Genevieve had been gone from IPH for six months, but she had been regularly reappearing as my nemesis for most of my life. We first met in the fourth grade, when Genevieve was still Genie and had, until the moment of our introduction, been the only Black girl in her class at the private school where I landed a scholarship. Our parents moved, broadly, in the same Black professional circles, but my father was a lawyer who had started with the Bureau of Consumer Protection and then moved into the sort of lawyering that advertised on the radio stations that were banned in Genie’s home (No Money? No Problems! At 1-800-TROUBLE your lawyer gets paid when you do); Genie’s mother was a sitting judge. My mother had recently moved from civil rights work in the Department of Justice to civil rights work in the Department of Education; Genie’s father owned part of a tech company and had his name on a wing of our school. My parents were first-generation upper middle class, and Genie’s were nearly as old money as Black money got to be in the U.S., which is to say, not terribly old but extremely proud of it.
My parents and I were invited over to their house after my first week of school. In the middle of the dessert course, Genie’s father said, “She’s so well spoken, for having been in public school until now,” and my mother grimaced and launched into a defense of public schools, and my father politely waited for her to finish and then said, “When your baby’s really brilliant you don’t need to pay for someone to tell you so. You wait for the opportunities to come to you.” Genie’s father hinted that my scholarship was possible because of funds they’d earmarked for the recruitment of minority students, and my mother said true charity wasn’t boastful, and Genie’s mother noted that the Bible verse my mother was trying to quote was actually about love. That was how joint family dinners went for the following decade, but they continued to happen several times a year.
At the dinner table, Genie was a proper young lady and I was a mouthy child being raised in a home where I’d never been told Children should be seen and not heard, or Stay out of grown folks’ business. Beyond our parents’ watch, Genie had plenty to say. She did not so much actively dislike me as disdain me. Her favorite thing to do was pronounce something I was doing, or wearing, or simply was, to be confusing. “Your hair is confusing me,” Genie said the first day we met, with an air of genuine concern that never entirely went away or became less grating. In both our households there were a series of party pictures of the two of us, one per party each year from childhood to adolescence. I liked myself just fine when looking at myself, but in photos with Genie, a former Gerber baby, belle of the Jack and Jill debutante ball, I looked sulky, ersatz. It was too late for the era when prestigious institutions would acquire one minority and stop, but too soon for there to be enough of us that we had the option of avoiding taking a position on each other. We grew up circling each other, each aware of the ways the other highlighted our deficiencies.
I went to college expecting to be mostly rid of Genie. For the four years we spent at well-regarded universities on opposite coasts, I became accustomed to her absence, but at the party Genie’s parents threw for her graduation, we discovered we were both headed directly to the same PhD program. Ready to believe in the comfort of the familiar, we tried that first year to be real friends, went on study dates and girls’ nights and salon outings, built the trappings of a closeness that never quite took. We were the only two Black women in the department—this counting faculty, grad students, staff, and, for four out of our five years, undergraduate majors—and in our first year I was constantly correcting people who got the two of us confused, our similar hair and coloring enough to override that Genie was five inches taller and three dress sizes smaller than I was. The confusion eventually faded because professors in the program liked me fine, but they loved Genie, and in that way they came to be able to tell the difference between us. Our pretense at true friendship also faded. In my telling, Genie discovered she didn’t need it, and in Genie’s telling, I discovered I didn’t want it. It was true, I admit—away from Genie, I had the peculiar confidence of only children, the boldness that came from being doted on but alone often enough to be oblivious to my own strangeness. In Genie’s presence, I felt revealed by the only nearby witness to my life as a whole.
At the end of our first year in the program, I visited my parents, who were in the suburbs now—they had given up on DC rent and moved to PG county—and told them there wasn’t anyone to date seriously in my small white university town. A week later we drove into DC for Genie’s parents’ annual summer white party, where Genie announced her engagement to James Harmon III, a Black doctor who’d just finished his residency there. Genie got married the summer after our second year, just before her husband started work at the University Hospital. I was invited, but I was teaching a summer class and couldn’t cancel sessions; I sent, via my parents, my apologies and a Vitamix. My research area was protest movements of the twentieth century, and Genie’s was material culture in the seventeenth century, which meant although we were both Americanists, after our first year of school we generally shared only one class a semester, and saw less and less of each other.
