The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  The post-election energy that created us had stalled almost immediately; the former congresswoman was now a TV pundit. At the institute, we were only forty people total, twenty of us headquartered in DC. The reduced parameters of our mission often led people to assume we were overzealous tour guides or long-winded museum employees who had strayed from our home base. Some of my colleagues leaned into the misunderstanding: Bill circled monuments correcting tourists with their facts mixed up, sometimes just by reading them the placards they’d walked by; Sophie rarely worked beyond the Smithsonian grounds; Ed hung out in breweries all day, but he checked in each week with such a lengthy log of plausible corrections no one was sure whether he was a friendly and efficient drunk or a gifted writer of fictional dialogue.

  I had been at IPH for four years then, and I wanted to take my charge seriously. To keep from falling into routine, I assigned myself a different DC neighborhood each month. For June, I was in Capitol Hill, where shortly after correcting a tourist who thought the Rayburn Building was named after Gene Rayburn, I realized it was lunchtime. The block surrounding me was cluttered with restaurants that had puns for names and sold expensive comfort food from ostentatiously nostalgic chrome countertops; it all felt sinister and I had settled on pizza when I walked past a bakery, its pink awning reading cake everyday count in loopy cursive that mimicked frosting. I hated the name—the attempt at a double entendre failing to properly be even a single entendre—but it was Daniel’s birthday, and I caught the towering cupcake trees in the window display, heaps of red and cocoa and gold. Cupcakes would seem light and full of options, I thought, and so I walked in and considered flavors before deciding cupcakes were wrong, a variety of cupcakes would say I was a child who could not make up her mind, or else invite him to imagine the opposite—me fully domesticated and walking triumphantly into a PTA meeting, as if that were the future I was waiting for him to offer me. I walked farther down the counter, past the wedding cakes, and the photorealistic DC landmark cakes, and the cakes carved into shoes and champagne bottles and cartoons, looking for something unobtrusive.

  The correction was so minor that four-years-ago-me would have decided it wasn’t worth it. A display cake read juneteenth! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery’s owner wasn’t. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song’s words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone’s backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer’s sales pitch—so much hanging on that We all know—was targeted not to the people who’d celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who’d feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my finger still resting on the countertop above the flyer. The young Black woman turned around.

  “You want that cake?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Hi. I’m Cassie. I’m with the Institute for Public History.”

  The white woman turned around, but both women looked at me without registering that the name meant anything.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “We don’t give orders or anything. We’re a public service. Like 311! But I thought you’d like to know that this flyer’s not quite correct. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September 1862. Juneteenth is celebrated nationally because it’s become a holiday for the whole diaspora, but it actually recognizes the date slaves in Texas learned they were free, which was in June 1865, after the end of the Civil War.”

  “Mmkay,” said the white woman.

  “I’m just going to leave a note. A tiny correction.”

  I pulled out a corrections sticker—double holographed and printed, at considerable expense, with a raised seal; though easily mocked they were almost never properly duplicated. I typed the correction into the office’s one futuristic indulgence—the handheld printers we’d all been issued when we were first hired—and ran a sticker through it to print my text. I signed my name and the date, peeled it from its backing, and affixed it to the counter beside the flyer.

  “There,” I said. “No biggie.”

  I smiled and met both women’s eyes. We were not supposed to be aggressive in demanding people’s time—correct the misinformation as swiftly and politely as possible (guideline 3)—but we were supposed to make it clear we were available for further inquiry or a longer conversation if anyone wanted to know more (guideline 5). We were supposed to be prepared to cite our sources (guideline 7).

  “You gonna buy a cake?” said the Black woman. “Or you came in about the flyer?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m kind of dating someone and it’s his birthday. I was trying to decide what kind of cake would be best. Or I don’t know, maybe cupcakes are better. Do you have any favorites?”

  “Ma’am, if you show up for your man’s birthday with you and a cake and he complains about it, you’re not even kind of dating him anymore. It doesn’t matter the kind of cake.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Give me that one.”

  I pointed at something labeled blackout cake. “Like an Oreo cookie without the cream” said the description. I could tell Daniel I had bought him the blackest cake in the store. The boxes were pink with whimsical phrases written in gold; I asked for the one with cake for days on it. I would let him decide whether to make the dirty joke, or complain about the cultural appropriation of white-owned businesses, or go with the obvious Oreo commentary. I would leave out the bit about my correction. Daniel was a journalist, skeptical by both nature and training, and he found my work suspicious at best.

