I'm Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of "My Monticello."

It's five stories and a novella.

Now, you know you've hit the literary jackpot when your debut book is one of "Time Magazine's" Best Fiction Books of the year, a "New York Times" and "Washington Post" notable book, a finalist for both the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle, and that Netflix is turning it into a movie.

And perhaps best of all, when the blurb on the front cover is by Colson Whitehead, who calls your book "electrifying."

This is a remarkable collection, and I am so pleased to welcome the author, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson.

How are you?

I'm doing really well.

Thanks for having me.

You are doing really well.

This book is five stories and a novella.

The novella is the title of the book, "My Monticello," and Charlottesville is where it takes place, in the somewhat near future.

The narrator is a young UVA, University of Virginia student, Da'Naisha Love, and what happens in the very beginning is that she, her grandmother, and their neighbors are forced out of their neighborhood because this mob of white supremacists has set fire to the neighborhood.

So this diverse band takes refuge where?

At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home.

And Jocelyn, before we get into discussing the book, I think it would really set the stage if you could read just the first paragraph from "My Monticello."

Absolutely, I'm gonna read the first paragraph of the novella, "My Monticello."

"We claimed it first, this little mountain, me and MaViolet, and a scattering of neighbors.

All of us fleeing First Street, after men came to set our row of tin-roofed homes on fire.

The men came at dusk, blaring an operatic 'Oh, Say Can You See?'

White heads rose up from dusty Jeeps, and dark hair thrashed in a harsh new wind, like tattered flags.

'Ours,' the men shouted.

Their rifles gleamed as if they'd only just been bought, a megastore militia.

Through a hasty breach in MaViolet's blinds, I even saw a boy among them, blond and sneering in a pickup window.

Men leapt from back seats, sprang out of truck beds, and rushed towards the faces of our homes.

White hands clutched metal canisters, swung torches, spilling flames.

Bright shouts, the rising haze of smoke, all that and more rousted us out.

From our patchy front yards, we saw bodies blur, as some of our neighbors charged forward to try to stop them.

We saw a teen struck with a butt of a rifle, his temple spraying red.

A toddler flailed, diapered and clinging to its mother's hip as she sank, knees first, to the sidewalk.

What we saw in those moments riveted us, and then it set us free."

Thank you, Jocelyn.

That was an extremely powerful first paragraph.

In this novella, there are references to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which, you know, is in our present time.

We witnessed this on TV ourselves.

It led to the death of that young woman, Heather Heyer.

Is this story a direct response to what happened in your community?

You are from Charlottesville.

Absolutely, so I live in Charlottesville.

I live right around the corner from First Street, which is featured in the section I wrote.

And when August 12th, 2017 happened here, that Unite the Right rally, a young woman was killed, and the whole summer that led up to it affected me profoundly.

I was teaching public school at the time.

I have a son, and I was thinking about, what does this mean?

How should I respond?

And over the next year, I really wasn't sure how to respond.

I wasn't sure the right thing to do.

And I kinda responded by writing that novella, that story.

This story takes place in Monticello.

Now we need to go, we need to look at a little history here, because Monticello was a working plantation.

It was Thomas Jefferson's.

It was built by slaves.

And I believe as many, 400 people were enslaved there.

Now, Da'Naisha Love is the descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

And that's an interesting take right there, but her history is handed down through generations.

She knows this.

It has been taught to her by her mother, her grandmother.

And as you write in this story, each of these women, each of these three generations, holds that particular truth differently.

Do you wanna talk about that?

Yeah, absolutely, so one thing I learned, that came into clearer focus for me, living in Charlottesville after August 12th, going to events about local histories, especially histories that concern Black people that live here, was that there are real descendants of slavery from Monticello that live here, and real descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved women with whom he had children.

When I made this fictional character, I really wanted to think about the ways in which people deal with their heritage in different ways.

So I have Da'Naisha's grandmother having what I call a cautious regard for this history.

I have her mother really feeling uncomfortable, because of the way she's been treated around this history.

And then I have Da'Naisha, kinda somewhere in the middle.

She's not sure what to do with it.

