The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  I felt unmoored, and so I called the person who made me feel most grounded. When Daniel didn’t pick up, I texted him to say that I was here safely and sorry I’d ruined his birthday and that I was a little shaken up because the local white supremacist fuckboys apparently knew I was in town. I sent him a picture of the graffiti. My phone didn’t ding. I pushed down the seat and lay in the car, waiting to cry but feeling mostly depleted.

  At two, I composed myself and left the car to ring the bell at Ms. Adelaide Robinson-formerly-Wynslow’s house. A teenage boy answered the door. He had wide bright eyes and a soft smile. He was wearing a wave cap and a jersey and a brand of jeans and sneakers I hadn’t seen in the wild since the late nineties. I had the disorienting sense I had around teenagers lately, that because they looked like they had walked out of the malls of my childhood, they were speaking to me from the past. He introduced himself as Anthony and led me to the living room, where I felt my breath calm. It looked like a living room I had been in before. The furniture was floral and leather, all of it covered in knit slipcovers; the walls were studded with every child in the family’s school pictures, on one side an old family portrait, and on the other side, framed portraits of this household’s trifecta of Black saviors, Jesus, MLK, and Barack Obama. On the table there was a tin of butter cookies, open to show it still had cookies in it and had not yet been turned into a sewing kit. A box fan sat in an open window and they had left me the seat directly in its path. Anthony introduced me to his mother, June, and his grandmother Ms. Adelaide. His father lived there too, but was still at work, driving a city bus. June was Ms. Adelaide’s youngest, in her forties, and already in salmon-pink scrubs for her shift as an orderly that started in a few hours. Her hair was tucked back, but her face was radiant, her eye makeup impeccable, and her lipstick a darker shade of pink that picked up on the color of the scrubs and, like a photo filter, turned them from sickly to elegant. Ms. Adelaide was nearly eighty, I knew from her birthdate, but she was sprightly, quite dressed up for a weekday afternoon, which I briefly flattered myself by thinking might be on my account. I worried that she’d gone through too much trouble for me, until she confessed she was hoping Anthony would run her to the casino after we were done, a request it seemed his initial refusal would do little to impede. June offered me a glass of iced tea and went to the kitchen to get it for me even though I told her she didn’t need to. I made small talk until June returned with the glass, cold but already gathering condensation. She sat in one of the wooden chairs and scooted it forward until she was almost between me and her mother, not hostile, but protective.

  “Grandpa Joe’s been dead going on twenty years now,” June said. “So if the law’s looking for him you can tell them they’re too slow.”

  I laughed. “I’m not here about anything he did wrong. I am here about when he died.”

  “I know I don’t look it,” said Ms. Adelaide. “But I was born in 1947 and my daddy was a Josiah Wynslow who got run out of Wisconsin before he was my daddy, so he certainly couldn’t have died there, could he now? So, now that we got that covered, is someone finally about to do something about that crazy white boy before he kills somebody?”

  “What boy?” I asked.

  “First I even heard about any sign or any Cherry Mill was a fool sending me evil letters. Called me everything but a child of God and said he would not let us defile his family name. I hadn’t the slightest what he was on about until Anthony talked to that other man. Meantime, June took one of the letters to the police, but, you know police. Lord knows what his mama calls him, but the boy calls himself White Justice.”

  “I believe his mama calls him Chase,” I said. “I haven’t met him and hope not to, but we think he spray-painted the memorial sign this morning. How long has he been bothering you?”

  June explained that he’d been sending them threatening letters for months. I asked to see them, and she sent Anthony to fetch them, and the family records while he was at it. I looked at the letters first, wanting to get the ugly part out of the way. They were vile, but written in perfect penmanship. It frightened me how neat they were—the kind of letters that for all their crazy had clearly been drafted first, the kind of neat readable letters a person wrote if he expected there to be a reason for them to be public someday. It seemed characteristic of the present that everyone, even the worst of us, was practicing being famous. I had no jurisdiction, and no reason to believe the local police would care if the director of the institute called them, but I photographed them anyway, for Genevieve if for no one else, and told June and Ms. Adelaide I wasn’t sure if it would help any but I would have my boss follow up.

  After the letters, the family archive box was a relief. I had already seen Josiah’s Illinois death certificate, but Ms. Adelaide showed me the archaic family Bible, which she, as his oldest living child, was now the keeper of. His birth and death had been recorded along with everyone else’s. He had been the second child of four—an older brother who died young, a younger brother who had lived to be ninety, and a sister who had no recorded year of death. I asked if I could see a photograph of Josiah; Anthony brought me one from the wall, June brought me an album, and Ms. Adelaide rummaged through the box until she found the one she was looking for. In the photo from the wall, Josiah was an older man, but he had the same face he did in the photo I had seen in the file.

