Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is the author of My Monticello, a fiction debut that was called “a masterly feat” by the New York Times and a winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Weatherford Award. Johnson’s work was also a finalist for the Kirkus Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, the LA Times Debut Seidenbaum Prize, as well as long-listed for a Pen/Faulkner Fiction Award and the Story Prize. Johnson has been a fellow at TinHouse, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, The Guardian, Kweli Journal and elsewhere. Her short story “Control Negro” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, guest edited by Roxane Gay and read live by LeVar Burton. A veteran public school art teacher, Johnson lives and writes in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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NEW ORLEANS REVIEW
This book talks about racism, microaggressions, and the plight of people of color, mainly Black people, in America. There are quite a few books written in this past year that talk about the same topics. What made you want to write this book, and what makes this book different from the others talking about the same issues?
JOHNSON
I guess what made me write this book was, it came out of my particular experiences here in Virginia, in Charlottesville. Some stories in the book are things that happened in the community but didn’t directly affect me. The first story, “Control Negro,” was a response to a violent interaction between a University of Virginia student and the police that patrolled the campus there in 2015. The last story, the novella, was a response to August 12th, 2017, here in Charlottesville, where white nationalists performed a lot of violence and vitriol towards Black and Brown people and Jewish people. Also, much smaller interactions here in Charlottesville influenced me to write this book, either because they happened to me or because I witnessed them, or my experiences just being in these spaces as a public school teacher and a parent. I can only write the book that comes from me, oblivious to what other people may be doing. The book absolutely talks about racism, race, identity, and the idea of home. What does it mean to be at home in America? It also talks about our responsibility to the environment, the idea of community. What does it mean for different kinds of people to be in community? What should they have access to? What does freedom mean in relation to other people? And how do you become a parent amid all these things? Or how can you be a parent? And how does that look? It’s just everything that I’m thinking about.
NOR
How long have you been sitting on this idea?
JOHNSON
I wrote the stories roughly between 2015 and 2020-ish. I didn’t know when I started that I was writing a collection related to Virginia, I was just writing short stories because I liked writing them. At some point, I wrote “Control Negro,” and that story was very specifically rooted in Charlottesville, and was anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2018 and got a lot more attention than anything I’ve ever written before. It gave me a sense of intention. I figured I could pull some of the stories I’ve already written into some of these themes of place, home, belonging, parenthood, safety, the environment, and I can also write towards these ideas. That’s when I created the intention to collect the stories around [themes]. The novella, on the other hand, was written last. By the time I wrote that I more or less knew this would be a set because the threads of the short stories kind of got pulled into the novella. I didn’t know exactly how it would look or what the form would be, but I’m happy that it remained a set.
NOR
How did you decide to couple these stories together, and how to order them?
JOHNSON
I’m a big list maker, so I kept a list of all the stories that might fit and might work within the collection, and then looked for (A) the strongest ones, and (B) how they’re different enough from one another and how they might be in relationship to one another. By that time, I’d gotten an agent who I trusted, so I had help there, too. I got an idea from a writer who I really like, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, who wrote an amazing collection called Friday Black. It’s really, really good, if you haven’t read it. He talked about reading the first sentence and the last sentence of your stories together, looking at them in relation to one another. So I did that. I thought about how I have a lot of different voices, different points of view, so I wanted to, as I ordered them, go from a male voice to a female voice, from a third-person story to a second-person story. It just made sense for certain stories to be there.
NOR
Your use of point of view is one of the most interesting things for me. The most interesting perspectives you write in, in my opinion, are from the male’s perspective, in “Control Negro” and “King of Xandria,” and then from little boy children’s perspective, in “Something Sweet On Our Tongues.” What made you want to write from a male point of view, instead of from a little girl’s point of view, a single mom doing that racial experiment, or an immigrant woman trying to defend her child in the classroom?
JOHNSON
The book is kind of half and half. There are three female voices, three male voices—or in the case of the kids, it’s a group of voices. I can’t say particularly why I chose to do that, except that I’m a fiction writer. I’m constantly going into other people’s spaces in my imagination. I think both as a writer and just the way that I’m made, and being a public school teacher for 20 years, it’s comfortable for me to play with less separation, and just to imagine being in someone else’s space. I know that’s not the same as really being in their space, but I can imagine. I think there can be something really beautiful about how your characters are just like you, but there also can be something really lovely about exaggerating a piece of you. You can’t write what isn’t you, you have to be able to imagine that, but you can exaggerate or pull apart, or even write into the opposite of what you would do. In the case of a story like “Control Negro,” I wouldn’t make those parental choices, but I could still relate to them. I think we want to say there are good people and bad people, and for me, I can find how I could be that way in another, less extreme form. So it wasn’t a stretch to write from those points of view, even though they weren’t my experience. I think the hard part is making sure you don’t do something really wrong, where it’s not believable to the reader. The way that I think about it is I’m making an individual, I’m not making it seem like it’s all black men or all children. I’m trying to create these particular children, and I as a teacher have seen these children, so I can slip into their point of view and imagine them. I think the reason I wrote the stories in those voices, those and the female-centered ones the way they are, is because each story required that voice. In the case of the school children, it’s about performing one’s power in a way that felt particular to little boys. Little girls could also do that, but that particular story was about little boys. It wouldn’t work if you put a different character in there. That would be a very different story; it might also be a good story, but it’d be a different one.
