My Monticello(40)
Not three days later, another group of strangers arrived, five young people in all. They showed up wearing cotton and spandex and denim beneath clear plastic rain ponchos. They showed up with red bandanas encircling their collars or else pulled up and halving their faces, as if they’d gotten lost on the way to a demonstration. Academic backpacks turtled their backs.
I was on duty with Elijah and LaToya—who’d begun to come out from her room more regularly, but who’d kept a listlessness about how she moved her body. When that second group reached us, it was the first and only time I’d ever leveled a gun at a person. To me guns meant indiscriminate power, the risk of fatally misjudging someone else’s worth.
My hands shook. The rain blurred my vision.
The group revealed themselves as a single voice, amplified but trembling: Do not be alarmed! We are SCFP—Students of Color for Peace! Are you friends or enemies of the people? That deep voice cutting through rainfall belonged to a college sophomore named Lakshmi, a curvy copper-colored girl with a striking downward slant to her mouth. She’d tied her red bandana over her hair, half-shorn and glossy black. She drew the megaphone back to her lips. You should know that some very bad things are happening down there! For fuck’s sake, let us in.
The students were part of a fledgling activist group from the same community college down the road that I’d attended for two years. They shared an apartment right behind campus, behind the man-made lake. Their school had shut down, chaotically, they told us—the cafeteria raided, the administrative offices strewn with papers. From their apartment, Lakshmi and the others had heard all kinds of rumors: that storefront windows had been smashed at Fifth Street Station, with people taking what they wanted or needed. That prisoners at the regional jail had died from hunger strikes or rioting in response to the 24/7 lockdown in unlit spaces. That there were plans for a large demonstration, demanding support from local and state government for those struggling to survive. But when the students had hiked downtown at the allotted time and peered from the bridge down to City Hall, no one was there.
Lakshmi and the others told us that they would walk some nights to the bottom of the driveway to their hillside campus. From a building near the road, they began to see small caravans of men, in SUVs and trucks, driving up and down the main road near the exits for the highway, laying on horns. They recognized the men—with their spectacle of flags and guns—as part of the same group they’d aimed to stand up to long before the grid crashed. They told us that the line of vehicles would roll by every night, right before dark. They’d loop around and either drive back toward town or else pull into a side street across the divided road. One time, Lakshmi and the others snuck closer, crouching near their side of the road. At sundown, when the caravan passed, Lakshmi said they’d seen what looked like bodies, beneath blankets, in one of the truck beds. They’d seen a foot flung out, but no, it had to have been an ax head or the barrel of a gun. The group had heard a rumor that there were local people up at Monticello, Black people. I wondered who had told them about us. Had Mr. Odem, the old white guard, told someone, who’d told someone else?
After the power flared in their apartment, the students told us that the road below campus had gone quiet again. A few days later, they set out to find us, in broad daylight, because the men always came at night. We were lucky, they told us, to be on this mountain, in this house. It was a refuge.
* * *
It felt both comforting and trying, having all those new bodies up on the mountain: everything theirs too. More hands to chip in, but our rations spread thinner. We met all together that eighth night and the next, to recite our parchment rules, but also to pen in a few new ones. Anyone was free to leave with one day’s rations. Anyone could be asked to leave if the group agreed. The Flores family had set up their tents in the parlor, sliding back red-cushioned chairs; they shuttled tent poles through nylon loops as the oily eyes of lurid portraits watched. Lakshmi and the other students went up to the house’s third level, fashioning pallets on the dull green floor of the dome room.
The Flores family and the SCFP students brought new things onto the mountain:
a solar stove
low-light binoculars
a trio of hunting rifles
a massive crossbow with neon quivers
paper face masks and a dozen canisters of Mace
a set of hand-drawn zines touting tactical self-defense
Lakshmi and the other students taught us hand signs they’d learned from fellow activist circles. Soon LaToya fell in with the students, gesturing agreement with snapping fingers, dry laughter rising in her throat. She swapped her gold-colored T-shirt with the only boy in their group, a rail-thin freshman named Gary Chen who had ivory skin and shaggy blue-streaked hair. I heard Gary lament to LaToya about his new boyfriend, found and lost in a matter of months. During a break in the storms, this boyfriend had driven home to Northern Virginia, “just for a few days,” but had not returned. One morning, as we doled out rations—sweetened pecans, torn greens, and foiled squares of dark chocolate—Gary leaned in toward me. Can you believe it, he said, I finally fall in love, I come out to my parents, and then the world explodes.
In the evenings, after we sang, the Flores family and the new students shared their stories of town, and we recounted ours, mumbling or shouting or laughing to the point of tears. Afterward we’d collapse to sobs on the rough slate floors of the all-weather pass. Afterward KJ and the Yahya children would sprint off through the muddy yard toward the small exhibits below the south terrace. We’d find them clanking copper pots, conjuring a fake fire in the deep hearth of the former slave kitchen. We’d find them whimpering in the cave of the Sally Hemings display. They’d be holding their knees, rocking, complaining that their heads, their backs, their bellies hurt.