The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  I went back to my documents. The researcher tasked with assembling clarification files had done a thorough job. In the file there was an article about the fire from the Appleton Gazette and an obituary that had run later, in the Wisconsin Enterprise-Blade, calling for an investigation that of course never came. The Gazette article focused on the chemical cause of the fire and included a photograph of the damage, but the obituary included a grainy photograph of Josiah himself, and a bit of biographical detail. Josiah Wynslow had dimples and an easy smile. In the photo he looked younger than he had been when he died, but the stylish hat and suit made me think the picture had been taken in Chicago and not Mississippi—somewhere there was still a before Joe, a Mississippi boy who hadn’t yet followed the great migration north. So much violence and lack waiting on the other end of the violence and lack that people poured out of the South to escape, and still they kept believing there was someplace in this country where they could be Black and be safe and make a home. Chicago, at least, had the pull of community in its favor, had decades of sales pitches calling the Black Belt up north, decades of people who had already learned to call the city a home. How was it that Josiah Wynslow had left Chicago and come to believe he could make his home in a place where no one wanted him, had wanted to stay there badly enough to die or cheat death?

  * * *

  • • •

  Officially, I was staying at a Ramada off the highway somewhere between Cherry Mill and the Milwaukee airport. Unofficially, I had texted Nick from National before my plane took off, and while it was possible his number had changed since we’d last been in touch, or that he was no longer in Milwaukee at all, or that he would choose to ignore my message, I was entirely unsurprised to see him waiting for me at the arrivals gate. His hair was shorter than I was used to it being, and it made his eyes, already a startling blue, stand out conspicuously. We had parted last on bad terms too inconclusive to be permanent. A few years ago he’d come to DC for a conference, and when we’d tried to have a friendly drink, he’d chastised me for leaving my position at GW, accused me of both wasting my talents and working in the service of empire, which seemed contradictory: my job could be menial or it could be gravely problematic, but not both. Now he seemed contrite—he offered a ride and a home-cooked meal. I was committed enough to the premise that we were harmless to each other to insist he drive me first to check into my hotel, and to keep the room keycard in my pocket as though I would need it later, but honest enough that my suitcase didn’t make it out of the trunk until we arrived at his loft.

  I’d met Nick in graduate school in a different state, and our time in this one had overlapped only by a single summer, at the end of my visiting gig in Eau Claire, and just before he’d started teaching at UW-Milwaukee. I spent most of that summer with him in his half-unpacked apartment, a cookie-cutter basic one bedroom I imagined exactly mirrored the apartment on the other side of the cheap plasterboard walls. When he said he lived in a loft now, I expected he’d stayed in the city and moved into something more aesthetically pleasing, one of those abandoned industrial spaces gone pricey, cavernous, and artisanal, with concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling windows, but, in fact, he lived in what my younger self would have called the woods, though I now knew it was merely rural, and that only barely. Nick’s childhood had been odd: he’d grown up monied half the time and rurally pragmatic the rest; his mother was the abandoned first wife of a man who went on to money. He’d gone to boarding school and then come home in the summer to be working middle class; he looked every bit the overgrown prep-school boy, but those summers were the roots he tended to play up. His house was a converted barn, and though I would not have put it past him to have taken his desire to transcend his patrician roots so far that he was now supplementing his academic work with farm labor, he explained that he had bought the barn from the family who used to run the place, and though one of the farmer’s children still lived in the house across the field, there was no farming happening anymore, the farm not having the capital to invest in the dairy industry’s turn to mechanical labor or the cushion to survive without an investment.

  “I did a lot of renovations myself,” he said. “But there’s no livestock involved, so I hope you didn’t come all this way to see me milk a cow.”

  “I didn’t come all this way to see you at all,” I said.

  When he’d moved here, he’d said it was because teaching at a state school better suited his praxis, though quietly I had heard his leaving had been slightly more contentious than that, that it involved a badly ended affair with a graduate student, which I believed insofar as I had also been a graduate student there, though to the extent that our involvement had ended, it was me who had ended it both times, in each case saved from my own worse impulses by a job in a different state. When we met, Nick was a junior professor and soon to be divorced. We had a two-body problem, he told people, but just going on offhand gossip, by my count there had been at least nine other bodies involved on his part alone by the time his wife called things off.

  Such was his level of charm that it was hard to be disgusted by it: Nick expected a door to open and it did; he expected to be adored and he was. Before Nick, I had been eating at the same three restaurants and drinking at the same two bars for years because it spared me the exhaustion of walking into a new place and convincing them I belonged and they should treat me kindly, of greeting clerks and waitpersons in my PhD voice, dropping the name of the university when necessary, generously overtipping. It was a revelation to move through the world with Nick, to see how little attention a white man needed to devote to that kind of performance, how much of his worry about how other people saw him could be consumed by the frivolous, how easy it was for me to be assumed respectable merely by association. It was in some ways the thing I’d liked least about him, even less than things that were actually his fault: when I went places with him, things were easier; when I was with him, the do they know I’m human yet question that hummed in me every time I met a new white person quieted a little, not because I could be sure of the answer but because I could be sure in his presence they’d at least pretend.