She has a lot of ambivalence.

And I think that just reflects the reality that individuals come to their families and to their family histories from a lot of different directions.

It was very important.

I really enjoyed learning that.

One thing that was interesting.

Now Virginia happens to be my home too.

I visited Monticello, I don't know how many times, on school trips, but that was a long time ago.

There were no enslaved people's tour when I took the tour.

There was no Hemings family tour.

So let's look at your research.

I wanna know what your research entailed, and how it felt for you to be there.

So I've lived in Charlottesville a little over 20 years, and I've gone to Monticello with family occasionally.

I've gone there, my husband's a photographer, for photography occasionally.

And over the years, we've slowly seen this change.

When we first went there, there really wasn't much mention of slavery.

And now if you go there, it's really highlighted.

Even if you go on a regular tour, it's been incorporated.

And so Monticello's really had kind of a reckoning with how they're gonna deal with descendants, not only of Thomas Jefferson's Black family, but also just of all the enslaved people who lived and died there.

So what I did is I was really indebted.

I'm not a historian.

I'm kind of a terrible historian, but I was able to learn the history the way Da'Naisha, the protagonist of the story would.

So I really thought about the way tour, how you would know it if you went there on tours, over time, and how you would know it as a family story, by going and listening to descendants talk in this area, about their relationship to Monticello.

I went to an event at a local library where I got to see a variety of people stand up and talk about that history.

I went to, I've read scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed, who painstakingly researched this.

And I also read Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," a book he wrote, in which he talks about how he felt about enslaved people, and about Virginia in general.

You may not be a historian, but one thing that you did so well is how you mapped out the rooms.

And I'm not gonna give anything away, because it's very important that this diverse band of people knows their way around the property, and the furnishings.

You took really good notes or photographs, or both, to have all of this, because it was like being there.

So, congratulations on that, well done.

Thank you, it was, yeah, I did a lot.

I went to Monticello quite a few times.

Is this a cautionary tale?

And to me, it's a cautionary tale on several levels.

First of all, the precise year that this happens is not known.

I know you did that on purpose, but it is in the near future, because you you give us some crumbs, some clues.

So we know that.

And at the same time, you're addressing environmental issues as well as social issues, because not only is our moral structure crumbling, our physical structures are crumbling.

So it's very clever how you look at slavery, and a disregard for the environment at the same time.

So would you please talk about that?

Yeah, absolutely, I think those things are really top of mind for me.

And I think there's a relationship between them.

I think the way that we do anything is the way we do everything.

So the way that, as a country and as a people, we might have a disregard for a certain group of people or be willing to exploit them in a certain way, and not treat them with care over time, really relates to the way that we treat our environment.

And then on the other side of it, I think there's a way in which the powers that be can create strife or encourage strife between different groups of Americans, white Americans, Black Americans, because if we're focused on fighting on each other, we may not be able to work together to address things that really need addressing.

So we can get distracted from the fact that our shared infrastructure, our shared environment, needs our care and needs the contributions of all of us, of all kinds of different people, the smarts of everyone.

And so I really wanted to put those things side by side in the story.

You told me at the beginning of the conversation where you got this idea from, and that it came out of the riot in Charlottesville, but at the same time, was the environmental social part, was that more organic as you were writing this story?

Or did you know, "These are two things I want to talk about."

This whole collection, the novella and the other stories, are just a reflection of the things that are top of mind for me.

So as a mother of a child, as a human person on this planet, the environment is top of mind for me.

So it really wove into the story naturally.

And I also think our crumbling infrastructure, when things are falling apart, when you're not taking care of the most vulnerable people among you, that creates the conditions for more difficulty, and it creates the conditions for more conflict.

And so they seemed, it seemed to work well together.

Your main character, Da'Naisha, she is the leader of this diverse band of refugees, really, that have have taken refuge at Monticello.

She's studying education.

You are a public elementary art teacher, for how many years, 20 years?

So, yeah, I taught for 20 years.

I did stop teaching during the pandemic, so yeah, but 20 years in total.

