My Monticello(20)

Off to one side, Devin raised his chin, his dark locs cascading toward his shoulders. He made no move whatsoever for his gun, though it glowed in his waistband. Never mind that he’d been a gentle kid, and an A/B student all the way through his senior year when he’d been expelled for fighting. Ezra and Elijah stood behind him, with Ezra’s handgun threatening only the asphalt at his feet. Still, I don’t believe our weapons were the reason the old guards let us stay. One of the Black guards—the one with the Afro gone feral, like a modern Frederick Douglass—looked hard at me.

I know you, he said.

I recognized him too, from the summer before this one, back when the world was bleeding internally but not yet broken open—at least not for me. There were a record number of wildfires last summer, but they’d been far away, on the other coast. There were heat waves and brownouts across the Midwest, and cascading government shutdowns. There was a national election girded by massive demonstrations—hundreds or thousands were killed or injured, they’d said on the news. Even so, last summer and up until this one, there was power. Tourists still turned up, at least in this part of Virginia. I’d rented myself out here for an hourly wage, donning khakis and a cranberry polo like the old guards were wearing. My internship here had ended up being mostly “security,” prodding pocketbooks with a slim plastic rod and occasionally driving the shuttle to the house.

At my interview, I did not tell them that I was related to the shining white man of this house, our third American president and drafter of the Declaration of Independence. I did not tug at that barbed connection even though, that spring, someone from here had contacted MaViolet to inform her she was a verified descendant. They’d arranged for a car to pick MaViolet up from town so that she could attend a gathering at the house, along with other Black descendants of Thomas Jefferson or of the people he’d owned.

They want me there now, she’d said to me at the time.

I should say that our family did not need a call from Monticello to tell us we were Thomas Jefferson’s descendants. The story of our connection to that man and this place was already woven into the Love family lore. MaViolet had told Momma when she was little, and in turn Momma had told me, like a cautionary tale. The body remembers, she used to say.

When I was little, Momma told me about her first visit to Monticello. The whole third grade had traveled in school buses up the mountain, to marvel at Jefferson’s gadgets and admire the pristine grounds. As her group waited for their tour, eight-year-old Momma had realized this was the man her own mother had told her about. But we are, for real, kin with that old white president, Momma had insisted, even after her teacher bent close to warn her to quit “telling stories.” That’s outrageous, her teacher said. When Momma kept on, the same teacher made her wait by the path while the others skipped off toward the front porch for their tour. Hold it as your own, Momma said to me all those years later, and I took it to mean, Don’t bother with them; they won’t believe you. It was only on account of MaViolet—some sense of duty or regard she carried—that Momma marked me with my middle name.

Momma’s childhood school visit took place before Monticello’s board had begun to publicly acknowledge or certify Jefferson’s contact with Sally Hemings: that Hemings was not only Jefferson’s young slave but also his baby mama, his darker but not very dark never-wife. Hold it as your own, Momma told me again in her menthol rasp before she died. I took it to mean, There’s nothing left for us to do with that old history but bear it. I figured that was why Momma used to turn her head if ever there was mention of Thomas Jefferson or his posh ancestral home. She would wince as if praise of that man landed like blows on her body. And so, years later, at my interview, I held my tongue. Even though by then they were pushing a special Hemings tour where visitors paid extra and approached the house through the “enslaved people’s” entrance. I twisted my mouth into a smile, told them I was born and raised in town. I told them I’d been accepted to Jefferson’s world-class university, a transfer from the community college program. I let them see what they wanted to see: a local brown girl made good.

The guard with the mushroomed Afro lowered his gun. When our eyes met, his name came to me. Mr. Byrd, I said.

I knew I knew you, he said.

Mr. Byrd announced to the others that I used to work here. Love, right? Da’Naisha Love.

When he said my name, that night, on that ground, I felt the intervening omission—but did nothing to fill it. I go by Naisha, I told him.

The other two guards let their shotguns fall too.

I could feel all those bodies listing behind me, with the house itself still half a mile up the hill. MaViolet took a step and faltered. Knox and I helped her to the nearest bench. Our shuffling advance broke the guards’ loose line, and our neighbors followed. From her seat, MaViolet looked up and all around.


III.

We were shaken and exhausted. I saw then that Devin had been injured: Glass spiked along his forearm like bony plates on the spine of some extinct creature. From my seat beside MaViolet, I stole glimpses as he worked to pick out each jagged piece. I hadn’t eaten much that day, and my body ached with hunger, but I felt like I might be sick. My thoughts kept leaping back to our homes, those rooms in which I’d eaten and slept and laughed and broken down. To MaViolet’s kitchen table, pushed against one wall, with its pattern of yellow flowers. I used to sit there to do homework or while Momma ran a hot comb through my hair, right off the stove’s red-hot coils. According to Momma, I was tender-headed. I do recall squirming as steam rose from my hairline. Afterward, I would parade out front, my head marked by a giant bow.