The Office of Historical Corrections

by Danielle Evans

  Alone again, I asked what was wrong. She told me she’d lost a debate tournament, or rather not lost but come in second, and also not lost because she had, by all accounts and measures won, been fiercer and smarter and more polished than the girl who beat her, won by every metric but the judge’s scorecards. Her teammates had sympathetically shrugged it off as one of those inexplicable decisions, and her parents had given her the twice as good for half the credit lecture, when she wanted, just once, for someone to tell her that she was already good enough and it wasn’t all right if the world wasn’t fair enough to reward it, wanted someone to acknowledge that even this trivial thing was allowed to hurt, and that the particularity of the unfairness had a name.

  “Genie,” I said. “Fuck those people. You’re smarter than all of them.”

  “I am,” said Genie. “But it’s never going to be enough.”

  * * *

  —

  That, I recognized as I watched Genevieve nurse a second morning beer at Andy Detry’s bar, was what had upset me seeing her yesterday. It had reminded me of the only other time, in any incarnation, I’d seen her look defeated. When we’d come in, Andy had been happy to see us and asked how things were going. I told him only the happy version of events—the truth of Josiah Wynslow’s long and full life. He gave us the promised first round on him, and he was pleased to hear how Josiah’s life had turned out. If he wondered why we were drinking so early to good news, bless the state of Wisconsin, he didn’t ask. When we had tucked ourselves into a back booth, Genevieve demanded to know why I hadn’t told him the rest of the story, and I said officially I had no rest of the story to tell—no proof of Ella Mae’s real identity and no official purpose for proving it.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  “Now nothing,” I said. “I go back to DC and send a request to vital records to pull the incorrect death certificate, and I recommend the city take the sign down, which I assume they will gladly do. I came to answer the question of whether the man survived. I can’t do much with a theory about how.”

  “So what’s your theory? Minerva saved his life and kept the property because that’s what he would have wanted, or Minerva was a cold-blooded bitch who would have let her brother die to keep her new life and he ran when he saw it?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to think the former. Either way, the cost of raising her daughter the way she wanted is that she’s got a Black white supremacist grandson running around, so in the end we all lose.”

  “The beauty of motherhood is that all the choices are wrong,” said Genevieve.

  “Is it terrifying?” I asked. “Being a parent?”

  “Yes,” said Genevieve. “It’s like every day since Octavia was born I’ve had to choose between trying to do the best I can for her and trying to do the best I can for the world she has to live in. I wouldn’t forgive her for it, but I understand the choice Minerva made in a way I wouldn’t without Octavia. She’s perfect. She’s doing a summer music camp and she’s lead violin. How much would I give up to protect her from everyone who’s going to hate her just for being there? Look at this. Look at how damn amazing she is.”

  Genevieve scrolled through the pictures on her phone for me—Octavia onstage, Octavia in pajamas in a picture she’d covered with sleepy emojis by way of texting her mother good night, Octavia making silly faces, Octavia helpfully screenshotting and circling in red ink an advertisement for the Disney princess salon, suggesting they go when Genevieve got her back next month, Octavia giving her own voice-over guide to a makeup artist’s tutorial on the screen behind her, giving Genevieve advice for how to do her lipstick when she got famous. I hadn’t seen Octavia in real life for a few years, and now, nearly ten, she looked startlingly like Genevieve when I had met her, except she appeared on the verge of laughter in every single picture, and even as a girl, Genie had been serious. In the middle of the slideshow, a new call popped up on-screen, and Genevieve excused herself to take it outside. I nursed my beer and thought about asking for another. When Genevieve came back, she looked tense.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  “My agent. I don’t have enough. He thinks we can’t pitch this story on an interesting theory. Not enough open conflict.”

  “What, he wants you to DNA-test White Justice in the town square?”

  “He’d love that, probably.” Genevieve took a breath. “Do you think it would change anything? If we told him the truth?”

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t. People can convince themselves of anything if they want badly enough to believe it.”

  “Why are you doing any of this then? If you don’t think telling people the truth makes a difference?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, and I had the strange experience of hearing myself say something I knew to be true only once I’d heard it come out of my own mouth.

  “Now you don’t care about the job?” said Genevieve. “You damn near acted like I was invisible for a year. You, the person I used to be able to at least count on not to have the sense to stay out of trouble. You didn’t stand up for me because you didn’t want to.”

  “I didn’t think it would be better if neither of us was in the office.”

  “Ella Mae didn’t think it would be better if both she and her brother had to be Black.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, though I couldn’t shake how personally I’d taken you know the type.

  “It’s not fair,” Genevieve conceded. “You wouldn’t watch me die. But you get away with so much. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to.”