  Though he was a political scientist, not a historian, I had taken a jointly listed class with Nick my first year in graduate school, but our dalliance had not begun until the next fall, when we found ourselves trapped in a cocktail party corner with a drunk senior faculty member who said he wasn’t complaining, exactly, about political correctness, but he did miss, sometimes, humor, or the capacity for particular kinds of observation, that he had told a harmless joke and his undergraduates had complained that it was racist. Alarmed that he was going to segue into the joke, and I was about to learn who would laugh and who wouldn’t, I intervened brightly to suggest that I too sometimes worried my funniest jokes might offend, for example, A white man walks into a room. While everyone waited for the punch line, I excused myself and headed to the porch. That’s it, I called behind me. That’s the whole joke. Everything else disappears.

  Nick had appeared outside beside me a few minutes later. He put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a firmer squeeze than was comforting.

  “I would have said something if he’d told his joke,” said Nick.

  “Isn’t it nice that we’ll never have to know if that’s true,” I said, and after we shared a cigarette we left the party together and stayed intermittently together for the next two years. Once I was alone again, navigating my way through a beautiful but bleak Eau Claire winter and trying to find the people and places welcoming enough to feel like home, I realized I had become so accustomed to Nick’s presence that it was surprising again when I went places and people treated me like myself. It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more
about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst. I couldn’t, of course, say any of that aloud, though what minimal decorum I had I’d only recently reacquired: I’d become accustomed to Nick shielding me from the more outrageous things I said. Without him, I had to relearn a certain modulation. Back in DC, first with men whose birthdays and favorite colors I didn’t bother memorizing, and then eventually with Daniel, I’d had to learn again how to watch a man move through the world and calibrate his every step to be disarming, how to watch a man worry about his body and the conditions under which someone might take his any gesture the wrong way. I’d had to remember back to high school, when my heart belonged only to boys my color, to whom I had to insist that no one else’s disrespect of me was worth a fight, was worth what a fight would cost them. That Daniel could only assume everything about my relationship with Nick had been exploitative bored me. That it wasn’t only Nick that Daniel would have hated, but the person I became when I was with him, cockier, more reckless, willing to take it all for granted: that kept me up at night, or at least, sometimes it kept me up, or as a metaphor it kept me up. In Nick’s room, in his platform bed, under the locally made quilt, I in fact slept very well.

  * * *

  —

  Over breakfast we skirted the issue of my purpose for being there. The night before I’d withheld most of the details—pled state secrets and repeated back to him the years-ago insults he’d lobbed at my work. “It wouldn’t interest you why I’m here,” I said, knowing full well nothing interested Nick like a mystery. At his breakfast table, after eating locally made yogurt and granola I caved and explained the background of the case. I wanted him to come with me and do the magic thing that made strangers in small towns more welcoming, and I wanted, I supposed, another read on the situation.

  He offered to drive me all the way to Cherry Mill, since I hadn’t picked up my rental car yet. In the car, he gave me what felt like the tourism board’s official spiel on everything charming to discover there. I was certain it would indeed be charming, but the Upper Midwest made me moody; people made me feel like I was being asked to speak a language I’d never learned and in which I was constantly misunderstood. When I lived here, it had taken me months to recognize that the pushy advice strangers gave about things like where to buy cheaper bottled water and which store was having a sale were not meant to be intrusive or judgmental or presumptuous but simply friendly, that they were considered friendly whether or not I experienced them that way, and even more months for me to understand that long meandering conversations full of small talk, the kind I considered a brief prelude to real human interaction, were never going to open up into genuine discussions or open expressions of feeling on their own, they were only going to restart on a loop. Once I had offended a Minnesotan colleague at IPH by saying it was no surprise this region was full of serial killers because what could be easier than being a horrifying person in a community where gossip and open conflict were shunned. The next day I found affixed to my desk a corrections sticker noting that most serial killers came from California, followed closely by Florida.

  So far as history recorded there had never been a serial killer in Cherry Mill. True cherry-growing country was farther north, in Door County. I’d made the drive up with Nick the summer we’d spent here together and had to concede it was idyllic, even though I didn’t like cherries and distrusted lakes. Cherry Mill was in the Fox River Valley, just south of a cannery and situated in between two paper mills. It was close enough to Lake Winnebago that it picked up vacation traffic, though mostly from visitors who couldn’t travel far. Still, I recognized in the solicitous festivity of the two blocks that comprised downtown something of the energy of DC in summer, the desperate language of tourist traps everywhere, selling a performance for people eager to believe they’d found whatever they’d come for.

