The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  The sign was there for decades, long enough that it went generally unnoticed. Then Genevieve spotted it. She issued a correction and took the additional liberty of not just stickering but replacing the existing plaque: hers added to Josiah’s name the names of those known to have participated in the mob, names known because they had identified themselves in a surviving photograph of the spectacle. Eight of Cherry Mill’s adults, seven men, two with small children sitting on their shoulders, and one woman, smiling and holding an infant, had posed and smiled for a photograph that someone had captioned The Cherry Mill Defenders: Fire Purifies. Their names and the date were on the back, in neat cursive penmanship. This, I gathered, was what had set Genevieve digging, what had made her upset enough to go looking for the sign to amend it.

  “Let me guess,” I said to the director, once I had scanned the file. “Someone is sure there’s been an error and their dear grandfather who wouldn’t have hurt a fly wasn’t a part of this ugliness. It was his doppelgänger in the photo and his name on the sign is a mistake and they want it taken down.”

  “Not quite. A guy—one Andy Detry—did go looking because his grandfather was named, but he says his grandfather was a right bastard and he was looking to see what became of the victim’s family afterward, and whether there was anything he could do to help set things right. What he found, he says, was the victim might not have been killed. Says his digging turned up two death certificates and some living relatives to suggest the victim escaped very much alive and went back to Illinois, where he went on to have a big family. Josiah’s surviving relatives joined the clarification request.”

  “Can’t we just correct it then?” I asked.

  “Well there’s a problem,” he said.

  “We need to know whose body they claimed was Josiah’s?”

  “Not exactly. There’s no record that there was a body. Total structural collapse and a town full of people who were eager to reclaim the land. Under those circumstances I imagine the word of witnesses would be enough for a death certificate and probably some shenanigans about the deed or the next of kin—after he died, the property somehow turned up in the name of the husband of the woman in the picture. But I’m not asking you to solve an eighty-year-old hypothetical property crime. The body I’m worried about is very much alive. Genevieve has been emailing the office and threatening FOIA requests on this one if we don’t keep her updated. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s still asking questions of the people of Cherry Mill too. Her sign kicked up some fuss there, and there could be media on this one.”

  “You’re sending me so if there’s news footage of an agent taking down a memorial sign with Genevieve screaming in the background, it’s two Black women yelling at each other and not a white guy in a suit tearing down the evidence of a crime?”

  “I’m sending you because you have good sense and you’re not looking for the attention. You can wear a suit if you’d like. Whether or not we list the killers is a philosophical question that I know we don’t all see the same way. Whether someone forged a will or a deed or a death certificate to acquire the property is out of our jurisdiction entirely. But whether they declared a living man dead and we doubled down on their mistake—that’s facts. And if you find it to be true that the sign is a mistake, Genevieve will take it better coming from you than from anyone else in this office.”

  “Genevieve will or the Post will?”

  “It is very much my hope that this clarification is so simple and boring and handled without drama that the Post takes absolutely no interest in it no matter how many times Genevieve calls them. Do you get me?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Can you handle this for me?”

  “I can,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  I carried the cake home on Metro and practiced ways to tell Daniel I was leaving for Wisconsin in a few days. I didn’t trust the state: my first job had been in Eau Claire; I had felt dazzled by its beauty and also claustrophobic the whole time, charmed by and hostile toward a region I had never entirely forgiven for its commitment to civility and conflict avoidance. Midwest nice was a steady, polite gaslighting I found sinister, a forced humility that prevented anyone from speaking up when they’d been diminished or disrespected, lest they be labeled an outsider. I was bewildered by the pride the region took in these pathologies. I didn’t trust my role at IPH, or at least I didn’t trust anymore my assumption that as long as I didn’t openly defy the agency, I’d be left alone to do work that mattered. I didn’t trust my own motivations. I wanted for once to get something right when Genevieve was wrong, but I also wanted my assignment to the case to be because I was careful and thorough and would ask the right questions, not because my friendly brown face would make good damage control when the agency discredited Genevieve, again. I didn’t trust my impulse to call Nick, my last serious ex, who was still in Milwaukee so far as I knew, and tell him I was coming to town, and I didn’t trust myself to explain any of it to Daniel.

  Daniel and I had met three years earlier, at a happy hour that Elena dragged me to. I’d been restless, nostalgic for the work I’d left: my nearly finished manuscript nagged at me, and it was disorienting having just experienced the second fall in my lifetime that I didn’t answer to an academic calendar. I still missed having an ongoing research project, and I had begun to design whimsical minor empirical studies, including one surrounding my wardrobe. When I was teaching, I’d been alert to which classes trusted me most when I was drab, dressed in blacks and grays and covered in a blazer, hair locked into place and makeup subdued, and which trusted me most when I looked eccentric, when my dresses and scarves and jewelry blazed and dangled and my lipstick was always red. There was always a question of how my appearance affected my credibility, but the answer was never the same from semester to semester. When I began at IPH, I tried out different styles on the general public: formal versus informal, eclectic versus reserved, cleavage versus covered. That day’s experiment, an elegant blue dress with a moderately interesting neckline and a jaunty scarf, hair pressed flat and then curled again for body, had me looking more than usual the young professional. It fell into the people were happier to speak with me, but more likely to argue with me about whether I knew what I was talking about quadrant of my wardrobe chart, and it made me feel out of place at Elena’s neighborhood bar, which pulled its crowd from artists and grad students and NGO workers, people who wouldn’t recognize me as one of their own in my current ensemble. It was a small thing, but I thought of it often lately: how out of character I’d looked when Daniel and I met, how unlike myself.

  I had been sitting in one of a circle of metal chairs outside by the patio heat lamp, which glowed softly and was almost romantic, except that the patio faced Eleventh Street traffic and was sandwiched between a dog park and a rowdy sports bar. I caught Daniel’s eye as we were both surveying the landscape.

  “Do you know what the problem with DC is?” he said casually, scooting his chair closer as though we were old friends in the middle of a conversation just arriving at a point of intimacy that required us to keep our voices down. It was a habit he had with everyone, something I came to understand as his journalism mode, the one that got people to drop their guards by strolling right past them, but at the time I felt seen, interesting.

  “There’s only one problem?” I asked.

  “Well, no. I mean the reason nobody ever tried to preserve anything until it was too late, the reason we’re going to lose all the mom-and-pop operations and corner stores and carryouts?”

  “Money?”

  “No and yes. The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they’re wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porc
h with a quilt behind them in a museum. There’s always a white person out there who wants to overpronounce a foreign word, or try an exotic food, or shop for crafts, but no one wants to do that for Black folks. Once white people started thinking they were better at urban Blackness than Black folks, it was game over. My dad grew up three blocks from here, but his parents lost their town house to property taxes and he can’t even bring himself to drive into the city to visit me. Says he’s going to get himself arrested one day driving up Fourteenth Street, yelling out the window cursing Barry for selling the city out from under folks.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Are we already at the part where we talk about our families?”

  “I don’t like small talk,” he said. “Tell me about yours.”

  I did. I was the child of two federal employees, raised in a city where integrated federal jobs had crucially sustained the Black middle class. The most bewildering part of leaving DC the first time was discovering that elsewhere people casually used “federal government” as a pejorative. I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked. I believed in government, I had come to understand, the way that agnostics who hadn’t been to service in decades sometimes hedged their bets and brought their babies to be baptized or otherwise welcomed into the religions of their parents’ youth. I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.

  When she was pregnant with me, she’d gone down to Louisiana on behalf of the Justice Department, charged with enforcing a school desegregation order that was nearly older than she was. She was twenty-five and six months pregnant, fresh out of law school and the sole employee sent to investigate. When she arrived, she was shepherded around by eleven different Black people who wanted to make sure that she knew the men in the truck who followed her with shotguns were the local Klan. By the time I was born, the people of that small Louisiana parish had nothing yet but faith and a high school in underfunded disrepair, but they believed in my mother and sent her home with a chest of handmade blankets and bibs and baby clothes, and by the time I was a year old, the parish’s Black high school had a science wing with lab equipment and new textbooks. That was the small victory so offensive to the local government that they had been willing to raise weapons in defense of it before the Justice Department in the form of my mother arrived. I asked her to tell me that story over and over, to tell me the name of the person who’d made me each doll or bib or blanket. It was my first experience of faith. It was part of why I’d jumped at the chance to come to IPH—I had imagined it was my best chance to be part of a legacy, something meaningfully bigger than myself.

  * * *

  —

  Daniel asked so many questions about my parents and my childhood that I thought he’d forgotten we were flirting, or where the story ended—with me, with my job and my hopes for the future—but after a few minutes he let the conversation wander back.

  “So, IPH? When I first saw you, I figured you for something depressing and corporate you were here to drink away your guilt about.”

  “Is that why you didn’t start by asking what I do?”

  “I never start there. It’s an easy trick for being the least predictable person at a DC party. Ask anything other than ‘What do you do?’ If people want you to know, they’ll still find a way to tell you.”

  “So are you pleasantly surprised that I’m not a corporate sellout?”