  He wasn’t alone. Before I’d left GW for the institute, I had been on an upward trajectory, had been lucky. I could recite the academia warning speech I had been given and was supposed to give promising students in return: you had to be willing to go anywhere, to leave anyone, to work for any paltry amount if you wanted to work in your field, and even then, there was probably no job, or no chance that out of a hundred PhDs who applied, you’d be the one to get it. But I had done just one year of a four-four visiting gig in the Midwest before landing a well-regarded tenure track job, a two-two job not just in a major city but in the city I was from. The DC of my childhood was gone, of course, whole swaths the city felt familiar now only because I remembered less of what they used to be, but it was still the only place I’d ever felt at home. Landing a good academic job here was serendipity bordering on magic in a market where “professor” increasingly meant teaching seven classes on four different campuses for no health insurance and below minimum wage.

  I missed my students and colleagues after leaving, missed working on the manuscript that no one asked me about anymore—my years of research on Odetta Holmes still in file drawers. I missed the particular playacted pretension and permanent adolescence that characterized academic parties, and, I admit, I missed the ways that being near the top of a crumbling enterprise had still felt like the top. But, when the chance to work at IPH came, I’d left all of that to do what felt more immediately meaningful.

  My parents had relished introducing me as Dr. Jacobs, the history professor, and now didn’t quite know what to say I was. I had tried to explain to them that professor, even in its best incarnation, now meant answering every year to the tyranny of metrics and enrollments, meant spi
nning what you loved because you loved it and valued because it was valuable into a language of corporate speak to convince administrators your students were employable. It meant being told you were the problem if you coddled students too much, you, the last chance to prepare them for the sink-or-swim world, but also you were the problem if the students were in crisis, if you didn’t warn someone in time that a student was a danger to themselves, if you didn’t have a plan for how to keep your classroom in the fifty-year-old building with doors that didn’t lock anymore safe if a student with a gun showed up. It meant being told each year in a celebratory fashion that the faculty was now more diverse than ever, and then, at some more somber meeting a few months later, being given a list of all the acts of self-governance faculty would no longer be trusted to do and all the evaluative metrics that would now be considered more strictly. It meant being given well-intentioned useless advice from senior colleagues who floated in denial that the institutions they’d devoted their lives to were over as they had known them, but reminded by your more precarious colleagues that you had it too good to complain.

  It had been hard for me to convince people—even the people at IPH itself, who had been mostly recruiting from the surplus of PhDs without full-time jobs—that I had really wanted to leave. The best I could explain it was that I loved my work and hated watching it disappear.

  * * *

  —

  The institute was not without its detractors. The proposal alone had incited a chorus of libertarian panic. In our first year, there were seventeen different social media accounts devoted just to monitoring our corrections; the accounts called us, depending on their angle of critique, The Big Brother Institute, or The Department of Political Correctness, or The Bureau of Whitewashing, or, once in a major paper’s op-ed, The Office of Historical Corrections, which was intended to be dismissive but felt enough like our actual mission that it had become a running office joke, the imaginary shadow entity on which we blamed all missteps and bad publicity. The Office of Historical Corrections strikes again!

  The attention economy was our nemesis and our cheapest tool. About half of the historians worked primarily online. Originally, each had a friendly profile with their name and picture and credentials, meant to make them accessible and unintimidating, but all three of the women of color complained that every time they made a correction their replies flooded with personal vitriol. They tried randomizing log-ins, so that each day’s corrections were not necessarily linked to the agent who’d issued them, which pleased no one: white men did not like being called ugly cunts any better than anyone else, it turned out, and the women of color who had complained in the first place did not like feeling uncredited for their labor, or appreciate the erasure of the professional voices they had cultivated. Everyone with a desk job now worked from a shared faceless account, which did, admittedly, look somewhat ominous and bureaucratic, but was generally cheerful in tone.

  We did the best we could. There was an agent primarily devoted to sending strongly worded letters to the publishers of inaccurate textbooks, but we did not go to schools and classrooms (guideline 4). Our purpose was limited to correction of the historical record, which our mission defined as events at least one year old (guideline 2, part b). We were to make every effort to avoid or back away from the kind of confrontation likely to escalate to force or police intervention (guideline 1). We were supposed to avoid meaningless and pedantic corrections (guideline 8), but the work attracted the pedantic. We had done a month of damage control after one of my more zealous colleagues publicly embarrassed a popular influencer over her pronunciation of “Ulysses” in a fashion vlog she’d posted from Grant’s Tomb. The influencer dubbed us The Office of Mansplaining, which was picked up by at least a thousand of her million followers. I was one of three women of color who were field historians with the project at the time; in the wake of the controversy, I had been sent by the director to be profiled in The Post, to show we were inclusive and nonthreatening.

