My Monticello(33)
Grandbaby, she said.
MaVi, I said, I’m right here—
She let her head loll back, closing her eyes. I could hear her breathing continue to ease, like it always had before, and my panic easing with it. Her chest, exposed at the scoop of her housecoat, rose and fell, her face filling with a newly euphoric glow. You’re going to be all right! I said, hugging her.
That entrance hall held so many things; in that moment, it held us too. High up to my right, a set of dark trophies marked the wall, mounted antlers of elk and moose. On the opposite wall, a plunder of artifacts from Native peoples: an ax, a quiver, moccasins that must have once held feet, a radial shield centered by feathers—Lakota Sioux, Mr. Byrd later told me. There were white marble busts, and the draped curves of a sculpted woman. There was a massive mastodon jaw bronzed with age. One object right up against another, curated, it seemed, by someone with broad aspirations and enormous self-regard.
Papa Yahya doubled back to the door to step out of his shoes. Kweli, kweli, he said softly, leaving them neatly by the entrance, proceeding in dark dress socks and looking oddly dignified, despite the cargo shorts he wore. Mama Yahya hastened her children to remove their shoes too, and KJ copied them. Mr. Byrd stood on the threshold, looking through those large glass doors at the storm.
MaViolet touched the bone of my hip, a small push in.
When I’d taken tours of Monticello in the past, I’d kept my head down, kept my hands to myself. This time, I ran fingers along the top of MaViolet’s chair; the painted wood felt slightly oily to the touch. I crossed the room to test the bottom rung of a ladder that stretched up toward a series of weights, attached to Jefferson’s great clock above the main entrance. That whole contraption suggested an effortful passing of time—the necessity of someone to wind it. When the clock was wound, a cord strung with cannonball weights would slowly descend along one wall, revealing the days of the week, which were written at intervals from the ceiling to a hole in a floor. I peered down into the depression: It looked to have been Saturday for some time.
That morning, gazing up at Monticello’s grand clock, I began an accounting of days, not only what happened within each, but also their unfurling number.
Mr. Byrd closed the front door as our tight group began to unknot itself. Lost-looking without his twin, Ezra set off through the parlor’s double doors, designed by Jefferson himself to part in tandem. Ira and Carol hurried off to the left side of the house while the Yahyas, along with KJ, wandered in the opposite direction, the children murmuring excitedly. Still in her loose gold T-shirt, LaToya followed Ms. Edith and Mr. Byrd. Finally, only Knox remained at my side, with MaViolet resting in the chair behind us. I crossed the room to where a map of Africa hung. Wordlessly, Knox joined me so that we stood shoulder to shoulder in front of it. Its proportions looked accurate enough—teal topography etched all along the coastline—but the continent’s center had been left falsely empty. I moved to the map of Virginia, a few feet away, borderless and drawn full of careful lines. Nearby, a painted portrait of Thomas Jefferson himself caught my eye, glimmering in a gilded frame. I pushed up to my tiptoes to better examine his face: his ruddy cheeks and gray hair tinged with amber. Behind us wind or water battered panes of glass.
Isn’t it strange, Knox said at my back, for us—for you—to be here?
Knox already knew about my tricky lineage. I’d told him just after he came home from spring recess, after he’d visited his family and before the grid went down. We’d been lying in bed in his small tidy dorm room, my hand on his chest, which felt smoother than I remembered from a week earlier. He was making his own confession to me, his hands plunged into my hair. My whole body had ached with a guilty kind of want, the desire to put space between our relationship and the thing I’d done with Devin in Knox’s absence. I think my father hates me, Knox had said, burying his head at my throat. His fan whirred in the window above us; we could never have imagined that the power would go out so soon. He wouldn’t even look at me, Knox said, and in my desperation to comfort him, I let my own truth slip out: Did you know my middle name is Hemings, I’d told him. Do you know who Sally Hemings was?
Knox had raised his face to examine mine. I do, actually.
That day, Knox accepted my announcement calmly, as if I’d recited a natural number, something clear and bounded. The detached way he’d responded had made me feel almost safe that I’d shared it with him. That’s kind of cool, he’d said.
I regained my footing below Jefferson’s portrait before I answered Knox. It’s crazy to be here, I said.
In my mind, I ran back through the parchment rules we’d written at the welcome pavilion. We would not hurt anything for the sake of hurting it, but we were not tourists. I slashed each ribbon and blocking rope in that first room, feeling a mixture of relief and indignation. We were out of the storm, MaViolet was breathing—but these rooms had been kept so pristine, while our homes in town had been treated like kindling. Upstairs, I could hear the call-and-response slap of KJ’s bare feet between the thumping slide of the Yahya children’s socked ones. All at once, they appeared on the landing, along a banister draped in pelts, with Papa Yahya calling after them.
Our group ventured into nearly every room that first day. We moved up narrow stairwells into the thickening heat, then back down again. In Jefferson’s day, those stairwells had been used by slaves as well as celebrated guests, eyes averted, I imagined, one group always yielding. We rounded the perimeter of the giant dome room, with its vaulted cap of white above us, its large circular windows like a row of eyes. From up there, the sky felt so close, as if it were only a larger dome made of wind and cloud and water. I thought of Devin then: Was he out of the storm and safe down below us? Would he abandon us for town, or elsewhere? Did he hate me now?