My Monticello(53)

I shook my head, kissed MaViolet’s cheek. It felt like she’d gone down even in the few hours since I’d looked at her early that morning. Her eyes were still closed, but her face held that new grim expression, a twisting I wanted desperately to see eased. The room stank of bodies, of wood ash, though maybe that funk emanated from our skin: Devin’s and Knox’s and mine. Behind me, Devin asked where this stranger was, and Ms. Edith directed us out front with an arched finger, her sewing needle pinched between her teeth.

Out front beyond the east porch, toward the gatepost of the twin linden trees, everybody else had gathered. Right away, I could see the stranger too, his head low. He was seated, I realized as I got closer. He’d been tied by his wrists and ankles to the black-painted chair that held him. His T-shirt and long pants were largely in tatters and when I got right up on him, I saw that his feet were bare. What I thought right away was, Who are we to do this to anybody? Who have we become? Only later did I realize our mistake: letting him see how few we were.

Y’all made it back! Ezra shouted, and the twins surrounded Devin in their arms.

Greetings rose from the small congregation, a brief but palpable expression of relief to see us again. But their hugs for us were like shallow breaths. Folks used the rest of the air in their lungs to question us about town, then to tell us about the bound man, as we stood to one far side of the path so that he might not overhear.

How was our place?

Daddy’s grave, the yellow house?

Folks out around the hood?

They blocked the road—I worried they would.

This man—I know! He walked right up here, no shoes on his feet. Keeps saying the same damn thing!

They told us that the stranger had nearly made it to the east porch, not long after we’d left that morning. He’d crept up through the northwest woods, avoiding the welcome pavilion altogether. KJ, who’d been playing hide-and-seek, counting to one hundred on the steps, head down but peeking, had seen the man first. When KJ got to shouting, Mama Yahya came running, jiggling the baby. Mr. Byrd arrived right away, but he’d left his shotgun inside. They all told us that the stranger had kept coming, his arms loose and swinging. He’d kept coming, even after Yamileth got Mr. Byrd’s shotgun. Even after Mr. Byrd raised that gun, demanding that the man stand down. Even after Elijah barreled over, his voice as assured as his body was imposing. The stranger’s heedlessness had kicked up a wide panic that we could still feel in the air around us, all those hours later.

In the end, the twins, working together, had tackled the stranger to the ground, because he would not stop, but no one had quite been able to shoot him, this wild-eyed Black man approaching with empty hands.

My sons and I, we tied him up, Mr. Flores said. He was not having any weapons on his body.

Mr. Byrd took stock of the three of us there who’d tried and failed to get to town. You all ought to hear what he’s been saying. Must have said the same thing a hundred times.

Our group turned back, encircling the barefoot man.

He was raw-boned, deep-complected like me, and filthy. He looked to be in his thirties, maybe, and he wore a blue armband like the white men who’d set fires, except this Black man’s banner had fallen from his emaciated biceps so that it circled his wrist like a cuff. Up close, I could see it was an upside-down flag of Virginia.

Knox studied the man’s profile from one side.

Devin crouched to eye level.

I moved closer to him. What do you want? I said.

Up close, the man smelled like sweat and urine and feces. His bare feet were and laced with bloody scrapes and gashes. I was so thirsty from our long walk, but I held my water bottle to the man’s cracked mouth. He gulped greedily until I took it away.

Tell them like you been telling us, Mr. Byrd said.

The strange man shook against his bindings. He lifted his head, stretching his mouth wide open, before he began. When he spoke, he sounded stilted, his diction way too tight.

It is my privilege to be allowed to speak for the True Men, the Patriots, the man said. They say, We are chosen to redeem the great state of Virginia from darkness. They say, We pledge to do what must be done, to restore our Legacy! Our Monuments! Ourselves! As the man spoke, it became clear he was reciting something, the slanted way each word fell into the next. They move—we move—with swiftness, with righteousness in this moment of chaos! We must not fail lest this commonwealth fail, lest America fail …

I listened without speaking, trying to take it all in, even as my tongue twitched in my mouth. I was braced to interject, to correct or argue, but it was so much: his degraded appearance, his erring elocution, the audacity of the words themselves.

He crazy, right? Ezra said.

The man kept speaking, stumbling over his we’s and they’s then doubling back to lay them straight. Toward the end of his oration, he attempted to stand, forgetting—I guess—that he was tied down to something. Seemed like he had rehearsed that speech many times and always on his feet.

Nonetheless his voice rose along with his gaze. You people are trespassing! he shouted, spittle flying, his voice pitching toward a crescendo. You people owe an unpayable debt! You owe for your Welfare, your Public Housing, your Petty Crimes. You owe for your children who pollute our public pools and classrooms. You people owe us this Great House, this Great Man, both of which are ours!

I thought of that young white woman, the one who’d been murdered by the man in a car, but who’d also died of a ravaged heart. I thought of various groups ringed around Jefferson’s statue at the university or encircling the old monument that loomed above a public park in town. For me, the menace from those relics came when I learned more about the circumstances of their installation. My anxiety grew as I watched the men stomp and chant so fearsomely around them. They seemed to want to remember in glory a thing my family hoped America would never forget. As the strange man spoke, I was thrown back, yet again, to the night I’d peered out through MaViolet’s blinds. That windowless white van parked across the way, the teen spouting blood who’d been thrown bucking into it. What had they done to that boy? Had this lost man in front of us been stolen from some neighborhood like ours? The man looked up at the roof of the house, toward the crooked weathervane; there was something dead at the center of his eyes, where the light should have been, where we should have seen ourselves reflected.