  The most persistent of our resistance came from the Free Americans, a group of white supremacists who preferred to be called white preservationists. Their leader had turned forty last year but was frequently described by the press as having boyish charm. He was soft-spoken and had a doctorate in psychology. He claimed to hate both violence and the spotlight, but he frequently appeared on television and at marches that turned into brawls. A few years earlier he’d been on the cover of a national magazine in a tailored suit and ascot, which had become such a joke that all members now wore ascots, though many continued to mark themselves by getting the same tattoo: an elk’s head with free men free fists no free lunches written between the antlers. Violence seemed to turn up where they did, but officially they were deemed responsible for only three deaths: an anarchist kid beaten after dueling protests, a Salvadoran man heckled and stabbed on his way home from work by a rowdy chapter leaving a bar, and a white college student shot and dumped into a lake after she argued with her boyfriend about his affiliation with the group. They had never physically attacked an IPH agent, though the Oakland field agent quit after an upsetting run-in. They staged protests against us, following a field historian around for the day, or papering over all of the corrections stickers in a given city with their own revisions, but they were more interested in the publicity than in us specifically, we’d realized, and when the press around us was quieter, mostly so were they.

  * * *

  —

  I made only three corrections after the bakery, and then I circled the reflecting pool several times without hearing anything more incorrect than celebrity gossip and unscientific speculation about the mating habits of ducks. I suspected that under its ornamental and slightly profane box, my cake was melting, so I decided to bring it safely to the office refrigerator and use the rest of the afternoon to type up reports. In the lobby, I flashed my badge at the security guard and took the elevator to the seventh floor, where we had been shoved into an open office space that a different government agency had argued its way out of based on studies showing reduced efficiency.

  I didn’t mind the close quarters; I wasn’t confined to my desk most of the time, and when I was there Elena was on the other side of it. We had started together at the beginning of the enterprise and bonded quickly: Elena worked online and I worked in the field; Elena was a Chicana from LA and I was a Black girl from DC; Elena had a husband and three kids and I had what Elena charitably called a free spirit, but we shared an urgency about the kind of work we were doing, a belief that the truth was our last best hope, and a sense that our own mission was less neutral and more necessary than that of the white men we answered to at the office.

  “What’s the cake for?” Elena asked.

  “Daniel’s birthday,” I said.

  “Hmm,” said Elena.

  “What?”

  “I guess it’s your turn to make the effort.”

  “It’s not about effort. That’s the whole point of not really dating. It’s easy. No one has to make the effort.”

  “Hold on, I’m writing down the date.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I can’t correct you until a year from now. Guideline 2.”

  “See, I almost brought you a cupcake, but then I remembered you’re mean.”

  “You really didn’t bring me a cupcake?”

  “I actually was going to, but I had to make a correction in the bakery, and I got flustered and forgot. Plus the girl who worked there already thought I was crazy.”

  “You corrected a cake?”

  “I corrected a flyer in a cake shop.”

  “Well, boss wants to see you. He left a note.” Elena pointed to my desk. “Maybe don’t lead with the cake bit.”

  I read the note, but it was inscrutable. I could not recall being involved in anything controversial lately—my recent corrections had been rather uniformly underwhelming—but our supervision was so generally lax that I fe
lt like I’d been called to the principal’s office. The director had been running a prestigious university’s ethnomusicology institute before he’d been invited to steer the organization. While he managed most days to look the DC part in suits and close-cropped hair, and he kept all the institute’s moving pieces more or less moving, he had the energy of a man who had intended to spend his golden years playing guitar on the beach and was daily bewildered by what had gone wrong.

  “Cassie,” he said when I walked into his office. “We have a Genevieve problem. It might take some legwork to sort out.”

  He tapped a folder on his desk. A clarification request. The requests that made it past initial review were mostly cases where the historian’s initial correction had been overzealous, frequently violations of guideline 6: we do not posit certainty where the facts are actually murky or disputed, or intervene in a dispute over something so trivial that the relevant information cannot be verified except by weighing the accounts of the disputing parties. Presently, though, the institute was working its way through a backlog of clarification requests all triggered by the recently departed Genevieve Marchand.