What we saw in those moments riveted us, and then it set us free
In a time of rolling blackouts and terrible storms battering America, the neighbourhood of 1st Street, Charlottesville is attacked by violent white supremacists.
Families, friends and strangers flee for their lives in an abandoned bus, taking refuge in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's historic plantation home in the hills above town.
Over nineteen heart-stopping days the group find ways to care for and sustain one another as the world burns beneath them.
Told by Da'Naisha Love, a young Black descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, My Monticello is a searing indictment of racism past and present, and a powerful vision of resistance, hope and love.
By the time you read this, you may have figured it out. Perhaps your mother told you, though she was only privy to my timeworn thesis—never to my aim or full intention. Still, maybe the truth of it breached your insides:
That I am your father, that you are my son.
In these typewritten pages I mean to make manifest the truth, the whole. But please do not mistake this letter for some manner of veiled confession. I cannot afford to be sorry, not for any of it. I hope you’ll come to understand, it was all for a grander good.
You see, I needed a Control Negro, grotesque as that may sound—
You should know I was there on the day you were born, a reflection behind the nursery glass. I laid eyes on you while your mother rested, along with her husband—that man you must have accepted, at least for a time, as your father. You seemed to see me too, my blurred silhouette. Your birth (natural, vaginal) took place at the university’s teaching hospital. I noted your weight (7 lb., 7 oz.), your color (dark and florid), your temperament (outwardly placid)—like mine.
I assisted with payment for your daycare as well, when you were so small, still in those plush white Pampers. The facility sat at the edge of campus. So graduate students, like your mother, could enroll their young children while they worked or studied. And faculty, like me, could take guided tours and observe through mirrored one-way glass. I took mental notes on the room of children, a rainbow of faces, but my eyes hung on you: your mahogany skin and dark, keen eyes. Your fat, curled fingers grasping at blocks, trying to build something sturdy and true. I grew skilled at enduring the feeling you inspired, a seeping pride that filled my chest, then spilled into a painful ache.
Remember your season of Little League games, the ones at Washington Park, just down from the bus stop? I could always spot you, especially at a distance. You’d be standing at the plate, arms angled, aiming for the bright white ball, determined to hit it past every boundary we could see.
What I mean to say is that all this time I’ve watched you, or else had others watch in my stead. My TA did a practicum with your sixth-grade civics teacher. One of my graduate students tutored you in middle school at my suggestion that he “give something back.” He shared anecdotes of your progress, never suspecting that you were mine. Your sophomore year, I hired a college student, a young man of legal age but slight enough to pass for seventeen. You knew him as David from the neighboring county. Under my direction he befriended you, prodded you toward swimming (and away from the fraught cliché of basketball). He ferried me printouts of your correspondence, revealing your vernacular speech, the slant of your smile in cell phone pictures. Hearing this now, you might feel manipulated, violated even. But I am almost certain that my determination to shape and groom, my attempts and failures to protect, aren’t terribly different from those of any other parent.
Everyone has an origin story and this is yours: You began as a thought fully formed and sprung from my head. No, you were more like a determined line of questions marching altogether toward a momentous thrashing. It was 1985, years before you were born, and I’d just come to work here on this campus. Mother died at the start of fall semester, her body inundated with cancer, undiagnosed until she had passed. Numb, I traveled south to bury her, missing the initiation of my own first classes, returning as promptly as I could. I was only away for a week and a day, but a cold snap had scattered leaves onto the great lawn. My first afternoon back, I walked over to my office and was straightening the objects on my desk, my shirtsleeves rolled up, my back to the door. A man walked in and he startled when I turned to face him, so I startled too. He was—I learned a few minutes later—a senior colleague from my own department: history. He’d been away on sabbatical and had come to my office to welcome me. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for a Professor Adams. Do you know where I can find him, buddy?” I realized what was happening a moment before he did, and forced myself to laugh, to try to put him at ease, though I fear my laughter came out as a strangled sound. You see, he’d mistaken me for one of the evening janitors.
But then, the next week, I stood before all of my bright young students. For the first time in a long time, I felt, if not settled, then at least situated. Soon afterward, in a morning seminar, I remember feeling hopeful as I collected an early set of in-class writings, our topic: nineteenth-century thinkers. I discovered a hand-drawn cartoon among the shuffle, no name in the corner, passed in on purpose or by accident—it was hard to tell which. It was nothing really, just a single frame of itchy graphite titled “Irony.” Within its borders, a history professor leaned over a lectern, looking quite like me—same jacket and bowtie—except with something primitive about his face. A thought bubble hovered over the room of students: “Darwin Taught to Men by an Ape.”