  In the album, June pointed out for me a dozen pictures of him, and I watched him come back from the death he’d been assigned in 1937 and marry, grin lovestruck at his wife, wear the uniform of the plant he’d worked at, hold his babies on his lap, cut up dancing at their weddings and graduations, grow old. It was the photo Adelaide had pulled from the box, though, that made me certain I could close the file. The picture had been taken at the Chicago Savoy, late in the 1920s judging by the fashion and the posters in the background. Josiah had his arm around a cream-colored woman with roller-set hair, and they both wore grins and roller skates, both looked delighted and post-dance breathless. I’d seen that smile—literally, I’d seen the same smile in the photograph in his obituary, the same light suit and dark shirt and patterned tie, the same hat jauntily askew on his head. Our file had been missing the woman, and all the evidence of the decades he had yet to come, but I had the same man.

  “We’ll get this cleared up for you,” I said after I’d scanned the photo with my phone. “Probably what will happen is the sign will come down, and hopefully that will keep that man from bothering you anymore anyway, if the police don’t follow up.”

  “Don’t hold your breath on them,” said June.

  “Can’t they just fix the sign to say they burned his place down and he escaped?” asked Anthony. “They still stole.”

  “They did,” I said. “But our sign was just a correction of the original sign. We’ve had a hard time with cities even wanting to memorialize the dead. I don’t see much chance of getting anyplace to make a note of every piece of land or property that was stolen. And we can only correct what’s already there to be fixed. I’m sorry.”

  “At least he made it out of there for us to be here,” said June.

  “Can I ask if you know what he was doing here in the first place? In Wisconsin?” I asked. “Not a lot of Black people or work for Black people here in the middle of the Depression. Why did he leave Chicago?”

  Ms. Adelaide took a sip of her tea and sat back in her chair. Instinctively, I leaned forward to hear her.

  “Of course, I wasn’t around back then. And he didn’t talk about it much. But Ma’dear did sometimes. She had four children. Three boys, including Daddy, and Minerva in the middle, but Minerva was always treated like the baby girl. That’s her in the picture with Daddy. He came out to Wisconsin looking for her.”

  Although my official assignment was finished, clean enough that I thought my answers would satisfy even Genevieve, I couldn’t help myself. Curiosity was an occupational hazard. I asked how it was Minerva had co
me to need finding. According to Ms. Adelaide, Minerva had been born restless, which, in her defense, being born a Black woman in Mississippi in 1910 might make a person. The whole family—Josiah, Minerva, their parents, and their two brothers—had left rural sharecropping and gone to Jackson after the first wave of great migrators made room for them to find work in the city. It was supposed to be the oldest brother, Elijah, who first left Mississippi for Chicago to test the waters and get a job that would send home train fare for the rest of the family to come up, but when he’d almost saved the money to go, Minerva, who was sixteen then, stole it from the coffee can under the floorboards and added her own paltry savings. It was enough to get her out of town. “Too big for her britches and too big for a small town,” Ms. Adelaide put it. Minerva had been reading The Defender and was certain that in Chicago, fame and fortune awaited her and she could send for everyone else sooner than Elijah would. By the time she realized the Chicago that greeted her was already overrun with buxom light-skinned country girls who had pretty faces and decent voices and thought they could model or sing, and no one had been waiting for her in particular, she was already there and didn’t have train fare home.

  After nearly a year as a boardinghouse maid, where Minerva found herself terrible at cleaning and in constant need of the lady of the house’s interventions to keep boarders from making passes at her, she got her bearings. With the recommendation of the landlady, who found her cleaning subpar, but appreciated what she could do with flowers and decor, Minerva got a job as the apprentice florist at a Black-owned shop that got most of its work from being partnered with one of the neighborhood’s Black funeral homes. She was pretty and charming enough to upsell grieving families, and passing contact with the dead and grieving didn’t make her squeamish, so she was good at the work. The family who owned the shop treated her well, kept her busy, and paid her a decent wage.

  Elijah broke his leg the next farming season and never did leave Mississippi, where he married and started a family, so it was Josiah who came up a few years later. When he came to Chicago in 1928, it was Minerva who taught him to navigate the city. It was her beside him in the photograph I had seen, the little sister who, even grown, brought out the laughter in him. The photo must have been from the last of the good years, because by the ’30s there was no more Savoy money, no more Brownie camera or anything that could be sold for cash, and no work for Joe—he had a city name now, but no city job anymore. Minerva rode it out OK for a while, because even if funerals and flower arrangements got smaller, people didn’t die any less often because they were poorer, and the death industry seemed Depression-proof. But she didn’t have enough for two people to live on, and Joe followed the promise of work from recruiter to recruiter, and city to city for a few years, during which he blamed his not hearing from Minerva on his lack of a permanent address. By the time he resettled in Chicago, three years later, the florist had gone under and Minerva was gone, and no one could say where.

  “She just disappeared?” I asked.

  “For a while she did,” said Ms. Adelaide. “Some people said she’d gone back to cleaning houses, and some people said they’d seen her making time with some white man, but he wasn’t around either by the time Daddy got back to town. When my grandparents finally came up to Chicago, they had a letter she sent home to Mississippi, saying she was doing all right. It was years old at that point, but it was the last anyone had heard from her, so when Daddy saw the postmark was from Wisconsin, he at least had an idea of where to go after her.”

  “Did he find her?”

