My Monticello
Fiction
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4.3 • 26 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle
"...'My Monticello' is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it." — The Washington Post
Winner of the Weatherford Award in Fiction
A winner of 2022 Lillian Smith Book Awards
A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.
Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.
In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom 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.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”
United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s candid and poetic story collection challenges us to sit with the realities of how racism impacts the lives of Black Americans today. My Monticello introduces us to a diverse cast of characters, all hailing from Virginia. Through their experiences, Johnson brilliantly explores issues like microaggressions, police brutality, wage disparity, and internalized racism. Johnson’s gift for adding a touch of surrealism shines in “Control Negro”—the story of a professor who, determined to see if a Black man with the same opportunities as white men can succeed, secretly studies his own son from a distance. And our hearts broke for the single mother in “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse” as she struggles to keep up a semblance of normalcy for her child as her world falls apart around her. But the most haunting read of the bunch is the book’s title story, which follows a descendant of Thomas Jefferson as she fights to keep her loved ones safe after white supremacists seize her city. It’s horrifically easy to picture the events in that story coming true—and that sense of real-life grounding is precisely what makes this collection a stunning read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson wrestles with questions of racial identity, post-racial society, and the legacies of slavery in her masterly debut collection. The pitch-perfect opener, "Control Negro," follows Cornelius, a Black history professor whose peers mistake him for a janitor and whom white students mock with racist jokes, prompting him to plot with a married Black graduate student to have a son together and give him opportunities equal to those of "Average Caucasian Males." In the experiment, the "Control Negro" doesn't learn the identity of his father, and Cornelius observes from a distance, hopeful his son will turn out better. Other stories reckon with institutionalized racism in schools ("Something Sweet on the Tongue") and the collateral damage wrought by the trauma endured by immigrants prior to leaving their homelands ("King of Xandria"). The superb title novella is set in the near future in Charlottesville, Va., where the Unite the Right rally has cast a long shadow and white supremacists pillage the downtown area. A collective of BIPOC residents decamp to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, seeking refuge. There's Da'Naisha Hemings Love; her white boyfriend, Knox; and her other largely Black and brown neighbors. Love and her grandmother, MaViolet, descend from the Jefferson-Sally Hemings lineage, and thus occupy a unique position in the group. The author's riveting storytelling and skill at rendering complex characters yield rich social commentary on Monticello and Jefferson's complex ideologies of freedom, justice, and liberty. This incandescent work speaks not just to the moment, but to history.
Customer Reviews
This Land Is Your Land…
It is hard to believe that this jaw dropping and painfully gripping novella is Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s first. Published in 2021 it remains tirelessly poignant and damning. It shows America at its grittiest from an eye witness perspective of the victimized.
Johnson’s style presents a fresh vignette driven telling of the black experience and the myth of the model minority. These are the stories you won’t hear on the nightly news. The stories that humanize the people who are demonized as being too ghetto, too black, too progressive, too everything.
The master stroke in this collection of stories is the future dystopian timeline that ties past and present and future together with one long racist cord. In the principal story Johnson reminds us that the body keeps the score even through generations. Along with the reminder that there are no happy endings in a world filled with such bigoted cruelty.
“My Monticello” is a quick and spirited read that still manages to flesh out characters you love and hate. Johnson’s approach uses efficient timing, frustrating revelations, and just the right amount of space between to let the imagination do its thing. All over a plot that seems eerily to plausible.