My Monticello(54)

Surrender the House! His voice rang out. Surrender the House within forty-eight hours or else it shall be liberated!

The man slumped forward, but he could fall only so far because of the way we’d bound him. I held my water to his lips again, even though I despised him. I could hardly stand to look at him after hearing his dark declaration: what the men below thought of us, what they hoped to do. They thought we owed them. They believed their security depended on making sure we never felt safe, not even in our own bodies. Their claims, along with their brutal means, trampled over the simple fact of my family: MaViolet and Momma and me. I felt it then, deep in my belly and maybe for the first time, that knotted tie to Monticello like a rope or a bridge. My bond by blood and water—as master and slave. My ancestors had conceived of this house and bloodied their hands to build and maintain it.

I wanted to shake the barefoot man like I’d shaken that boy on the road in the dark. Had that boy told the men about us? Is that how they knew we were living up here, Black and armed and afraid? And had that even been the same boy or had my reckless fury been the seed of some random child’s budding hate? Either way, I upended my water bottle. The man drank savagely, water gushing down his face.

Maybe it was because of the water or because I am a young woman that he looked at me like he recognized me. Face shadowed with wild sorrow, he mumbled something, his voice skittish at first, a voice unsure of where to go. They got my girls, the man said, tears streaming and wrestling again against our ropes. They got my girls—they not but seven and thirteen. Now please let me go back.



* * *



After we let the strange man leave, tying strips of cloth around his feet, like bandages and shoes all at once, and escorting him into the woods he’d come from, I hurried back to check on MaViolet. I was startled to find her awake, lucid. Ms. Edith was still by her bed, rocking and singing a hymn MaViolet loved. Her mouth hung slightly parted and her eyes seemed to have gone milky. Her gaze roamed up and around before landing on my face.

Ma, I said. I lifted her hand in mine.

She looked hard at me, as if she could see through me. Her jaw began to work, the muscles drawing in like she was struggling to wake her mouth up, but her tongue stayed sunk, and no words came out.

I parted my own lips, still cracked with thirst, intending to tell her all of it. About the barefoot man and the orchard people. About the child on the road whom I’d beaten and run off. I meant to tell her about my body’s unfolding toward motherhood—how astonishing it was, how absurd it was—but I was terrified.

Instead I sang a few lines of that old hymn Ms. Edith was singing, my voice going slick against the back of my throat.

Precious lord, take my hand,

Lead me on, let me stand,



I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.



I could not leave her just then, so I asked Knox to gather everybody, even the children. I asked him to call them into this house where our muddy footprints marked the parquet flooring. Where oil from our fingers lacquered brassy key hooks and collected on the strings of bygone instruments we couldn’t quite name but managed to pluck an odd tune from. Where the heat of our bodies, along with our sweat, left deep impressions on high beds and sunken chair cushions.

Bring them in here, I said.

I figured, if we met in Jefferson’s cabinet, that office-like space between the bedchamber and his personal library, then at least I could look over my shoulder at MaViolet, awake and with us. Those men are coming for us, I whispered to her. They’re practically here.

Truth is, I’d already known they were coming, even before the barefoot man told us. Even before the unraveling: those old flags brandished and baiting fliers flung. I knew it as a girl, when they killed that young woman, then blamed her own body. It was a hitch deep in my lungs, reminding me not to breathe too easy. I inherited my knowing from Momma, and from MaViolet before her: I was born knowing.

Hold on, MaVi, I said as I waited for folks to arrive. I was standing at her bedside, still clinging to her hand. I was thinking it had been a terrible mistake to drag her up here, and for what? And after all she had sacrificed for me. Getting me through high school after Momma passed and our spirits were battered. Urging me ever forward and toward that fancy university—And why not you, Grandbaby, she’d said. MaViolet had insisted we keep on striving, keep on hoping, even through our infinite grief.

Body by body, folks brought themselves into the cabinet room and adjacent library, their voices low as if at a wake. Their voices full of fear because of our failed expedition and all the barefoot man had said. Mr. Byrd spoke in a low voice to MaViolet, but her eyes were blinking closed again. To fit, folks wove their bodies around Thomas Jefferson’s things: his desk and famed handwriting machine, which allowed two pens to move in tandem, making easy twins for his letters, for posterity. His tables and globes. The students wedged themselves against window ledges, mindful of a wooden bureau that held an ivory bust. Ira and Carol squeezed in along a sofa the color of KJ’s suitcase, with Yamileth teetering at one edge, her slim face angled up at me. The Yahyas treaded between a surveying tool and an angled telescope, most everything brassy or cherry brown, not unlike that small exhibit at the museum below that the children had loosed.

Devin came in last, just after KJ and the twins and Georgie, but from the opposite direction. He must have passed through our glass-faced greenhouse, stepping over the pallet where Knox and I had slept side by side each night.