NOR
As a reader, I can say it didn’t feel like a woman writing from the perspective of a man. It really felt like a man’s voice. How did you reach the point where you could slip into those POVs easily and write believably?
JOHNSON
I don’t think it’s easy. Writing isn’t easy for me. But I do think that that skill just came like any skill, right? Just the same way you develop being thoughtful of language or the way that you develop dialogue that isn’t flat, you know, it’s just another skill, and it suited me. Some people might never want to do that, and I think that would be fine. There are so many ways that you come to it; I don’t know that you can entirely choose. When I think of stories I wrote as a teenager, I remember writing one that was totally from a boy’s point of view. That was something I already was doing. It wasn’t like, “I’m going to make this intention to learn how to write in this way.” The story required this professor who was going to be really flat, in the case of “Control Negro.” I borrowed a lot from my parents growing up. You always are writing from what you know, but it isn’t their story; I just pulled the little details. He becomes his own voice. If you get some of the story right, then you kind of match the rest. In other words, if you get a moment of the voice to be authentic, then you can keep working on it until it all matches the best that you can muster.
NOR
It sounds like a very organic process.
JOHNSON
Yeah, I would say so.
NOR
I love how diverse the stories are, how they pinpoint different parts of the Black experience, and they’re all connected, of course, by racism. Just going back to how good a writer you are, it seems like different people wrote these stories and sent them in for you to compile them. What compelled you to write these particular scenarios? Why does this man make a racial experiment with his son from afar? Why does this woman travel to Europe and find a lover? Why these particular stories, rather than other stories that you could have chosen?
JOHNSON
Each story has its own genesis. “The King of Xandria,” I think, is the first story I wrote that was included in the collection. It came from me hearing from a friend who works in a school system, not where I am, who overheard this parent ranting in the office. She didn’t describe the race of the parent, but I had a sense the parent was an immigrant from somewhere, I didn’t know where, who felt self-important, but also vulnerable. For some reason, that was interesting to me, and I thought, “Well, who would this person be, who was using big words, but slightly misusing them?” That was a tiny anecdote that someone shared with me, so that’s where the story came from. And often the person who tells me the story or the place you’d think I would want to be in the story isn’t where I end up wanting to be. I’m a teacher, so I really identified with her. No one wants to get yelled at. But I felt for that man. I wondered, what could he be, and how could I show you what would make someone be both vulnerable and also kind of misusing their power, but not as powerful as they need or want to be, and who also cares about his kids? So that’s how that story came about, for example. Then a story like buying a house ahead of the apocalypse came out of my own very particular worries, even though the character isn’t me. Her biography is not mine, but that’s probably closest to my actual concerns. That’s a story about how do you prepare and invest in your future when things feel very uncertain? It was written before the pandemic, but I think we all had that moment of contemplation. The novella is specifically a reaction to August 12th, here in Charlottesville, where we had this precursor to the storming of the Capitol. We had this moment of violent protests around the Confederate monuments, but it was so much more than that, in my experience. It was like a summer of violence that ended in a weekend of someone getting killed and a lot more violence. The reason the stories are what they are is because of, again, the experiences I’ve had. I’m responding specifically to things that worry me, things I think about, that I am concerned about, that I have questions about. As far as which stories I chose, I think once I knew my main themes, it became clear which stories belonged together. I also picked the stories I liked the best and then decided those would be the themes too, the stories that felt like they had the most energy and the most life and the most diversity between them, but also still talked about this idea of place, belonging, and identity.
NOR
Do you have a favorite story out of this collection?