By our third year, Genie and her husband had moved into a spectacular town house, at which she volunteered to host the annual grad student end-of-year party. In previous years, the party had consisted of chips and beer in an overheated basement apartment, or supermarket cheese plates in the student union room, but Genie’s party was catered, except for the gingerbread Bundt cake she baked and iced herself, using her grandmother’s recipe. Professional bartenders in black tie were on hand serving cocktails named after schools of historical thought. Genie drank only The Great Man, which was actually a mocktail, and confided in me that she was pregnant. I congratulated her, genuinely, and felt resentful that I could not allow myself even a moment of smug anti-feminist joy to think that motherhood might slow Genie down or at least keep her off the job market when it was my turn. At least I am having a twenties, I thought, though my twenties, which I’d treated with a cast-down-your-bucket-where-you-are approach, had thus far only brought me a string of men who were all very sad about some quality in themselves that they had no intention of making any effort to change. I took a sip of my Marxist, a vodka cocktail made with such high-end alcohol that at first sip I hadn’t recognized it as vodka, having until that party believed that it was the essence of vodka to have an aftertaste like astringent.
Genie went straight from grad school to a fabulous job the same year I headed off for my visiting position; when I landed the tenure-track job a year later, she sent a note of congratulations written on stationery from her own higher-ranked university. For years I had only peripheral knowledge of her life—talks and publications, family photos shared on social media. She and James had a daughter, Octavia, who appeared to take to the camera the way Genie had as a child, and I watched her grow from baby-faced to long-limbed and theatrical. There’d been no note of congratulations when I joined IPH, and when Genie and her family stopped appearing in my social media feeds I thought maybe I’d been downsized from her Friends roster, having become professionally unimportant. When she reappeared, to my astonishment, it was to join IPH two years after I had. She was divorced, parted from her tenure-track job in her pre-tenure year under murky circumstances rumored to involve a lawsuit, had shaved her hair down to a crisp teenie Afro, and no longer went by Genie—it was Genevieve now.
The Genie I remembered would have had expansive ideas about our mission but would have spent years charming the director into coming around to them, while parroting her parents on the virtues of treading lightly. Genevieve said in our first office meeting during her first week that we were tiptoeing around history to the point that we might as well be lying to people. She wanted a guideline emphasizing that lies of omission were still lies. In the field, she amended a sign quoting the Declaration of Independence with portions of the worst of Notes on the State of Virginia. She was instructed not to come back to the National Portrait Gallery a
fter she stood in front of the Gauguin for hours telling viewers about his abuse of underage Tahitian girls. She made a tourist child cry at Mount Vernon when she talked about Washington’s vicious pursuit of his runaway slaves, and she was formally asked by the only Virginia field historian to avoid making further corrections in the state. The following month she talked her way into the Kennedy Center and “corrected” hundreds of programs for that evening’s showing of a beloved musical where George Washington was written as a kindly paternal figure, noting that in real life Washington had not been a jovial singing Black man, and including an extensive list of his atrocities. She was, she protested when our director reprimanded her, not in the state of Virginia when she made the correction.
That was the only Genevieve clarification I had previously been called in for—less a clarification really, and more a minor PR campaign. I got complimentary tickets to the show and brought Daniel. A picture of us in the audience ran on the agency account, along with an apologia for having overstepped. We know the difference between history and artistry, the post said. I didn’t write it—I didn’t work online—and Elena had refused the assignment; the actual text was written by one of the two white men named Steve whom I couldn’t always tell apart because I’d never learned their last names. IPH hadn’t needed me to weigh in; they’d only needed my face, to show that I was one of the reasonable ones. My face only barely held up its part of the bargain—in the picture, Daniel looked quizzical and I was grimacing. I had never seen the show before and was inclined to agree with Genevieve’s critique, if not her methods.
