My Monticello(29)

In the broken display, a set of gadgets shone. A brass telescope on a pedestal, a pocketknife flung open with one ragged blade extended like a dragonfly’s wing. I wondered, had Thomas Jefferson himself used these very tools to mark or measure. Fleeing home, we could have landed anywhere, but there we were in that particular museum dedicated to my own great-great-great-grandfather. So many generations between him and me, and what did it matter anymore? I reached through the newly jagged edge with wary fingers, angling toward a watch—pearl-faced and encased in a palm-sized square of wood, built to open and close like a compact mirror. Touching it, I felt a low-level currency, some sense of conduction.

What now, I thought.

Be mindful of all that sharpness, Mr. Byrd said.

The children backed away, sobbing softly, Home.

It was me who called everyone together, as Knox and Mr. Byrd scraped café chairs into a hasty circle. Georgie set out waters, keeping a buffer of distance from Ezra, whose jaw gleamed a deep shade of purple where his twin had struck him. Devin and Elijah came over and stood to the far right of our group, with MaViolet in a chair at a table near the middle. Before taking her place, Ms. Edith breezed through the café, picking up trail mix and dark, seeded crackers, as if she were gleaning from a garden. She set out these snacks on a table, beside the line of bottled waters. Folks snatched them up; a somber crunching commenced. At my request, Knox found and opened a package of stationery from the gift shop. Seeing it, Imani retrieved a quill pen and a pot of ink from a children’s discovery room below, her face still salted in tear tracks.

Y’all wanna head back, I said, once everyone was seated and looking up toward me. Y’all wanna see what’s left, hope it’s safe already? Split up? Head somewhere different? I can’t say me and my grandma have anywhere else to go.

I looked out across the open courtyard. From his bench beside Carol, Ira suffered a fit of coughing and cloaked his mouth with the crook of his arm. MaViolet gnawed at dry crackers, her body otherwise motionless. Her eyes shone, as if beams of light were radiating right from her to me. What is it y’all wanna do? I said.

A blistering breeze swept through, rustling stray brush. I’m thinking we should stay here and together, for now, I offered.

The wind died back. No one agreed aloud, but nobody disagreed either. Papa Yahya pulled his son, Jobari, closer to him. LaToya, who’d braided her hair and now sported meandering cornrows, ran her fingers over the new peaks and valleys. I tugged my frayed scooped collar up over the knob of my shoulder. What is it we need from one another, I said, in this time in between?

We sat facing one another until folks began to offer up words for what they wanted or needed. We began a short list of things we could do and would do. We agreed to talk and listen. We promised we would try not to fight with each other. Knox wrote each thing down on the parchment-colored stationery, in his left-handed script, careful not to smear the ink. The hens squawked, as if in agreement, and everybody laughed.

Then Ezra called out, We oughta fry those birds up good! And I couldn’t help but think of Brown’s corner store, the boxes of battered wings Devin and I had shared. My mouth filled with water. How hungry I felt for the past.

Don’t be foolish, boy, Ms. Edith said. You’d trade one meal of meat for an egg or two every day?

From her chair beside Ira’s, Carol mouthed, Thank you.

They drank their wine, Elijah persisted. They drank without offering anything to anybody. No disrespect, Ms. Edith, but what makes you think they about to share even one little egg with us?

Ira grasped the edge of the chair he sat in. It was mine! he said. I had every right! But then he looked out into the fan of leaves in the courtyard, as if they were flames. They always come, don’t they, sooner or later? Well armed, right? Fueled by lies! Carrying those disgraceful flags. When Ira spoke of flags, I remembered how the men on First Street had all worn blue armbands, though I hadn’t been able to see the emblem clearly. I guess I hoped I might not live to see it, Ira said.

We’ll share our eggs! Carol said, rubbing Ira’s back, which now convulsed beneath her hand. We will, she said.

We pressed on, fleshing out our makeshift treaty. We talked each proposition up and down, or sometimes just nodded assent. We agreed to collect and share all the food and drink we found on the mountain. We agreed to borrow and use any supplies or tools we needed, from the shops and staff areas and even the displays. Georgie tipped his chin up but continued to move from table to table, carrying our trash away.

The things on the mountain, along with what little we’d brought, made a strange assortment. We had basic first aid supplies and a large collection of tools. We had chips, granola bars, crackers, pretty tins of tea. We had bags of old-timey dark chocolate drops covered in white sprinkles, which MaViolet said reminded her of ones she’d eaten when she was a girl. We had the shaky promise of eggs, and many, many tins of Virginia peanuts glistening beneath silvery vacuum seals. Earlier, I’d seen Ms. Edith squinting at a display of heirloom seeds in the garden section of the gift shop. Now she was schooling us on how to keep the hens properly grazed, and on some of the things that grew free in Virginia that we might eat—things she’d eaten around her mother’s garden as a child. Ditch lilies, dandelions, morels, chickweed. The way she said it sounded like she was quoting Scripture.

You were born in Virginia? I asked Ms. Edith. She looked at me hard, her brow furrowed like she might just send me off to fetch my own whupping switch from some tree. But then she answered, locating her beginnings in widening circles: She was born in her Granny Lee’s house at the end of what the colored folks called Harp Street, near Shadwell, in the Piedmont, in North America, on God’s green earth.