Robert Jones Jr.

She was writing with pure intention about the evils of slavery.

But in doing so, she sort of diminishes the character of Uncle Tom.

He becomes less of a human and more of an argument she's trying to make.

And so in The Prophets, I'm sort of doing the opposite where slavery is not the argument.

The humanity of these characters is the argument.

Slavery is the backdrop.

So I'm returning to them their fullness as human beings, their agency, their complexity.

Whereas Harriet Beecher Stowe was making an anti-slavery argument by presenting Uncle Tom as a cipher.

for all of these ideas, I wanted to sort of move that to the background.

Yes, we know slavery is evil, but who are these people?

And how are they defined in a way that defies what we come to know as the caricature of the enslaved person?

Oh, yes.

Deeply unfortunate, but absolutely true, is the conflict in the book is about a betrayal.

And it's sad because the individual who is doing the betraying actually loves our protagonist, Samuel and Isaiah, but is, in a way...

forced to do what he has to do in order to protect someone else.

And so he's in a bit of a catch-22 and makes a decision that leads us down the road that it leads us down.

Oh, my goodness.

It has to be Things Fall Apart by Chenua Achebe, who wrote so beautifully about what we now call Nigeria just before colonizers come to his village.

So fully about customs and beliefs and interactions and culture and

outside of the gaze of whiteness.