Well, I need your thoughts as both a writer and as a former teacher, on what's happening now, on books and materials that are being taken out of curricula, books that are being banned.

What do you think?

You know, it's heartbreaking, just as a person who always loved books.

But it also seems really shortsighted.

In one sense, I think that when you tell a student, "You can't read this," it just creates interest and attention on that book, so there's that.

But also, I think there's a real fear to talk about things that are difficult.

And I don't think it's for a protection of children, because I think children, when I talk to children, when they read a story where someone's centered, even if the person doesn't look like them, they identify with the protagonist, and they're curious, and they wanna know, and they wanna understand.

And they tend to have really resilient hearts and really open hearts towards others, you know?

And so I think the fear really comes from people projecting a change, a change in power, a change in what's gonna happen in the world if their child really identifies with people who may be different from them, so, that's really heartbreaking.

That it is.

There are so many rich characters in the novella, and there is a special relationship that just touched me.

And that is the protagonist, Da'Naisha, and her grandmother, MaViolet.

And I want to know if MaViolet is totally from your imagination, or is she based on someone?

Yeah, so Da'Naisha's grandmother and her are like peas in a pod.

They're very close.

MaViolet is just absolutely a fictional character, but I will say that ironically, I named her MaViolet.

I'd gone through a bunch of names, and that one just really stuck with me.

And the funny thing about it is, my grandmother is Pansy, MaPansy.

So it's like a purple flower, a violet.

And I didn't mean to do this at all.

My mom is named after her.

So it's like this little, like, secret in there that reflects this thing, this person, my grandmother.

So, it's like a little secret in the book.

I'm glad you shared that with me.

There is a powerful scene.

There are many, but there's one that in this story, this story, first of all, is trauma, and life and death situations.

And in the scene I'm talking about, MaViolet talks to Da'Naisha, and she asks if she has found joy.

And I'm thinking, in the midst of all of this, explain why it was that she wanted to know if her grandchild had ever found joy.

Yeah, so in the story, this whole collection, and especially in "My Monticello," the characters are under a lot of duress, but they're still people.

They like, you know, there's love interests.

There's people who are caring for one another.

There's families, there's mothers and children.

And that doesn't stop in the middle of a violent scene.

It doesn't stop in a war.

It doesn't stop if there's climate emergency.

Those things still happen, and I thought it was important in the story to highlight and remind the readers that these are people who want all the things that you would want in your home, where you're comfortable.

You still want those things.

And those things are still part of you, even in this place.

And MaViolet knows that.

She's a person who's lived through ups and downs, and she wants her granddaughter to have happiness, even in this difficulty.

And part of that joy, I think, she was asking about was her boyfriend, who was a very interesting character that you put into this book, this white boyfriend that she has who is now part of these people that that are hiding from the supremacists.

Tell me about writing about him.

Where did he come from?

I think he always existed there, Knox did in this story, in part because I was thinking about the intimate relationships between Black Americans and white Americans, and how that goes with the filter of racism, but how people still find and care for one another.

And I thought about it in the most positive ways.

That's like a lovely thing, right?

You can love someone within this difficulty.

But it also was this kind of reflection of thinking about Thomas Jefferson's times, and his relationship with his white wife, Martha, and then also with this enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, who happened to be Martha's half-sister in real life also.

So I was just thinking about how these relationships, how we still have intimate relationships, even within the context of all the insanity of racism.

It is a marvelous story, but there are other stories in the book.

And I wanna talk about those if we can, for what's remaining.

And the first story in the book is called "Control Negro."

And let me tell you, there was such a shocking reveal, for me, at the end of this story.

The second thing is, LeVar Burton picks this story to read live, so, wow.

I have to know, first, the inspiration for the story.

And did it feel like magic, having LeVar Burton read your words?

I will start with the LeVar Burton part, and yes, it was absolutely the best thing ever.

It was really, really good.

And then, as far as the inspiration for the story, like "My Monticello," this was inspired by real events here in Charlottesville.

In 2015, a UVA student, a Black UVA student, was bloodied by uniformed officers, right next to campus.

The event was caught on film, and spurred a lawsuit.

And I was sitting with that.