JOHNSON
“Control Negro” is special to me, because it was the beginning of everything as far as what the collection would become. “Buying a House Out of the Apocalypse” is the closest to my actual heart and my way of being. The “My Monticello” novella is just like my manifesto. It’s kind of that story that is more accessible, I think, to a lot of people. It’s more like a novel, it’s longer, it’s a first-person narrative bringing you into something, whereas some of the stories, the forms are a little bit different than some people who read novels may be used to. I am really proud of that story, because it’s deceptively simple. It could be read as an adventure story or a zombie story where the white supremacists are the zombies, but then it talks about some bigger ideas about who gets to occupy space, who owns history, and what it means to be a community. I’m proud that those big ideas are woven into a story that’s very accessible so that a young person could read it as an adventure, and hopefully, those ideas and questions would still come through.
NOR
That’s what I noticed when I was reading that last chapter, “My Monticello.” It’s very different from the other short stories. It’s a full-on action-packed story and seems apocalyptic. It’s also a lot more fleshed out, introduces a love triangle between Da’Naisha, Devin, and Knox, as well as their community’s struggles with racism and white supremacists. Why the sudden change in the narrative? Why not keep going with the short story trend that you already had going?
JOHNSON
That’s a good question. I don’t think I was planning in that way. I will say that it started off as a short story. The novella was longer and more fleshed out, but it did start more like a short story and less different than everything else, at least in its length. But it needed more. So I guess there’s this way in which I think, when you’re writing, the story can tell you what it needs to be. I like compression; I tend to shorten things, but that story, for it to work, needed a middle that made sense. I had to think about all kinds of things that the other stories didn’t need because the novella existed in a real place, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello. I wanted the details of that place to ring true; I wanted the factual parts of the history to be true. It has so many characters in the story, and each one needed a moment, dialogue, voice. At one point, someone told me I should cut down some of the characters. That same person ended up interviewing me recently, and was like, “I’m so glad you didn’t listen to me!” I mean, that was a valid criticism or idea to think about, and I did think about it, and I kind of went the opposite way. The story got bigger, and I decided to have more time with the characters together and to think a little bit more deeply about who they were. I think there are some people who would want it even bigger, right? You could go in and really have dialogue and have the scenes be more, but to me, the form of the story is Da’Naisha. She is telling you this story, whether you imagine her writing it out or recalling it. She’s not going to give you verbatim dialogue of every character, she’s going to summarize what’s happening and give you a feel for the scene. Once I knew that she was telling the story in this urgent way, and relaying these things to you, the reader, then everything—the histories and the characters—come through her; it’s all her voice. That simplified it, because you really should know these people through how she sees them.
NOR
That’s one of the few stories in this collection that are in the first person. Most of them are second or third person. Why that stylistic choice?
JOHNSON
It had to be told that way. “My Monticello” is from Da’Naisha’s perspective, it’s centering her. It would be a dramatically different story to put it in the third person. It wouldn’t even work; it would become a whole different project. It’s a story about a young person questioning where she fits in history. The intimacy or the power in the story is that you, whoever you are as a reader, whether you look like Da’Naisha or not, whether you identify with her struggles or not, you literally need to be intimately in her shoes. From the first scene where these marauding white supremacists come into her grandmother’s neighborhood and start setting things on fire and grabbing people and fighting with people, you need to be in her shoes at that moment. And you need to be in her shoes at the moment where she drives up to Monticello with this group of neighbors and her boyfriend and her grandmother to a place that she knows, that she’s worked at, and she knows she has this complicated history with. She knows that she’s a descendant of [Jefferson] but hasn’t dealt with it in this intimate way, until she walks into Thomas Jefferson’s house and is like, “This is my grandfather’s house and the house of my great great great great great great grandmother, who was owned by him.” If it weren’t through that lens, I think the story wouldn’t be what I hoped it would be. The story dictated what the voice should be. Whereas a story like “King of Xandria,” which I really liked, is in third person. It totally made sense for there to be a distance between the reader and this Nigerian father who’s living in Alexandria, Virginia, and it’s cold, it’s drizzling, it’s snowy. There’s a way in which he’s looking at these migratory birds and thinking about them, it made sense for you [the reader] to be over his shoulder because there’s a distance between you, him, and his idea upon these two places.
NOR
One line that stuck out to me in the “My Monticello” chapter is when Da’Naisha says, “Back when the world was bleeding internally, but not yet broken open.” Then the narrative proceeds to look like the world is breaking open for these characters. You mentioned this [story] was a direct response to August 12th, what happened in Charlottesville. But I also wonder, did you write this chapter to be sort of prophetic? Do you perceive there to be a “breaking open” to happen in America in real life at any point soon?