It’s nothing, I told myself as I walked back to my apartment that evening, though, in truth, I felt—tired. What does it matter, I remember thinking. What does it matter how much I achieve, or how clearly I speak, or how carefully I conduct myself, if the brutal misjudgments remain regardless? What if, even here, they cannot bring themselves to see me, and instead see something oblique reflected where I thought I stood? Mother used to tell me, Work hard, Cornelius. Work twice as hard and you can have something. But there I was, a grown man, wondering what it was I could have, and what would forever be withheld.
What I needed, it occurred to me then, was to watch another man’s life unfold: a Black boy not unlike me, but better than me—an African American who was otherwise equivalent to those broods of average American Caucasian males who scudded through my classrooms. ACMs, I came to call them, and I wondered how they would measure up with this flawless young man as a watermark. No, it wasn’t them exactly—I wanted to test my own beloved country: Given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me? What I needed was a control, a Control Negro. And given what I teach, it wasn’t lost on me, the agitation of those two words linked together, that archaic descriptor clanking off the end like a rusted shackle.
Those words struck in me and, from them, you grew.
That was the start of my true research, a secret second job hidden inside of the rigors of my first one. Evenings and weekends I searched library stacks, scoured journals and published studies. I focused on contemporary ACMs, looking for patterns, for cause and effect. An ACM’s access to adequate childhood nutrition up against disciplinary referrals resulting in primary school suspensions. An ACM’s expected time with his father (watching the game, I imagined, practicing catch), versus police reports of petty vandalism, of said balls careening through a neighbor’s window. I was determined to measure the relationship of support, to action, to re-action, to autonomy in these young men. At some point it occurred to me to work backward. I gathered a more intimate sample: twenty-five case files borrowed from the university’s records, culled from a larger random pool. Each of these ACMs came from families of high middle income, had an average or slightly above average IQ, had a face that approached symmetry as determined by his student ID photo. In my pursuit to better understand them, I called suburban high schools, interviewed teachers, coaches, parents even, always over the phone—I was less than forthright, I concede. My ACMs were all “good” promising young men, but they were flawed too, if you scratched the surface. My dredging uncovered attention deficit disorder, depression, vandalism, drug and alcohol abuse. In several cases, I found evidence of more serious transgressions: assault and battery; accusations of sexual misconduct. Not one of these young men was perfect, yet each held promise, and this promise, on balance, was enough to protect them and to buoy their young lives into the future. Five years of my life spent marveling at the resiliency of theirs.
Now all I had to do was monitor a boy who enjoyed, on average, the same lifted circumstances that my ACMs had experienced. Prenatal care and regular visits to the dentist. An educated mother and father (or father figure). Well-funded schools and a residence situated in a “good,” safe neighborhood. For his part, this young man would have to keep his grades up, have clear diction, wear his pants at an average perch at his waist. He would have to present a moderate temperament, maybe twice as moderate—just to be safe—as those bright boys he’d be buffed so hard to mirror.
What I aimed to do was to painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one who I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.
About this time, I met your mother.
What can I say—she was, in her own way, a force of nature, and the sole woman of color in the graduate program in environmental studies that year. I spotted her one rainy afternoon in a dimly lit classroom. The door half open, she stood at the lectern rehearsing, her PowerPoint blinking furiously behind her, projecting light and shadow on her face. Slide after slide of washed-out shores and water rising. She looked up at me but did not lose her place. It would be only one more year before you were born.
Our first night together, your mother informed me she was married—she intended to remain married—which came as a relief. Those early years of struggle had made me a solitary sort of man. Nonetheless we continued to see each other, sporadically, into the spring. She wanted a child, I knew, and although her husband was likely the source of her childlessness, to protect his pride she alone bore the blame between them. That winter when I found out you were growing inside her, part mine and a boy, we both agreed. I would contribute financially and keep silent about my paternity. She would keep you nearby and take my requests about you to heart. She knew about my ACMs, but never that I needed a boy to balance them. Right then and there, I realized who you would be.
There are many studies now about the cost of race in this great nation. Most convincing is the work from other departments: sociology, cultural anthropology. Researchers send out identical résumés or home loan applications, half of which are headed with “ethnic-sounding” names. They instruct Black and white individuals to watch other Black and white individuals receive a painful-looking shot. The needle digs into muscle and the researchers mark how much sweat leaks from pores of the watchers. They measure who gets the job, the loan, who gets the lion’s share of salted, dank empathy. They mark which colored human-shaped targets get shot by police, in study after study, no matter how innocuous the silhouetted objects they cradle. All these studies, I concede, are good, great work, but I wonder, is there something flawed in them that makes the findings too easy to dismiss?