This was in 2015.

This was a while ago.

And thinking about what that meant, and I kind of came up with this Frankenstein-like father, creating an experiment, a Black father, where he kind of wants to test America's promise through kind of manipulating and watching the life of his son.

It was, I was totally taken aback by the story, I have to say.

It was not what I thought.

It was an excellent read.

One of the other stories that I truly loved is "Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse."

Now, to me, it was the most cleverly crafted story.

It's a checklist.

And as someone who really does live her life by a checklist, I thought, "Okay, I can get this."

And first tell me about the crafting of it, and explain how you wrote this one.

Yeah, so again, this book is like, full of all my biggest fears.

So in this story, "Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse," it's this single mother with a, kind of a college-aged daughter who's thinking about a big birthday.

She wants to own her first home, but she also is pretty certain the world is falling apart.

So it has a little bit of surrealness.

You're not sure how much the apocalypse exists in the world, but it certainly exists in her mind and in her fears.

And the checklist, I live and die by checklists.

I have, I've said this before.

I have lists, like a Post-it Note on top of my list and then like a second iteration of the list on the back of the paper.

I just really love lists.

So it made sense to me that you're trying to take something so big, your fear for the world, your desire to own your first home, and press it all into something.

You're trying to control the world in this way.

And a list can be like that.

This way that you can think "If I can get through these things, then I can create some order out of kind of insanity."

So, that's how I came to that form.

Yeah, I truly get this.

This is how I live, but for her, everything was just so much more difficult.

Everything was a struggle and gut wrenching.

And obviously that was your intent.

Absolutely, yeah, I'm thinking about, I'm also, it's funny though.

Like the joy piece that you talked about before, she's connecting these, you know, really difficult things, but then also in there she's imagining her, you know, apocalypse hairstyle, and how will she survive.

But also she wants to have like, be happy.

She wants things even amidst chaos.

So I think that's just very human.

I really took.

You know, all of these stories, every one of these stories, is connected through place, through history.

It is, they are American stories.

And yet, all of your characters seem to feel the weight of the world, whether it is unrest or poverty or racism, or all of it.

And here's what I find, that there's a glimmer of hope.

And that's you.

Can you talk about this glimmer of hope?

And do you think there is a glimmer of hope?

I really, I do.

I was a public school art teacher for 20 years, and I taught little kids.

So, and I've said this before.

I'm like the Mr. Rogers of teachers.

I had my cardigan.

I had like a little chime, and we'd all take a breath together, and we'd have India ink, and we'd paint and make things.

Very, just kind of positive person.

And in a way, optimistic, but just very realistic too.

So even though I smile at the world, I notice things.

And so writing is a place where I kind of collect all these things I noticed, that might not have a space in my professional life, or in the way that I want to spend my day.

And so it's kind of this really condensed view of just some of the harder things, right?

So that's where writing goes.

But within that, that hope still comes through.

Because ultimately, even in the story "My Monticello," there's this call to community, this call to action.

There's a call to recognizing the way each and everything, the people, the animals, and the land are connected, and that we sink or swim together.

And so there's a way in which I hope these stories remind us when we're reading, and inspire us to think about that, and to recognize that, and to move forward with our best instincts.

Jocelyn, when I was reading the book, and there are the five stories and the novella, in my mind, they were building toward the final story.

Did you, was that the way that you crafted it?

Did you purposefully put them in that order, or was that an editor?

No, well, absolutely.

I definitely had help, but yeah, when you craft a collection, you think about, I think about the first story being a question, the second story being, and the last story being kind of an answer.

You think about how you're gonna build one thing to the next.

So a lot of thought and care goes into that, and it should build to the end.

Even though it's a collection, it should still read through and you should end on something that circles you back.

And even, there's a story called "Virginia's Not Your Home," and that's actually a line in the novella.

So thinking about this way, that everything kind of points to everything else, and hopefully it's satisfying to readers.

The book is "My Monticello."

It is a thought-provoking, sometimes chilling, sometimes heartbreaking collection of five short stories and a novella.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, this has been such a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm Anne Bocock, please connect with us.

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