My Monticello(24)



Could you make me not be knocked up, I thought.

I’m all right for now, I said.

I ran my free hand over my belly, which was flat, but for how long? Understand, I wasn’t ready to be pregnant. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be ready. Even before the unraveling, with the world as it was, I’d set my sights on bounded things: I wanted to get my degree, to go to grad school, maybe. I wanted to become a teacher, to do something for somebody the way so many people had done for me.

Are you sure? Knox said.

Could you make this baby yours, at least? I thought.

I couldn’t be sure if Knox was the father, or if Devin was the father. I pressed into Knox’s body, looked up at him from under his chin, and offered my mouth, even if the whole cavity of my heart ached. Knox kissed my lashes, the blunt slope of my nose. He ran our still-joined hands up so that his thumb brushed my rib cage, my chest, until the sound of wanting him escaped my parted lips, despite my deep worry. He kissed me slowly, studiously. He cocooned his body around mine despite the heat. We stayed like this, turning in tandem, trying to spare our hips, our shoulders the unrelenting hardness of the ground.

When I felt Knox drift into watery sleep, I untangled myself to lie on my back. The ground felt uneven and endless beneath me. The moon shone high and bright in the patch of open sky. I could hear MaViolet’s soft snoring cut through the chirp of insects.

I was so tired my eyes burned, but when I let them close, all I could see was the slant view from MaViolet’s window: men with guns rushing forward, their faces glinting orange, reflecting oily flames. That one pale boy in the pickup window, all hair and teeth. In my head the boy was grinning fiercely, his thatched hair an ashy blond as if it were an extension of his skin, his eyes protruding in ecstasy or terror. My eyes flew open. In sleep, Knox had thrown his arm back over me. He mumbled something that sounded like my name. Then MaViolet called to me in earnest.

Grandbaby, she said.

I tried to answer. I struggled against gravity to wake myself, to pull my body upright, failing at first. It felt like that bit of earth was trying to claim me, as if I’d been lying on that patch for more than a hundred years. I swear I could feel roots clutching, rocks cleaving between the blades of my shoulders.

Nay-Nay, she said.

I willed myself up and made my way to her, propped in those chairs. In my haste to offer her water, I tipped the plastic bottle too quickly. Water dripped from her mouth, beaded along the quilted smocking of her housecoat. Together we fumbled to brush it away before it sank in.

You think they got to ours? MaViolet said.

When she said this, I could almost see MaViolet’s front room, her looming shelving unit crowded with a lifetime of collections: dust-speckled pictures of her late husband, Papa Alred, in his porkpie hat and suspenders; Momma’s orphaned ebony African heads alongside MaViolet’s gleaming porcelain figurines—everything jockeying to be seen. All the versions of that same front room in the homes of our neighbors, dwellings bridged together in sets of two or four, helmeted in stray slopes of metal roofing as if the whole project had been conceived from remnants. Over the years, MaViolet had lived in three different units. She’d moved from Rose Hill after Papa Alred died and her landlord steepened the rent. MaViolet had been famous back then, for her fruit pies and red velvet—she’d catered events around town and out into the county. But when she looked to rent or buy her own place, she was deemed unqualified, even after she found work in food services at the university. Eventually, she and Momma moved to First Street, a community full of Black and brown people, back when the buildings were newish and varnished in some kind of promise.

MaViolet sat up straighter, wiped her mouth with her hand. You think they burned ours down?

I don’t think they got ours, I said. I hoped this was true.

Around the way, we could hear Mama Yahya—she was singing to the baby, she was pleading with the baby. She was weeping.


IV.

We woke to the sharp sounds of birds crying. We woke glazed in sweat, our limbs newly speckled in bites from unseen insects. Our stomachs rumbled and our chests ached with all the losses we’d inventoried that first long night. Papa Yahya had left an amber-beaded necklace; it had long ago belonged to his mother, a difficult woman. Elijah had left a rubied ring, which had been given to him by a scout years earlier; the ring had turned out to be worthless, but its gleam and tight fit had inspired a feeling of possibility. LaToya’d left her GED certificate—she could picture it, she said, in a top drawer, among loose bills. Ms. Edith had left a small wooden cross hanging on the wall above her bed. I’d left something precious back on First Street too, but I hid its absence from myself until whole days had passed. We woke wondering: Had our friends and neighbors made it somewhere safe? Had we?

The white-house couple had lost one of their hens during the night, so we woke to Carol’s shrill call. She would not let up until she found the bird pecking and shitting in the dark aisles of the small theater. Once up, we learned that the white guard, Mr. Odem, had taken off in the night. According to Mr. Byrd, he’d left with one shotgun, driving off in Mrs. Dandridge’s second car. Mrs. Dandridge, he told us, was Monticello’s acting president. She’d attempted for some time to keep the grand house and gardens tidy, to keep the lights on by way of generator. She’d wanted to be poised to reopen Monticello’s doors as soon as the world was mended enough to once again buy tickets to the past. But eventually, Mrs. Dandridge had left too, in her Range Rover with her two bullmastiffs, to be with her grown children outside of Richmond.

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