WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOTABLE INTERVIEWS w/ ROBERT Vulgar GenuisesLayla Saad Brit Bennett Kiese Laymon Deesha Philyaw Brooklyn College ARTICLES Sylvia Tamale : Homosexuality is not un-African ARTISTS Beah Richards : Black Woman Speaks PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: Twitter : @harshzaran :: :: IG : @harshwordspod :: MUSIC :: sabzi : sabzi.bandcamp.com ..read more

be a stone. please be a stone. that was what some rocks said to some feathers, to the dandelion-wishes that floated about minding their own business before coming down slowly to land in some meadow and, after a time, take root. they wanted soft things to harden, for their own good, for their own good. but that left no consideration for the traveler who had to walk barefoot over the terrain, left them no comfortable place to step. and Isaiah wanted to be that for Samuel.  WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: twit ..read more

Paul didn't tell him how disagreeable the land would prove to be, how it would harden him further, that even his voice would change. no one told him that the women here would scoff at him and that, as a result, his beauty—the one thing he could count on across the sea—would fade from disuse. Paul had called him vain and he thought Paul gluttonous. linked by sins, he realized that they were family not merely because the same blood ran through their veins, but because the same blood stained their hands. WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PO ..read more

Isaiah moved slowly toward Samuel and put an arm around his waist. he pushed against him. Samuel threw an arm around Isaiah's neck. they pressed their faces together. for long moments, they breathed heavily into each other. one of them coughed. the other choked. a sob and its refusal. they rubbed their foreheads together. finally, Isaiah put his hand on Samuel's jaw and they looked each other in the eyes. they kissed. it was neither gentle nor rough, but it was full. something had been exchanged. WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST ..read more

truth could be known as long as it wasn't spoken. given form, truth laid waste to even the most elaborate and fortified of walls. not even the rubble was safe.  WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: twitter : @harshzaran :: :: IG : @harshwordspod ..read more

he thought his eyes were accustomed to darkness, but this was a different kind entirely. this dark had nothing to do with inky night or ancestral shadows or the ebony of playmates and lovers. no, this dark lived inside the captors like a chasm that nothing could ever fill no matter what was tossed into it. WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: twitter : @harshzaran :: :: IG : @harshwordspod ..read more

he didn't mean to use it as extortion. he saw the look on Isaiah's face when he wouldn't reveal it. there, then, he remembered Isaiah's father's face: all twisted up in the way it does when the soul is trying to leave the body. the difference between grief and sorrow lay there, a cavern in the face that threatened heartbreak for all witnesses, or, in Amos's new language, the threat of being turned to living salt, to be like an upright but unmoving sea.  WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: twitter : @harshzaran ..read more

but he did think about the ways in which his body wasn't his own and how that condition showed up uniquely for everyone whose personhood wasn't just disputed but denied. swirling beneath him were the ways in which not having lawful claim to yourself diminished you, yes, but in another way, condemned those who invented the disconnection. he hoped. maybe not in this realm, but absolutely in others—if there were others. matching hard for hard did nothing but create wreckage. but being soft, while beautiful, was subject to being torn asunder by the harder thing. what other answer was there then bu ..read more

the house itself was built on top of bones. she could hear them rattling every once in a while because the shacks, too, were essentially tombstones for the land's First People, often unengraved. WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @thesonofbaldwin NOVEL The Prophets PODCAST SOCIAL MEDIA :: twitter : @harshzaran :: :: IG : @harshwordspod ..read more

maybe Be Auntie had no choice. maybe after so many times of being beaten in the field by Massa only to return, scarred, to the shack to be beaten by her lover's hand, she had finally decided to yield. maybe she thought she could influence manhood in another way, shower them with a tenderness they could carry with them and share with other women they encountered, if they remembered. that was the problem. the desire for power erased memory and replaced it with violence. and Be Auntie had the bruises to prove it. nearly every woman did. WRITER Robert Jones, Jr. Twitter : @sonofbaldwin IG : @theso ..read more