The novel stretches itself to the point of disbelief when Jones dips his toe into that African past, and there are too many balls in the air for the details of life on Empty to cohere into a satisfying plot. Jones spins a sprawling story of jealousy and passion that foregrounds Black queerness, asserting that queerness has always been part of the Black experience-not just in the slave past, but the African one as well. 'There was no suitable name for whatever it was that Samuel and Isaiah were doing,' he reflects after seeing them coiled together in the barn they share. She becomes pregnant with Solomon-whom she can't bring herself to love-and this infuriates Amos, an older slave who loves her and schemes to turn the plantation against Isaiah and Samuel for what he thinks of not only as their selfishness, but their unnatural love.

There's Essie, for instance, the female slave Isaiah can't impregnate and who eventually is raped by Paul.

Samuel’s and Isaiah's sexuality throws a wrench in Paul's cruelty, and the consequences of their love send ripples through the novel's vast cast of vividly rendered characters. The plantation's owner is Paul, a White man who forces his slaves into having sex so the women will produce new slaves. Isaiah is haunted by fragmented memories of the mother he was stripped from as a child Samuel became Isaiah's first friend on the plantation when he was brought there in chains, and their relationship has bloomed into a love affair that sets them apart from the other slaves and disrupts the plantation's functioning. Samuel and Isaiah are two young men enslaved on a Mississippi plantation known as Empty. In his debut novel, Jones-perhaps better known to readers as the blogger Son of Baldwin-delivers an ambitious tale of love and beauty in the face of brutality. An epic attempt to imagine a history of Black queerness from the African past to the antebellum American South.

The prophets book robert jones jr