Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

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.

Download a free excerpt from Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Fiction !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.

Este volumen recoge los cinco relatos que acompañaban en su edición original a la novela breve Mi Monticello (publicada en castellano por Alpha Decay en 2023), el electrizante debut narrativo de Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. En estas historias encontramos de nuevo una mirada distópica hacia la Norteamérica negra y una crítica desencantada al legado cultural y social que se ha formado en Estados Unidos tras siglos de tensión racial.La piedra de toque de esta colección es «Negro de control», un relato alabado por voces como Roxane Gay (que la describió como «una barbaridad de historia»), en el que un profesor universitario pone en marcha un dudoso experimento sociológico para estudiar el efecto del racismo en su propio hijo desde su nacimiento, al moldearlo en los valores de la comunidad blanca y así condicionar su comportamiento y evaluar su integración en los grupos sociales dominantes. Junto a esta pieza, el resto de historias abordan situaciones igualmente escabrosas y perturbadoramente posibles, como la de una joven mestiza que adopta una nueva lengua y un nuevo nombre para escapar de sus orígenes y de su familia en la Virgina rural; la de un grupo de niños que sobrellevan el día a día en el entorno violento de un colegio donde se les señala y se les encasilla; la de una madre soltera en busca de su salvación con muy pocas esperanzas y la de un viudo nigeriano que emigra a Estados Unidos para malvivir en la ciudad de Alexandria.