My Monticello

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The disputed nature of American history, who 'owns' Monticello and who are its descendants are where the interests and weight of this lay for me. Society has broken down and white supremacists are burning and looting, forcing a mixed race group to take refuge nearby in Thomas Jefferson's old Monticello plantation. Narrated in epistolary style, the darkly satirical “Control Negro” is the strongest of the five short stories. While I wasn’t blown away by My Monticello, I am curious to read this author’s other stories (which were sadly not included in my arc copy) and I would probably still recommend this to other readers. She has them do what a teacher would do on the first day of school – they commit to a list of things they all do together, to get by.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Goodreads

Predictably, his hope doesn’t come to pass—instead, the young man becomes the victim of police brutality.

S., and the protagonist’s secret pregnancy somewhat parallels Thomas Jefferson’s quandary of biracial children.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson review: hunted by a My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson review: hunted by a

And we’re constantly working to produce a magazine that deserves you—a magazine that is a platform for ideas fostering justice, equality, and civic action. Author Johnson’s imagination takes off from the day in 2017 when a young woman was killed by a white supremacist who intentionally drove his car into a group of protestors in Charlottesville. Following a summer of wildfires, extreme heatwaves, and “a national election girded by massive demonstrations,” narrator Da’Naisha Hemings Love explains, the East Coast is hit with “great and terrible storms” that disrupt transportation, take down the power grid, and cause mobile phones to go “glitchy and dark in our palms. where Thomas Jefferson’s plantation sits and where Johnson was a public-school art teacher for nearly two decades. In “Control Negro”, narrated by Levar Burton in the audio version, an aging African American man recounts what happens when he plans to plot out the life of a black youth in a way that makes his position in the world a perfect parallel for a young white man in the same circumstances.My Monticello is a gorgeous, devastating collection of stories spotlighting the ways a life, a country, and a planet can tend toward disaster but still be worth fighting for. The characters in stories and novella are all facing great personal challenges within their internal and external worlds. It is believed that Jefferson was the father of six children with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings, who lived with and labored . She is also hunkering down amidst all this violence with her current boyfriend, grandmother and her ex, which gives rise to multiple issues during the story.

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson | Waterstones

The title novella blew me away as well, for its too-true observations about the shock, and the after-shock, of racial violence on a place and its people. The refugees fleeing from violent white supremacists establish a settlement in the home their ancestors were forced to build. Following the Upheaval, a sketchily described conflagration of environmental disasters and civil unrest, marauding bands of armed White Supremacists are violently attempting to clear the country of what they view as trash. For all its virtues, My Monticello is relentless in driving home its message, often at the expense of expanding the secondary characters.All the same, for such a short piece, a long short story or novella, there are places where the pacing falls apart and could do with some editorial tightening.

My Monticello - Wikipedia

It made me think, Well, if I share this with other people, if I say now this is true and this is an issue and also these feelings are real, then they could share them with me and I wouldn’t have to feel like I had to fix it alone. A group of black men and women find themselves fighting to survive at Monticello from White Militia.

Note: I read a copy of this novella alone, though it will be issued as apart of a collection of the author's stories under the same title. This collection represents Africans in diaspora, as well as African Americans and shows the variation in Black American experience. Da’Naisha notes the irony that the plantation, previously overseen by a man who considered slavery a “moral depravity” yet owned 600 enslaved people, is their one hope of salvation.