Excerpt from The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr., plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She moved over toward of the front of the kitchen to get some logs to heat the stove. There was a pile of them under another window, one which faced south. During the day, that window allowed her to see past the row of willow trees in front of the house, down the long path that led to the front fence and intersected with the dusty road to Vicksburg's town square.

She had only seen the square once, when she was dragged from Georgia and hauled off to Mississippi. Her old master had loaded her up onto a wagon, chained her feet, and sat her amongst some other frightened people. The journey took weeks. Once they got past the lumbering trees, the road opened up upon a great number of buildings, the kind of which she had never seen. She was marched from the wagon onto some platform, where she stood before a great crowd. A toubab, filthy and smelling of ale, stood next to her and shouted numbers. The people in the audience looked at her, none raised their hands in pursuit of her—none except Paul, who she heard tell his young charge that she would make a good kitchen wench and companion for Ruth.

She picked up two logs and headed for the stove, which sat near one of the doors. The kitchen had two doors. The one closest to the stove faced north and led to the covered porch where she slept. The other, facing west, led into the dining room, beyond which was the foyer, the living room, and the sitting room where Ruth entertained when she was up to it. One of the windows in the sitting room faced the cotton fields. Ruth often sat and stared through it for hours. On her face, a smile so delicate Maggie couldn't be sure it was a smile at all.

At the back of the house was Paul's study, which contained more books than Maggie had ever seen in one place. Glimpses of the room only intensified her desire to be able to open one of the books and recite the words, any words, as long as she could say them herself.

On the second floor, four large bedrooms anchored each corner of the house. Paul and Ruth slept in the two rooms facing south, adjoined by a balcony from which they surveyed most of the property. At the back of the house, Timothy, their only surviving child, slept in the northeastern room. The last bedroom remained empty for guests.

Perceptive folks called the Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.

Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky. Maggie sweat so profusely that the scarf wrapped around her head was drenched by the time she began gathering the cookware. She would have to change it before the Halifaxes got up to eat. Her neat appearance was important to them, these people who didn't even wash their hands before they ate and who didn't clean themselves after leaving the outhouse.

With powdered hands, Maggie rubbed her sides, content with how her own figure—not just its particular curves, but also how it never burned and became red under a beaming sun—separated her from her captors. She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp. The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties. For she was the kind of black that made toubab men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark.

When she felt her shape—narrow, hard—it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick. There was only the four dull corners of the kitchen, where sorrow hung like hooks and rage leaped in from any opening. It came in from the spaces between floorboards, the slits between doorjambs and doors, the line between lips.

Excerpted from The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.. Copyright © 2021 by Robert Jones, Jr.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.