I didn’t say any of that to the director, but I took Genevieve out for a drink at an upscale Black-owned bar on U Street to apologize. We had socialized minimally since she’d started at the agency, and though we blamed it on working mostly outside of the office, and Genevieve juggling joint custody, I knew it wasn’t scheduling that stood between us. I was sincere enough in being sorry for my role in things that we left the bar almost on good terms, but on our way back to Metro, we passed a bar with a young and multiracial crowd and a weekly hip-hop and classic rock dance party. Its name—Dodge City—was a nod to both its country-western decor and DC’s derogatory nickname from the ’90s, when the city was the country’s murder capital and so many people, most of them young and Black, were killed in its streets that a joke about the likelihood of being shot there became a way of saying where you were from.
Genevieve wanted to go inside and footnote the bar’s name on the cocktail menus with an explanation of the violence it referenced, and I had to threaten to call the director before she relented. I walked home, furious at still being the bad guy, and also remembering the way Genevieve’s parents had talked about the revival of U Street when we were children, the way Genevieve had adopted their disdain in adolescence, how much they’d spoken of the city’s past and future, and how little they’d wanted to be connected with the Black people living in its dilapidated present until most of them had been pushed out. Where was the correction for that?
Genevieve gave up on me again. For her remaining time at IPH, our interactions stopped at cordial acknowledgment. It was the kind of tension that in the beginning seemed it might still be resolved, but went on long enough that the grievance settled, turned so solid that trying to make pleasant chitchat around it would have felt disrespectful. Besides, I knew if I did resolve things with her, I would end up in the middle of whatever battle she picked next, and I couldn’t afford that. I told myself that in the institute’s good graces, I could still do some good.
If it had only been the occasional play or bar that Genevieve raised a fuss about, she might have lasted longer, but Genevieve’s most persistent and controversial grievance was the passive voice atrocity: wherever there was a memorial, she wanted to name not just the dead but the killers. She corrected every memorial to lynching, every note about burnt schoolhouses and destroyed business districts, murdered leaders and bombed churches, that failed to say exactly who had done it. She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others. She upset people. She jeopardized the whole project, and for nothing, said our more liberal colleagues. She was not correcting falsehoods, said the more conservative, she was adding revisionist addendums. They said these things to my face, assuming, because we did not seem to be friends, that I disagreed with her.
My problem, alas, had never been as simple as Genie being wrong. In fourth grade, she’d been right about my hair: I had insisted on doing it myself, and my parents were willing to let me learn through trial and error. In high school, Genie might have found a nicer way to put it than “You know they only keep telling you you’re a good poet because they expect us to be illiterate?” but my poetry wasn’t actually as good as teachers’ praise for it. In grad school, Genie asked me once what my parents wanted for me, and I said that they just wanted me to be happy. Genie said “That explains a lot then,” and I said “What?” and Genie said “I’ve met a lot of Black women who had to learn it was OK to choose to be happy, but you’re the only one I know who was raised to expect it.”
It was hard to reconcile people-pleasing Genie with abrasive Genevieve, but they had in common usually being correct. IPH disagreed and had forced her out after just over a year and a dozen write-ups for policy violations. Being indignant on Genevieve’s behalf was unsettling. The very fact of Genie being Genevieve was unsettling. Just as I was accepting that I had grown into as much of a different person as I was ever going to become, Genevieve showed up proving it was still possible to entirely reinvent yourself. Perhaps in whatever years Genie was turning into Genevieve, I was supposed to have been turning into someone called Cassandra. Worse, perhaps I had already turned into Cassandra; perhaps it was Cassandra who made her white colleagues feel so comfortable that they whispered to her while waiting for the coffee to brew or the microwave to ding, “Genevieve—she’s a lot, isn’t she?” Cassandra whom the director trusted to fix Genevieve’s missteps on behalf of the U.S. government. Perhaps I’d been Cassandra for some time now, walking around using some bolder girl’s name.
