order to protect herself from men who should she thought should just act like civilized human beings instead of her having to do something in order to make them civilized human beings. So she rejected these religions outright. And my mother is atheist, she does not believe anything without evidence, hard facts. So she kind of provided a path for me to also reject the idea of any spiritual system that could not accept the whole full me. And so while I loved the music, and the rhythm, and the structure of Christianity in particular, I also realized there was no room for me to be my full self within that paradigm. And so I had to either put it at arm’s length, or reject it outright in order for me to be sane and healthy.
JT: You have a very large online following for a blog you’ve done for a number of years called Son of Baldwin. And at that time you were writing anonymously. How did the blog come to be and how did it influence your fiction writing?
RJ: Great questions. My first semester back at Brooklyn College in 2002, one of the courses I took was a core course called “People, Power and Politics,” which I think was… I can’t remember what number core it was, that was so many years ago. But God bless Brooklyn College for having that core system in place, because it introduced me to so many different disciplines, and I think made me a very well-rounded scholar. So I’m sitting in this course with Jerome Krase, who’s a retired professor. And he gives us an assignment to read an essay by some gentleman called James Baldwin, called “Here Be Dragons.” And I had heard about James Baldwin but didn’t know very much about him at all. And I read this essay, and I was absolutely blown away by the sheer brilliance of it. And it made me go out and read everything else James Baldwin had ever written. And in that discovery, I found that he was Black, queer, grew up in New York City and was a writer, all of the things that I am. And I adopted him as my spiritual godfather. And then I was like in total Baldwin mode and was wondering, why isn’t he more discussed? Like, how come in the same breath with Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, why aren’t we also saying James Baldwin? And I came across this documentary on PBS where, toward the end of it was about James Baldwin and his brother talks about Baldwin’s last words. And one of the things he said was, “I hope that someone finds him in the wreckage.” And that sort of broke me, because I felt like he wasn’t being found in the wreckage. Although he was being taught in schools, he didn’t have the real mass mainstream appeal that he has now. And I said, I am going to start a blog where I talk about James Baldwin and all of the things he talked about from race to sexuality to whiteness to politics. And we’re going to just kind of bring him back into the public consciousness.
And so I started the blog, Son of Baldwin, in 2007 or 2008, and people started to engage the site in conversation and it started to expand and it went beyond just focusing on all things James Baldwin to focusing on global issues. And that is kind of how it started. And it was my introduction to these global ideas. In no other way would I have been able to have conversations with, say, a Black transgender woman living in Zimbabwe, if not for social media and the internet, and this space called Son of Baldwin, which then informed me as a writer about my own sort of areas where I need to develop and think about politics in a way that’s more expansive, and not so narrow. And all of that filtered in to my writing, as Robert Jones Jr. in “The Prophets” because now I have a wider lens to sort of evaluate all of the topics I’m discussing in terms of white supremacy, and anti-queer sentiment and so on. And that was just a tremendous boon to me, to be able to have so readily available so many other perspectives.
JT: So maybe without that blog, I mean, it sounds like that was a key part of your journey as a writer.
RJ: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. It really sharpened my politics. So yes.
JT: So last question. You mentioned before, the Toni Morrison quote, if there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet that you must write it. Now you’ve written such a book. So what do you hope happens now that you’ve put this book out into the world?
RJ: The dream is that whoever reads this book will finish it with a renewed sense of humanity and will be less likely to look at their human siblings with anything other than reverence and respect. Because right now, we’re in a time, and maybe we’ve always been in this time in this country, where we can’t even respect each other’s basic humanity. Which is deeply saddening for me, it just depresses me that we are in this state, because we’re so advanced in other ways, technology and such. But when it comes to human character, we still seem so primitive. I’m hoping that in some small way, some spark is somewhere in “The Prophets” that makes people who read it feel a deeper sense of empathy, for people who are marginalized, and for themselves, because I think that is where it all starts. You can’t love somebody else if you hate yourself. And I think so much of the bigotry that we face in this country in this world stems from some deep insecurity in the bigot that makes them, you know, want to lash out at the other, at someone else. So I’m hoping that self-love and eventually love is the ultimate moral of “The Prophet” and that people pick up on that.
JT: Well, that’s a beautiful sentiment to end the interview on. I want to thank you for taking the time to do this. It’s been a pleasure talking to you,
RJ: Joe, this has been so fantastic. I’m back home at CUNY.