  “Do you really think it’s a good idea for the government to be in the business of telling people what the truth is?”

  “It’s not the government, it’s me,” I said. “And it’s not the truth in some abstract ideological sense. It’s the actual historical record. I was a professor for three years. I loved teaching, but all my resources went into bringing information to the exact people who would have gotten it somehow anyway. Now I can be anywhere.”

  “But so can anybody,” he said. “What happens when you leave and the office is full of people with a different agenda?”

  “I guess I don’t leave,” I said. “Isn’t that the point of being a career civil servant? Administrations come and go and there you are, doing the work. Did you change how you did your job when your newspaper got sold?”

  “You strike me as the leaving type,” he said, avoiding the question. We both laughed and treated it as though he had paid me a compliment, though later it would occur to me there was no reason it should have been. Things started quickly between us but then didn’t seem to know where to go. We were busy; I had recently declared myself to be beyond giddy girlish feelings and their accompanying heartbreak; he’d broken an engagement a month before he met me, though I gathered some months later that while the wedding was off by then, the fiancée hadn’t yet entirely disappeared from his life. I didn’t pry—there was no arrangement we’d made, and if there had been, the way things were headed I would have held on to it quietly, certain already that someday I’d need forgiveness, or something to hold against him.

  * * *

  —

  Tonight I had intended a mood for Daniel’s birthday: candles, the cake, a change of clothes, my good lipstick. But when Daniel arrived I was thoroughly unmade, the candles unlit, and the cake still in its box. I had shed my pants and bra, but was still wearing a work blouse over yoga pants, sitting on the living room floor with the contents of the clarification file spread in front of me.

  “I got you a cake,” I called when he walked in. “It’s on the table.”

  “Fancy cake,” he said, a moment later. I looked up and found him staring into the cake box.

  “I was working Capitol Hill today. I had to go to a gentrification bakery.”

  “Is there any other kind anymore? I was just talking to a cat who grew up there yesterday. Working on a long piece about what happened to the property people lost to back taxes. Did you at least get to yell at any tourists?”

  “Not even one.”

  “All I wanted for my birthday was a video of you just once cursing out a white person who should know better.” He sat beside me and gestured at the papers. “So what did you get me? A scavenger hunt?”

  I leaned into him. He had stopped at home, I noted, had changed out of his work-routine suit and into a dress shirt, smelled like good cologne—woodsy and bright—and coconut oil. I kissed him. He began to sort through the contents of the file, and I decided it would be both rude and futile to demand privacy. I gave him the basics and let him look through the records with me.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make fancier plans,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to a guy who tried to buy property in the thirties and may or may not have died for it. See? You can hate my job all you want, but we’re both trying to solve the mystery of why this country doesn’t let Black people keep anything.”

  “Boo-Boo the fool could solve that mystery. The real question is how we get it back.”

  “Black love is Black wealth.”

  “Isn’t that poem about being broke?”

  “Look, I got you a gentrified cake, a pile of evidence about how much our country hates us, and a Nikki Giovanni metaphor about dealing with it. Happy Birthday. Make it count, because I have to leave town soon to deal with all this—it’s a clarification on one of Genevieve’s corrections.”

  “Why don’t they just let Genevieve be? It’s bad enough they drove her out. Now they can’t stop undoing ever
ything she did while she was there?”

  “It’s not like that. This might be an actual mistake. I have to go to Wisconsin and find out whether or not this man was actually murdered.”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “You know that’s not it.”

  “Do I?”

  “This is a work thing—I have to make a correction. It might even be a relatively happy one, but I have to do it gently enough that we don’t have to go on another apology tour or duel the goddamn Free Americans in the press.”

  “So you’re letting them use you now so you don’t have to let them use you later.”

  “Them who?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I don’t have anything to prove,” I said. “If there’s someplace else you’d rather be on your birthday, I’m not keeping you here.”

  “I guess you’re not,” Daniel said, getting up. “But, for the record, this was where I wanted to be.”

  I refused to meet his eyes. I stared at the floor and waited for the door to slam and then got up and ate two slices of Daniel’s birthday cake for dinner. The buttercream was exquisite but the cake itself was dry and crumbly. I overthought the metaphor. I had made the wrong choice, clearly, but had I made it in trying at all or in not trying hard enough? The night had probably been salvageable when I let him leave. Things were always salvageable between us, and knowing that felt like both a relief and an obligation. I wanted to be able to go out into the world with him and protect him from anything that might harm him, and I knew that I could not; I wanted to leave for Wisconsin with the freedom to be disappointing and I knew that I could.