It terrified me because I didn’t have any foundation and it would require imagination work. The question for me was: Alright, but what about love? And since Toni Morrison herself said, ‘If you cannot find the book you wish to read, then you must write it,’ I knew that this was something that I would have to write. Then, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the character Paul D is sexually assaulted by an overseer. She talked about how a plantation master raped one of the enslaved men. So, I searched and searched to see if there was any evidence, or any record of it, and the only thing I personally encountered was in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Through all of the texts that I read, something stood out to me as missing-and that was the Black queer character in a time prior to the Harlem Renaissance. Robert Jones Jr: As an undergraduate, Africana studies was my minor and as part of that I got to read incredible pieces of literature, including some of the slave narratives written by enslaved people themselves. What made you want to create a Black queer love story about two enslaved men on a plantation in the Antebellum South? I loved reading it and taking in its expansive views. Efemia Chela for The JRB: Thanks so much for writing The Prophets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |