“Then why don’t you look happier? Case closed. Mostly no one gets a second act in America, so here’s to Joe, who got the hell out of hostile territory alive and met a nice girl and had some babies and died of old age. May we all be so lucky.”
“He had a sister. He followed her to Wisconsin. That’s what he was doing here. She never turned up, not even after he supposedly died. I think maybe that’s who sent in an obituary.”
I pulled out my phone and showed Nick the image of Minerva I’d scanned earlier. I zoomed in on her face.
“Do you think you’d know she was Black? If you hadn’t seen that many Black people?”
“It’s hard to tell in black-and-white. You think she was passing?”
“Maybe. It would explain why she cared enough to write an obituary but never got back in touch with her family to find out if he was still alive.”
“So then say she was passing. Then he lived and so did she. They both cheated the rules and beat the system.”
“The house always wins.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“Don’t I?”
You know the type, I thought. You know the type.
* * *
• • •
Following Nick’s car back to his place, I tried to convince myself I saw things his way: two people made themselves a way out where there wasn’t one, there was nothing left for me to do but set the record as right as it could be. A way out of what, though? In the driveway of the lofted barn, I looked at the red paneling and the big windows and the bright hanging moon. I pulled Nick through his front doorway and led him up his loft stairs and into his own bedroom, trying to be a woman without baggage, a woman who did not believe the worst was always coming. I deliberately did not check my phone. Let it be as happy an ending as it can be, I told myself. I decided to change my flight and go home a day early. I wasn’t responsible for knowing the unknowable and I wasn’t responsible for what Genevieve did next and I felt deliriously not responsible for anything as I pulled Nick into his bedroom and whispered what I wanted, undressed him button to button, button to zipper, ignored the nagging voice. Later, awake in the cool sheets and in the clarity after my second orgasm, I felt suddenly, queasily sure of what was true, of the connection I’d been avoiding making for hours. I pushed the thought away long enough to sleep for an hour, but woke again as if startled out of a nightmare. I looked at Nick’s sleeping face, but instead of calming me, it reminded me how easy it was to slip into wanting something, how easy to become something else by wanting. You know the type.
I got out of bed and fished my phone out of my purse. The screen awakened to reveal a cavalcade of updates from Genevieve: everyone in Cherry Mill knew Chase had done the graffiti but no one knew where to find him or how to prove it. I had one message from Daniel, a zoomed-in photo of the photo from the file, one he must have snapped before I’d left DC, before our fight. He knew I’d see it, probably that I had seen it already and spent hours trying not to know the words for it. I opened my phone and looked again at Minerva’s face in the photo of her with her brother. I scrolled back to the magnified face of Ella Mae Schmidt. I looked between them until I was certain that looking back at me from Ella Mae Schmidt’s haughty expression was the face of Minerva Wynslow. There had been something ugly to me about Ella Mae’s presence all along, something about the set of her eyes against the florals of her dress, the baby on her hip, the feminine softness and lipsticked grin beside the triumphant aftermath of violence. I had imagined into Ella Mae’s expression a particularly vicious innocence, the innocence of white women who never saw the damage in their wake, and now I tried again to understand what I was looking at. Ella Mae could have pretended innocence, but Minerva would have known better.
I showered in the guest bathroom so I wouldn’t wake Nick and, though it was barely dawn, called Genevieve from my rental car in the driveway. I had intended not to need her, but I did now—it was a revelation I didn’t want to be alone with, one I understood I didn’t want to walk away from, although there was nothing forcing me to follow up on it. It will be good for Genevieve’s story, I told myself. Let Genevieve have it. As though I was gifting her something, and not running from it. The phone went to voice mail the first time, but she answered my second call groggy and alarmed, and agreed to meet me at a twenty-four-hour diner off the highway outside of Cherry Mill. I drove there entertaining a choose-your-own-adventure of self-loathing: at some point Minerva Wynslow had become Ella Mae Schmidt, had gone from a girl who fled the Mississippi summer for the promise of a city life, a girl who laughed with her brother’s arm around her, a girl who wanted more but cared enough to write home, to a woman who smiled outside the building where her brother had died, who boasted of having set it aflame, and then, her brother presumed dead, stayed Ella Mae long enough to have a child, who had two children of her own, one of whom had a son, and now the great-grandson Ella Mae never met was generations removed from his own Blackness, was vandalizing Josiah’s memorial, terrorizing his distant cousins, and proclaiming a violent willingness to defend the integrity of the white race.
I arrived before Genevieve and waited for her in a plastic booth. It was the hour of the day when the diner was mostly empty except for truckers, who ate silently and alone. I drank my coffee and hoped for the clarity of Genevieve telling me my eyes were bad and my deductive skills were bullshit, but when she arrived and slid into the booth across from me, and I showed her the two pictures side by side, Genevieve caught on faster than I had.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “White Justice isn’t white?”