  “Not the way he told it, but I don’t think Ma’dear ever believed that. Minerva never came back anyway. Back then I suppose a white man could have done anything with a Black girl once he got tired of her. But the way Ma’dear talked about Minerva, seemed she’d have just as likely killed that man as let him put a hand on her. Always had her eyes on something bigger. You know the type. Couldn’t stand the thought of just being a regular Black girl and having to do like everybody else. Ma’dear always figured my daddy found her and she told him she didn’t want to be found, that she would rather be disgraced or come to a bad end than come back home.”

  I looked more closely at the woman in the photograph. In the picture she was barely more than a teenager. Her mouth was open in a laugh, but her eyes were steel. It was unclear who was wobbly on their skates, but in the picture she and Joe were hanging on to one another like they were each the only thing keeping the other person upright.

  “You see?” said Ms. Adelaide. “You can see the trouble in her. Like I said. You know the type.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I left the Robinsons with an anticlimactic sense that my job was both done and forever undoable, a simple matter of reconciling the record books and an impossible matter of making any kind of actual repair. I had three messages from Genevieve, one telling me that she’d heard more Cherry Mill gossip than she cared to but knew nothing about the current whereabouts of White Justice, another telling me she was safely in her B & B for the night and I could find her there if I wanted to tell her what I’d found, and a final message in which she essentially repeated the second message, but with a desperation that sounded disorientingly unlike her. “Come on, Cassie,” she said. “Call if you find something out. I need this.” I had one message from Nick, who had reservations at a tiny place where he was on a first-name basis with the owner, asking if I’d meet him there for dinner, and one message from Daniel, who I called back right away. He was concerned, and we picked up the conversation as though we were not fighting. I summarized my trip so far, being honest enough to say that Nick had come with me to Cherry Mill, but not volunteering where I’d slept. I told him about Genevieve, and the graffiti, and the Robinsons, and my nagging question: Who had taken the time to write to Wisconsin’s struggling Black paper and report that Josiah was dead, and beloved, when his family knew he was very much alive?

  “Maybe he wrote it himself?” I thought out loud. “To prove his own death and buy himself time to start over? To leave a record of what happened?”

  “The man was running out of town and stopped long enough to write his own obituary? And call himself ‘beloved’? He doesn’t sound like a man with more ego than sense.”

  “Give me a better idea then,” I said.

  “What about the sister?”

  “What about her? No one knows where she was.”

  “Doesn’t mean she didn’t know where he was.”

  “So what happened to her?”

  “Cassie. What happens to Black people when they don’t want to be Black anymore?”

  The answer felt obvious now. If you wanted to hide Blackness from white people, you went where they would least suspect it. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Black Milwaukee lawyer claimed offhand that hundreds of the white people in Milwaukee were actually Black people passing. There was nine-to-five passing for employment, and there was sometimes passing, and then there was the kind you disappeared into, the kind you might not come back from. You know the type, I thought. You know the type. A second answer to the question nagged at me. I felt confident Daniel was right and queasy about the possibility that I might also be. I got off the phone before I could say it out loud and make it real. I told Daniel I had to call Genevieve, but instead I took a nap and a shower. I dressed with the intention of having dinner alone at the hotel bar, but when I got to the lobby I felt daunted by my own suspicions, and annoyed by the dinging of my phone, and so I muted it and kept walking to the parking lot, where I got into my car and drove to meet Nick, as I supposed he’d known I would.

  Outside, the restaurant was an inconspicuous old farmhouse with a chalkboard sign, but inside it had been redone, rustic, and chicly minimalist. The tables were unfinished wood and the chairs were modernist and metal. The ceiling beams were exposed and the wood flooring was salvaged, but the art on the wall was blocky and bright. Schubert piped
in from invisible speakers and the menu was the genre of farm-to-table where the waiter introduced meat and produce by county of origin. I sulked through two glasses of good wine before we were done with appetizers.

  “Smile,” said Nick. “You’re at the best hidden gem in Wisconsin.”

  “I’m pretty sure the best hidden gem in Wisconsin has cheese curds and three-dollar spotted cow.”

  “I’ve known you too long for you to pretend this place is too fancy for you. You’re not a dive bar girl.”

  “You haven’t really known me for years.”

  “I wouldn’t have to know you for five minutes to know that. I’ll take you for a dive bar beer later if that’s what you want. I’ve been worried about you all day. I don’t like the idea of some half-cocked white supremacist tracking what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t love it either, but I don’t do this work to be chased off by the first two-bit white supremacist with a paint can.”

  “It’s Wisconsin. If he isn’t armed with more than a paint can he could be in five minutes. Do you know he’s the head of a rogue branch, officially? I’ve been reading about him all day. He’s been formally expelled from a quasi-libertarian organization best known for starting street fights. Not a guy you want to get into it with.”

  “I’m going to recommend the sign come down anyway,” I said. “Not for the reasons he wants, but it will solve the problem. All evidence would suggest that Josiah Wynslow died an old man with a loving family in 1984, and all the good people of Cherry Mill did was use his imploded building to steal the land they were never going to let him keep.”