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. The book 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 unraveling within the nation.                                                                                                     In "Control Negro" hailed by Roxanne 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 hi 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 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".