JOHNSON
That’s a good question. I finished the story by 2018, 2019. That was a pivotal time in the country. We were thinking about the then-current president, and how that was exposing some of the vulnerabilities of government, but also transforming what the Office of the President could do in a particular way. And also, police. So many things. Many of those things came to fruition after, but while I was writing I was thinking about, not George Floyd, but Martice Johnson, the person who was bloodied by police in Virginia. That was happening in relation to other incidents of violence. I was taking what happened and saying, “Let’s look at this as a cautionary tale.” With the August 12th incident, I was like, “This is what this is, I see what this is, and this is what it would look like if we don’t address it. Do these people have the right to come and do this and that? When we protect their freedom to be able to do this and that, this is what an outcome could be.” I wasn’t trying to be prophetic, but I was trying to say, “Let’s not do that.” We should [all] care about this, even if you don’t feel directly under threat. We should recognize that a character like Da’Naisha is at the center of our history as Americans, and we should protect and care about one another in this very particular way, as an anecdote, and as an alternative to the opposite idea those particular protesters brought to our community. In that way, I was thinking into the future, but as a cautionary tale. It’s not surprising where we’ve gone as a country, but I certainly didn’t expect us to be here as I was launching the book.
NOR
With that said, what are the main things you’d want your readers to get from reading the book as a whole?
JOHNSON
There’s a way in which you hope people get things, but there’s also a way in which you make something, and people are going to bring so much of themselves to it, and that’s a good thing. They’re going to find things you wrote that you didn’t even know you wrote. They’re going to find moments that you put in there, that you aren’t even 100% aware of. At least for me, it’s a myth to say I’m a puppeteer that’s going to manipulate your experience as a reader. All I can do is talk about what I think and try to make something a little bit better than I can even think about it. I’m relying on my subconscious, I’m relying on all the things I’ve ever read, and all the things I’ve ever heard, and all the people I’ve ever known to channel something that I don’t 100% understand, but I have an idea about, and I try to refine it to reflect my values and so forth. I guess I just want to help readers appreciate the nuances, the contradictions, the humanity of characters who do things they both agree with and disagree with. I want them to recognize the right for these and other characters to be at the center of stories. We need stories that center all kinds of people, and we need to be able to recognize the connections between ourselves and characters like these. I would be pretty happy if someone cared about these characters, even if they cared about one of these characters, and hoped something better for them, and by extension, they would hope something better for us.
NOR
I have felt very deeply for these characters. I think it’s going to make me more aware when I go out in these public spaces, and I overhear a teacher arguing with a parent. Now I’ll be thinking “Ok, is that person from a foreign place? Is there discrimination happening?” This book has made me more aware, and I hope all the readers become more aware reading this, too. Lastly, do you have any advice for young writers, any words of wisdom?
JOHNSON
Yeah, so I was a young writer (giggles). I didn’t publish this book until I was 50 years old, so I wrote for a long time trying to get things published before this book came into the world. I guess I would say two things. One, try to love and enjoy the writing part. Even though it’s a hard thing, it can be wonderful. There’s a powerfulness in writing. I’m a really low-key person, really accommodating, a public school teacher, but in writing, I can write something that is almost obscene in a beautiful way. I can write a character who is going to do something that I would never do. Even before anyone reads it, that’s a whole other thing. There’s something really nice about the process of that, and to think, “Well, what would I wanna write about?” You talk about writing about racism and these big ideas, but it doesn’t feel like that when I’m writing it because I’m writing from my own individual self. Nothing is off-limits. It doesn’t have to be a big idea or a small idea. I think if you explore it honestly within yourself it’s gonna be of interest to you, and probably to the interest of other people.
The second thing I would say is kind of the opposite, which is, find community as you go along. [When] you’re making something, when you’re in the trenches, when you don’t know what something is, when you get your first story published, or you don’t, all the people that you come in contact with and spend time with like your writer groups, readers, teachers, these people will help you refine your vision. They’re gonna help you see what you’re doing, to see yourself, to find opportunities, and to sustain yourself and keep going.
NOR
Thank you so much again for agreeing to do this interview. I’m so glad I got to talk to you and get into the mind of someone who wrote such a beautiful piece of work.
JOHNSON
No problem! Are you a writer?
NOR
Yes, that’s the goal!
JOHNSON
Well, I hope all goes well for you, and who knows, maybe I’ll just be reading your story somewhere and I’ll think, “Oh, I remember her interviewing me and being kind!”
Breanna Henry is a junior Mass Communication and English Writing double-major at Loyola University New Orleans from Houston, Texas. She has published works on her university’s newspaper The Maroon, the university literary journal Meraki, and on her own blog website. When she’s not working towards her degree, she’s writing poems in the middle of the night, doing photoshoots with friends, and dancing wildly in her room while music blasts through her speakers.
+++This interview was edited for length and clarity