“You want to try telling him that?”
“Sure. Let’s find him and slap on a correction sticker citing the one drop rule. Problem solved.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections finds that you are in fact Blacker than the Ace of Spades.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections regrets to inform you that you are so Black you got marked absent in night school.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections has concluded that you are so Black your credit score dropped one hundred points as soon as the bank saw you in person.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections wants you to know that you are so Black the apartment you went to see was coincidentally just rented right before you got there.”
“I like it when we’re friends,” said Genevieve.
“You could have fooled me,” I said.
“You called me,” said Genevieve.
* * *
—
I followed Genevieve’s car back to Cherry Mill. We had decided to start with Susan, our only direct line to Ella Mae, but didn’t have a plan beyond that. It was only because there was no plan that there was a “we.” We both parked in the same downtown lot as the day before, and I looked in the direction of the sign and the graffiti, but it had all been covered with a white tarp that was affixed to the side of the building, I supposed until it could be powerwashed or muraled over. It covered everything: White Justice’s artwork, but also the original sign. The coffee shop was just opening for the day, only Susan and two customers inside, and the homey haphazard upholstered chairs and twee memorabilia marking the walls made me feel more on edge. Susan greeted us warmly, but her face pursed when I asked if it would be possible for us to speak to her mother.
“If this is about my nephew, I promise you we haven’t heard from him,” said Susan.
“It’s not about the graffiti,” I said. “We’d like to talk to her about your grandmother.”
“My mother gets tired easy,” Susan said. She was reluctant to say anything further, but when we said politely that we’d just look up the address and go ourselves instead of troubling her, she agreed to bring us over if we could wait an hour for the shop’s other employee to show up. I ordered muffins because I felt irrationally guilty about being in the shop without buying anything, and t
oo jumpy for a second cup of coffee. For an hour, Genevieve and I sat together in the cozy chairs and waited.
“And you thought I didn’t have a story,” she said.
“We don’t even know what the story is,” I said.
I was not looking forward to the rest of the day, but Genevieve, I could see, was excited about it. It was one of the differences between us that had been true even when she was Genie—she liked talking to people more than I did. She had the nerves for the uncomfortable conversations I only forced myself to have in the interest of the larger purpose. In grad school, though I wasn’t proud of it, I’d sometimes mocked Genie’s areas of focus, joked to our peers that she’d gotten as far from studying Blackness as she could. I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough. But I was also jealous because Genie’s primary sources were long dead, discoverable only through paper trails. Mine I often had to track down and ask to speak to me about the worst days of their lives, a task I categorically knew that Genie would have been better at.
* * *
—
Susan drove us a few miles to her childhood home, which was sturdy and wood framed and had been in the family for generations. Abigail still lived there, as her parents had before her and her father’s parents had before that. Owen Varner, Abigail’s husband, had died a decade earlier, but the inside furniture tended toward plaid and the decor toward hunting trophies, and though the animals he’d mounted must have been dead for more years than he had, their glassy-eyed awe made them seem still afraid. In the living room, there was a portrait of a younger Abigail and Owen, and Abigail looked enough like her mother that I had to look twice to be sure the portrait was of her and not her parents. The sunporch where Susan led us was lighter than the living room, its furniture fraying wicker. Susan offered lemonade, and while we waited for her to bring it I looked up, the peeling paint on the porch roof showing glimmers of blue and green beneath its current coat of white, and tried to remember whether painting your porch haint blue was a Black tradition or just a southern one. Susan returned with a pitcher of lemonade and then left and came back again with her mother on her arm. Abigail Varner was eighty-eight years old, and though she walked slowly and seemed to need Susan to steady her, her voice was sharp and clear when she greeted us, and her face could have passed for two decades younger.
“Like I was saying yesterday,” Susan said, “I’m sorry about my nephew, but we can’t tell you why he’s causing trouble. The downtown association had an emergency meeting yesterday and we’ll get the mess cleaned up. But my grandmother doesn’t know where Chase is any more than I do.”
“He hasn’t called in months,” said Mrs. Varner.
“We came,” I said gently, “to ask a question about you. About your mother, actually, if that’s all right.”
Mrs. Varner straightened up.
“You’ll find my mother’s not here to answer for herself. When they put her name on that sign I didn’t fuss, or pretend that wasn’t her in the picture, but if you came to ask me to speak ill of the dead, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“I put her name on the sign,” said Genevieve.
“Well then I guess you know what you think of her. I can’t imagine what you came here to ask me.”
“How much do you know about your mother before she came to Cherry Mill?” I asked.
“As much as anyone knows about their mother before she was a mother, I suppose. The stories I was told. She had a beautiful laugh and sang like a bird, but she wasn’t a big talker. She was in Chicago and working the counter of a flower shop when she met my father. It was love at first sight. My father walked in for a bouquet for the poor girl he was dating at the time and walked out with a wife. She came here with him and never looked back, and they were in love until they died a month apart, and they probably still are in the hereafter if it allows that sort of thing.”