  The candy store that we were looking for, the one that stood on the lot that had once been Josiah’s, was a redbrick building, but someone had painted a scattering of bricks in bright primary colors, zigzagging down the exterior. The marquee advertised it as the sugar mill, with a giant lollipop and candy apple, and a handwritten sign in the window suggested the cherry taffy or the brandy fudge, both of which were homemade and on sale. Through the windows I could see the checkered floor and wooden countertops. I distrusted, in general, appeals to nostalgia—I loved the past of archives, but there was no era of the past I had any inclination to visit with my actual human body, being rather fond of it having at least minimal rights and protections. I tried to think of what this block would have looked like when Josiah first set eyes on it, what about it would have called to him.

  The sign I had come to see faced the small lot where Nick parked the car. It was unobtrusive, easy not to notice if you weren’t looking for it, which had, according to the file, been a source of some contention when the first sign went up in the ’90s. The store owner won the placement debate, arguing that she didn’t mind having the sign, but no one wanted it to be the first thing children saw when they came to get sweets. Genevieve’s new sign was brassier, but still located in the same spot, on the side of the building, near the parking lot:

  In 1937 African American shopkeeper Josiah Wynslow was killed when a mob intending to keep Cherry Mill white burned down the original building while he was inside. This type of violence was at one point frequent all over the country, and though there were few official restrictive covenants in Wisconsin then, in part because the African American population was so minimal, racial restrictions and the boundaries of “sundown towns” were often enforced less officially through violence or intimidation. Citizens involved in the burning of the store and the murder of Josiah Wynslow were never charged or punished in any way, though many publicly bragged about their responsibility for the crime. The names of the individuals known to be involved are Gunnar West, Anderson Piekowski, Gene Norman, Ronald Bunch, Ed Schwartze, Peter Detry, and George and Ella Mae Schmidt. George Schmidt took over the property after the murder and sold it at a profit in 1959.

  I checked the file. The original sign had started off the same way, but where the identifying names appeared in Genevieve’s sign, the original final line had read Today in Cherry Mill we welcome all as friends and visitors, and are glad to have learned from the past.

  In the front of the shop, a woman was standing in the window flipping the closed sign to open. She was a collage of reds, candy apple lipstick, and hair the color of grenadine, her dress a faded burgundy and her skin freckled and sun-blushed pink. She waved.

  “Welcome,” she said. “We’re open now if you have a sweet tooth.”

  “It all looks wonderful,” I said, “but unfortunately today calls for caffeine before sugar and business before pleasure.”

  “Business? Are you here with the young lady who came by earlier? The one who kicked up all the fuss a few months back?”

  “What lady?” I asked, forcing a smile and arriving at the answer to my own question even before I heard her description of Genevieve.

  * * *

  —

  Genevieve was sitting in the window of the coffee shop, reading the morning paper. She had let her hair grow out a bit since I had seen her last, and now it haloed her face in curls. She was as put together as ever; the heat that threatened to burn everyone else only seemed to make her glow. As though in solidarity with the sun, she wore a bright yellow dress. She put the paper down and raised her eyebrows when she saw me. I told Nick to wander and let me figure out Genevieve on my own. His plan seemed to be merely to walk up and down the block; as I waited for my coffee and then joined Genevieve at her table, I kept catching flashes of him passing the window.

  “I heard you were coming,” Genevieve said.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I have some free time. My ex has Octavia for the month.”


  “Why is this what you’re doing with your free time?”

  “You may recall that I am out of a job of late. But as neither IPH nor academia holds a monopoly on the historical record, I’m not necessarily out of a profession. A little bird at project headquarters told me something interesting might be happening here, so I pitched a feature piece on it.”

  “You’re a journalist now?”

  “I’m a storyteller, in any medium. For all I don’t love about the West Coast, it’s lousy with TV people, one of whom thinks if I can create some buzz there might be a market for me yet. History Exposed with Genevieve Johnson.” Genevieve fanned out her hands and framed her camera-ready face. “So here I am. And here you are. Buzz buzz buzz. Have a coffee. It’s not bad, for Wisconsin.”

  “Why would it be bad? They fly the same coffee beans here as everywhere else in the country,” I said.

  “Wow. Already defensive of the good white people of the Upper Midwest. They’re going to feel so much better when you take my mean old sign down.”

  “I’m not here to take your sign down because it makes people uncomfortable,” I said.

  “Oh, nice. You decided to finally stand up for something after I was gone. Why are you here then?”

  “Genie. This was my job before it was yours and for longer. Just let me do my job. And if you’re hitting up people at the office for gossip, next time get the whole story.”