My research, by contrast, has been more personal—challenging me, at times, to reexamine my history. How different my life has been from the lives of my ACMs, and from your life. You grew up on that tree-lined cul-de-sac, while I was born in the back room of a two-room house, in the sand hills of South Carolina. I was a dark-skinned bookish child—we both are only sons. My own mother didn’t have much money, but no one had much. Certainly not any of the colored folks we knew, the only point of comparison one dared in those days. Most of my schoolmates had fathers, though, and mine had gone north, to Chicago, for work, and not come back. He was essentially a stranger. Even so, growing up, I felt his abandonment acutely, like hunger. I filled that hunger with reading.
Like you, I played baseball, if briefly. The summer I turned ten I joined the Negro Youth League. I went for the promised uniforms, which turned out to be sweat-stained cast-offs salvaged from a white church’s collection. Even so, thick patches had been sewn onto the chests, and underneath mine, my heart felt sanctioned. Our very first practice, I managed a decent hit, a satisfying thwack like an ax cleaving wood. Afterward, I should have walked back with the others, but instead I set off on my own, replaying my minuscule victory in my head until it felt epic and novel-worthy. I wandered down behind White Knoll, crossing Main, still dreaming. I didn’t realize where I was until I heard car doors slap shut behind me, felt the chilled shadows of strangers. Three young white men had gathered around me, their bodies blocking each path of escape I darted toward. “Where does this boy believe he’s going?” the one in the work boots said.
As they knocked and beat me to the ground, I couldn’t help but think of a boy we all knew of—Tully Jones—whose body had been found some summer before, floating in the river, his head bashed in. When these men finish killing me, they’ll drag my body down to the water too, I remember thinking. Please, don’t hold me down under that murky water—I can’t even swim! Why hadn’t I learned to swim? And how would Mother even find my body? What if she thought I’d run off too, like my father had? Up close, the men reeked of peach brandy, the kind my schoolmates’ fathers would nurse Friday nights under the sycamores. When those men finished doing what they did to me, I lay chest and cheek in the sand, playing dead, as they staggered back to their car, breathless. Even after they pulled off, sending up a sharp spray of gravel over my body, I kept on playing dead, as if I were sunk down under that endless water, my skin a wrinkled softness that would soon scrape away or be eaten by crawfish, by those microscopic creatures that troubled the silted bottom, until no one could tell or else it didn’t matter what color I was.
The following fall, Mother insisted I attend a private boarding school, miles out of town. I wasn’t to live in the dormitory with the others. Instead, I woke before sunrise, walked out to the highway, and caught a ride with a deacon from our church, an elderly man who smelled of polishing oil. He was the boarding school’s custodian and the only other brown face to grace those halls besides mine. During the school day, we never looked at each other. I was always aware when he was in the same room, but I never let my eyes rest on his, not until we were far away from that place, and even then it was with a kind of shame.
The school’s headmaster—the man who had agreed to my admittance—had gone “up north” for some number of years. His surname was the name of the school, and everyone knew it was his family’s money that kept that dying boarding school from going under. At school assemblies, this headmaster would find excuses to parade me across the stage—my improbably strong elocution, the sharp crease in my uniform—defiant or oblivious to the contempt my visibility inspired. Even the dimmest boys were clever in their cruelty. Mother had been hired to cook and clean at the headmaster’s residence in town, and for this, the others mocked her mercilessly. What could I do, it was true—my scholarship was her bowed back, her bleach-bitten hands. Enrolling me there must have been an act of faith or desperation, like pressing a message into a bottle and floating it onto turbulent waters.
Even so, I clung to my formal education, setting off at seventeen to a small all-Black college, then going far north for graduate school. The boys I’d grown up with mostly stayed rooted. They married girls from church, worked hard to scrape together a living or get ahead. Some were shipped off to Vietnam; a few marched in bigger towns, facing police dogs and fire hoses. I devoted my life to scholarly truth, spending the majority of my adult life here at this esteemed institution. After you were born, I purchased my own home, just a two-bedroom bungalow, but in a good neighborhood not far from campus. I can walk to work, and sometimes I do. Whenever I walk my mind wanders. Occasionally I worry that I’ve been self-indulgent in my research, somehow selfish in my secret fatherhood. Walking, I think the world is surely a better place now than it used to be for people of color. Aren’t I myself living proof against my theories? Can’t I be satisfied?
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