“That’s a lovely story,” I said.
“Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Varner.
“It sounds a little bit like the story I heard about this woman,” I said, sliding the picture of Minerva to Susan and Mrs. Varner. “She worked at a flower shop too, but on the south side. When it closed, she disappeared, and eventually wound up in Wisconsin, where no one ever heard from her again. But say she didn’t vanish into thin air. Say your mother wasn’t originally from Chicago, but from Mississippi, say she came up on the train, in the colored car, where they would have made her stay because beige reads differently in Mississippi, and on the south side, than it does in a place where there wasn’t enough mixing to know what mixed looks like. Say when that south side flower shop closed up, she took herself to a neighborhood where the florists could survive the decade, one where they didn’t know what she was, and when she left that neighborhood she left with a man who brought her right here. Then say her big brother followed her. He did some work, not all of it legal, and came into some money, and bought a store for cheap, on account of it was the Depression and the land he wanted was way outside of Milwaukee and dirt cheap because the owner was trying to keep afloat. Maybe the owner thought it would all be a laugh because that Black man could give his last penny to have his name on the deed and they’d still never let him keep it, and maybe her brother should have known that, but wanted to think he could keep an eye on his sister without blowing her cover. Instead the building ends up burning down while the whole town thinks he’s inside of it, and while no one seemed to care about anything but getting the property, which, coincidentally, your father did, there was someone who loved the man enough to send an obituary notice down to the paper, to mourn him or to cover for him so the white men wouldn’t keep looking. It would make sense if that person was his sister, except a year later, with the place still a heap of rubble, there was his same sister in a photograph, laughing about having helped set the fire.”
Mrs. Varner tilted back in what I realized was a rocking chair, her face impassive, and kept rocking for just long enough that I wondered if she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard me, if, in fact, she’d been following at all. A tendril of her hair had flattened to her forehead in the heat, even with the shade of the porch.
“That’s certainly a story,” she said finally.
“Is this not your mother in the picture then?” I asked, pointing again to Minerva.
“There’s a resemblance. But it’s not a very good photo.”
“She never told you anything other than that she was from Chicago?”
“What my mother told me and what I need to tell you are not the same question. If that was my mother, she would have given up everything she had to have this life and give it to me. If that was my mother, the only reason she would have ever told me anything about any of it would have been as a warning.”
“We believe this is your mother,” Genevieve said.
“I don’t believe you can prove it. And if you could, if that man was her brother and he didn’t burn up with the building, someone must have woken him up in the middle of the night and told him to go. Someone must have cared that much, at least. If everyone thought he was dead, was she supposed to up and die too?”
“Is that what she told you, or what you told yourself?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Did you ever tell your grandson about any of this?”
“What would it matter? The thing about one drop of blood? It’s only you people who believe in it now.”
* * *
• • •
The first time I was ever in a bar, I was with Genie. We were in high school, and not friends, exactly, but we knew the rules that applied to most of our classmates didn’t apply to us. By high school we had reached a kind of détente during school hours—I was w
riting mediocre poems and serving as class vice president, and Genie was on dance team and Model UN and captain of debate club. We each stayed out of the other’s territory. We both had boyfriends at high schools that were not ours, and when we went to what we thought of as real parties, the ones where nearly everyone was Black, we went with the boyfriends and didn’t consult each other, but when we went to school parties, we went as a pair. We blamed arriving at parties or clubs or shows together on our parents’ insistence that we keep an eye on each other in situations that could go badly, but in reality, both sets of parents believed their own daughter to be the sensible one; it was the two of us who our buddy system made feel safer.
Although she was by most measures more popular, I enjoyed myself more than Genie did when we went out with our classmates. Genie navigated social occasions as she did everything else—strategically, and with an eye toward what social currency they could bring her and what a misstep would cost. I liked the opportunity to surprise people with the less guarded version of myself, liked the rush of getting away with things.
Genie had to tell me when I was about to press my luck too far, when I was too much with the wrong person or in the wrong place. Only once had I needed to be the moderating force. Our junior year of high school, a classmate invited us to watch the mediocre band he played bass in open for a better band, and a group of us went to a club to watch. In the middle of the set I realized I’d lost track of Genie. I found her, in the sticky-floored back barroom, doing a fourth shot of tequila—the first two rounds had been earlier, at the band’s insistence, but the last two she’d done alone. She was drunk enough that it wasn’t worth asking why, so I got us in a cab and held her hair while she threw up on my lawn, and called her parents to say we were having a sleepover, which we were insofar as she passed out inside. In the morning I brought her ibuprofen and water and oatmeal before my parents were awake, giving her a chance to be presentable when she greeted them, which she did with perfect poise.
The Office of Historical Corrections Page 19