Robert Jones Jr.

And so that all of these people are witnessing, whether they are inspired by Samuel and Isaiah's love, frightened by it, frightened for them because of it, or if they find it disgusting and they want to smash it.

All of these people are witnesses, for lack of a better word, who get to tell the reader what they see, why they see it.

And from that, that sort of chorus, I get to look at Samuel and Isaiah's deep, profound love for one another in a way that is more dimensional if I had just let them themselves tell it.

So they sort of guided me toward they, Samuel and Isaiah, as well as the other characters, sort of guided me toward the structure of the book, which then, of course, drove the plot of the book as well.

Well, that is a great question because

What the slave masters need is for all of the enslaved to be able to procreate.

Because I'm not sure how many people know this, but at a certain point, the importing of enslaved people became illegal in the United States.

So the way that plantation owners got around that was that they said, OK, we'll just ensure that the enslaved people we have procreate, whether that be us forcing them to have sex with one another or if that is by rape that we have to carry out ourselves.

And so.

In the face of this, here are Samuel and Isaiah, who are engaged in a kind of love and sexual relation that does not procreate, that does not give the enslaver what he wants.

So the fact that they are in love and defiantly so says, I will disobey you.

I am not going to do the thing you wish me to do, which puts them in grave danger.

Tubab is a Wolof word, and it means to convert.

And that is what some of the pre-colonial African cultures and societies and the people who spoke the Wolof language said.

used to describe the Europeans who came, whether through colonization or through missionary work, into their tribal spaces.

It spoke specifically to the attempt by these Europeans to change these people from one thing to the thing they wanted them to be, whether that was from their own spiritual practices to Christianity or from free people to enslaved people.

And that word was chosen very specifically because it conveys something that I wanted to convey in that sense.

If I were to put this book on a bookshelf next to books that I think it's in conversation with or in conflict with, I would put it in conversation with books like Beloved by Toni Morrison.

I would put it in conversation with books like Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston or The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

I think the prophets might be in conflict with