Summary

“My Monticello'' (62) is narrated in the first person by a young Black woman named Da’Naisha Love. Da’Naisha describes how she, her grandmother MaViolet, her white college boyfriend Knox, and several of their neighbors used a bus to escape a violent militia uprising in their neighborhood on First Street, implied to be motivated by white supremacist ideals. In the period leading up to the uprising, there had been storms, power failures, and demonstrations. The group on the bus of “mostly brown and Black people, sixteen of us in all” (67) included the Yahya family, who had two children and a baby; an elderly woman named Ms. Edith; a white couple named Ira and Carol, who brought along a pair of hens; a 10-year-old boy named KJ; a sex worker named LaToya; and a man named Devin, who along with...