* * *
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In the director’s office, I opened the blue folder with a suspicion that it would become obvious to me why I had been chosen for this assignment, why this particular Genevieve problem needed a Black woman’s face. The issue surrounded a memorial plaque in Cherry Mill, Wisconsin, a small town in the Fox River Valley, about an hour northwest of Milwaukee. Technically, we were federal; Wisconsin was not out of bounds—we could make corrections on vacation, even—but no one from the DC office would be sent there without special circumstances, so what Genevieve had been doing in Wisconsin was for her to know and the clarification file to guess. A generation ago someone would have stopped her from going at all: Cherry Mill had been a sundown town by reputation if not actual ordinance. From the dawn of its existence through the 1980 census it had zero Black residents, officially. In 1937 it apparently had one, briefly, though he was gone before a census caught him: a man named Josiah Wynslow. He’d gone from Mississippi to Chicago and Chicago to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee he’d come into luck—somehow he’d leaped from his job at a meat-packing plant to one as a driver and general errand boy for a Milwaukee tanner who, having watched what the war, the Depression, and the sheer passage of time did to industries and the workers in them, moonlighted as a radical socialist. He died, childless and ornery enough to leave Josiah most of his money. It was less than it would have been before the Depression, much less than it would have been when the tanning industry was in its heyday, but it was still a small fortune for a Black man a decade removed from Mississippi sharecropping.
It was hard to say from the record what his boss meant of the gift—whether it was a gesture of kindness, or a final experiment, or a fuck-you to the society he felt had failed itself—but Josiah took the money, sold his share of the business, and left the city. Even Milwaukee
, eventually one of the Blackest cities in the country, barely had a Black population in the ’30s, and what there was had been redlined into two diminishing neighborhoods and waxed and waned with the fortunes of the plants that occasionally recruited from Chicago. Josiah, for reasons the file knew not, left Milwaukee for the even whiter and more openly hostile Cherry Mill, where he bought a defunct printing shop from a white man who was about to lose it to the bank, with the apparent intention of turning it into his own tannery and leather goods shop. On the subject of race, Wisconsin was a strange cocktail of progressivism and old-fashioned American anti-Blackness. It had passed one of the earliest civil rights ordinances in the country in 1895 but immediately reduced the remedy for discrimination so much that it wasn’t worth the cost of court to sue. Portions of the state had been welcoming enough, if pushed by protest, in its early history, but as in many northern cities, as the number of Black residents grew, so did the number of restrictions on where they could live, socialize, be served, or own property. There had never been a lynching in the state of Wisconsin, the heyday of the Klan was over, and Wisconsin had stayed so white for so long that for decades its local Klan mostly harassed Italians, but no place remained unwelcoming through innocence. There were no restrictive covenants in Cherry Mill when Josiah arrived because previously there had been no one in town to restrict. The man who sold him the location took the money and ran before he had to answer to his neighbors, but find out the neighbors did, and Josiah was repeatedly told to leave town and leave the deed behind or have it taken by force. Repeatedly he did not go.
Josiah was thirty in 1937, old enough to remember the South before he’d left it and the Midwest when he’d arrived, Tulsa and Chicago in 1919, and St. Louis before that, still raw in communal memory. He should have known better than to stay put, and still he stayed put, stayed for months, until a group of concerned citizens came in the night and set the place on fire. He had not finished clearing out the old printing debris and had already hauled in some of his tanning supplies; the basement was stocked with barrels of lye and the place was completely engulfed before he had a chance to get out. For years, this had been openly bragged about, a warning to anyone who might try it next. By the ’60s it had become a quiet open secret, and then a nearly lost memory, until it was rediscovered by a graduate student in the late ’90s doing archive work with the local newspaper. The result of the ensuing town meetings and public shame was a memorial plaque that went up at the former site of the building where Josiah died.
The Office of Historical Corrections Page 14