My Monticello(19)

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Fleeing First Street in the Jaunt, we barreled by Brown’s corner store with its sabotaged pumps and boarded-up windows. We veered at a blighted traffic light and rolled down a long sagging road past small, once-cheerful-looking dwellings. By then, those houses stood battered and grim-faced, ringed in waist-high lawns.

Behind me someone said, You cut?

Someone else called out, Everybody all right?

Then folks’ voices began to surge with new panic. Is that them? Oh God! They’re still coming! Drive!

It was true, in the side-view mirror, I could see an inky Jeep was gaining speed behind us. More men and the same, closing the distance, and what would they do when they reached us—what should we do? Fresh cries floated up from the aisle, but for a moment all meaning of those words was lost on me: A deep ringing invaded my head. I spun the wheel right at the intersection, but the Jeep turned too, trailing at a distance. Now we were heading south toward the edge of town.

Lord, what is happening? I heard MaViolet say.

I did not know where we were going—I only knew I meant to get us all away. I might’ve taken the exit for the highway, except a lone man was pacing its slanted mouth. When he saw our Jaunt, the exit man splayed his arms. He seemed to be yelling but I couldn’t tell what he was yelling. I could not tell if he meant to lure us or to warn us away. A bandana covered most of his face, and something dark dripped over and around his eyes.

Behind us, the Jeep screeched to a stop, straddling both lanes, as if there were an invisible line drawn.

I kept straight, my pulse wild in my throat as our hometown shrank and cowered behind us. The voices in the bus went silent again, and in their absence, I could hear the shhhhush of tires gripping, an unsteady rumble as we treaded fallen branches. In the rearview, MaViolet worried the yoke of her housecoat, her face caught in waning copper light. I drove us past the community college, where I used to go, tucked into rolling hills. We were fast approaching the rise of the Piedmont Mountains where the road slid between the shadows of trees. At the last failed streetlight, I swung us left, if only to disappear the specter of that oil-black Jeep still spun out across the road.

I did not know that I would bring us here. Not even as we passed the steep drive up to the orchard, or slowed at the curve near the old-timey general store, with its dark planked walls and the massive wheel of the mill clinging to one side. Across a parking lot, a plantation house turned tavern shone white with black-shuttered windows. I kept on, following the slender tree-lined route, rounding a set of S curves, pulled forward as if by gravitation. The Jaunt, squat and heavy, skidded toward the edge of the road like we might tumble into the trees. It was only when I saw Monticello’s stone-faced bridge, lucent in the twilight: That’s when I understood.

I drove us underneath that bridge and followed the driveway as it doubled back and overtop the same arch. Then we began our final ascent. Slowly. Up and up, as if we’d spent our whole lives climbing. Past a wooden gate, breached by a fallen branch. Up through the towering trees.

We rounded a small loop and rolled up on the welcome pavilion—a complex of stone and wooden buildings around an open patio—as if arriving for some rare evening tour. We jerked to a halt in our lost-and-found Jaunt, pockmarked by bullets: The men on First Street had shot out a set of windows, so we arrived with glass glittering on our scalps.

We were mostly neighbors, mostly brown and Black people, sixteen of us in all. The youngest among us was three months old. At seventy-eight, MaViolet was the eldest. She floundered in her seat, her arms splayed for purchase. Knox helped her to her feet, his glasses speckled with what turned out to be someone else’s blood.

We came with whatever we could grab or hang on to. The Yahya family, who had two young children and a baby, brought yards of colorful fabric tangled in Papa Yahya’s arms. Ms. Edith, who was well into her sixties, but spry and owllike in her downy brown tracksuit, carried a leatherette book of psalms. The white couple from the white house across the road, Ira and Carol, carried two snowy hens, clucking and bristling in their grasps. KJ, who was slight for ten and on his own, carried a drab pea-green suitcase with a rip running along one side. Our neighbor LaToya—who we all knew sold herself—carried her own gleaming body, her rust-colored hair and near-white skin, her cheeks doused in rose-gold blush.

Among other things, Devin carried a bright seed of angry. His cousin Elijah, who was built like a wall, hefted a large duffel full of handguns and clips. Elijah’s twin, Ezra, the smaller of the pair, carried one handgun, along with the smell of reefer in his hair. The guns had belonged to the twins’ father—Devin’s uncle—who’d been decorated police out in the county.

We stepped down cautiously, testing the new ground.

We came with nine pocketknives, five sets of keys, and seven useless cell phones, which sank like stones in our pockets. Knox carried the same messenger bag he’d brought with him from campus days earlier; it held a toothbrush, a gridded notebook, a copy of Morrison’s Song of Solomon that I’d lent him some time before. MaViolet carried empty trembling hands, and beside her I held no more than the clothes on my body: high-waisted cutoffs and a navy T-shirt touting the university’s emblem in orange. Months earlier, I’d cut a hopeful scoop from the once-tight collar, but standing there, I tried to tug one fallen edge back onto my shoulder.

Three guards hurried toward us from the ticket office, moving together through the thickening dark. Unshaven men, well into their sixties, the trio wore khakis and cranberry polos, the same uniform I’d worn the summer before. Up close, they did not look like guards exactly—more like drivers, or docents maybe, who’d been begged or commanded to defend the historic house. They looked weary though, their pant cuffs hemmed in mud. The shotguns they raised struck me as ancient, as if they’d been pulled off the wall of some exhibit, as likely to jam or explode as fire. One white guard and two Black guards; the white one stepped forward. Keep driving, he said, but our feet had already touched the ground, and we’d gotten here on fumes.