  “Thanks. I love you too, Genie,” I said.

  “It’s going to be Genevieve forever. But I look at my daughter and I think sometimes that’s what I want for her. A life where she doesn’t feel like she has to answer to anyone.”

  “Did you just call me a role model?”

  “I would deny it in court.”

  “White Justice would deny his Blackness in court but that doesn’t make it true.”

  “Yes, well. At least I have a story to break.”

  “There’s no more story here. The story’s dead.”

  “It’s a story if I talk to him.”

  “He doesn’t seem like a great talker.”

  “I need this to work. I can’t go back to LA with nothing.”

  “Genie, you’re brilliant. You don’t need to rile up an idiot in order to validate your career.”

  “Don’t play stupid. Of course I do.”

  * * *

  —

  Genevieve and I stayed at the bar long enough to have a third round, and then a round of coffee, which we nursed until I felt sober enough to drive her back to her car. It looked like rain, one of those flash storms that would pass through and leave the day sunny, not strong enough to signal the tornado sirens, but nasty enough that we’d want to be inside before it came. The wind had picked up and the white tarp over the sign billowed. I told Genevieve to go home and sleep, to call her daughter, to find another story, and she said she could promise me only the first two.

  I took my own advice and went back to my hotel room to nap. I hovered at half awake, my dreams upsetting and not subconscious enough to be actual dreams. I gave in and decided to go toward the fear instead. While it stormed outside, I opened my laptop and watched an hour of Free Americans videos, trying to make myself immune to them. It felt unfair, how absurd someone could be and still be terrifying. I watched video after video of white boy and “white” boy, cherub-faced and angular, blond and brunette, sharply styled and scruffy, all mangling their country’s history in its purported defense, promising to fight for the return of an America that, as they described it, was as real as Narnia. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I went back to bed and finally fell asleep for real, but I woke up after only an hour, with the Free Americans’ rallying cry of We are the future circling in my head. I tried Genevieve on the phone,
thinking of Octavia, of the fact that maybe Genevieve was the closest thing I had to a sister, because what was a sibling but a person you stayed tied to whether or not you liked them. She could not stay here, I decided. I had given her this story and I had to take it back, even if I had to put her on a plane myself.

  It had stopped raining and was barely dusk now. Genevieve didn’t answer. I decided to go in person and talk her out of whatever nonsense idea I was sure she was planning. Five minutes from Genevieve’s B & B, my phone beeped to life, and after a minute the messages became so persistent that I pulled over to find out what was wrong. I assumed at first, with the flood of Genevieves on my screen, that the messages were all from Genevieve telling me to turn around and not sabotage her moment, but instead it was a tumble of messages about Genevieve, messages from Nick, and Elena, and Daniel. Daniel’s message told me to go somewhere safe and not to watch the livestream; Nick’s message had a link, which I clicked.

  White Justice’s grainy live feed appeared. He was filming on his phone and the angle shook and shifted. First his whole face took up the screen, enraged, and then the camera went to Genevieve’s. She had taken down the tarp and was standing where the sign and the graffiti were, where I had seen her just a few hours earlier. “This bitch,” White Justice said, “thinks she can come to my town and lie about my family,” and as the camera rocked I could see that he was holding the camera in one hand but in the other was a gun. Genevieve had settled her face into a terrifyingly calm expression, although she was armed only with an IPH printer—I wondered if she’d kept hers when they fired her but realized belatedly that it was mine, that she must have taken it, impatient with me, with the lack of purpose with which I was using it. In the background of the livestream I could hear what sounded like sirens on their way, and I willed Genevieve to just keep quiet, to stall until the police got there, although I knew that this would not happen and that even if it did it might not help. Genevieve pointed to the wall, to the silver scroll she must have placed there, her correction of the correction. She read it to the camera, her voice fighting with White Justice’s, breaking only on Ella Mae.

  “In 1937 African American shopkeeper Josiah Wynslow was believed to have been killed when a mob intending to keep Cherry Mill white burned down the original building while he was inside. In fact, he escaped with his life, though the circumstances of his escape remain unclear. 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. George Schmidt took over the property after the murder and sold it at a profit in 1959. Ella Mae Schmidt is believed to have been Josiah Wynslow’s biological sister, passing as white for so long that her own children and grandchildren never knew the truth of her connection to Josiah or their own ancestry.”

  “Say it again,” said White Justice, cocking the gun.

  “You heard me,” said Genevieve.

  “I’m not a nigger,” said White Justice.

  “Neither am I,” said Genevieve.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what I was waiting for to know that I could open them, and then I heard the clear crack of the gunshot. Rain, I wanted to think. Thunder. But I knew what I’d heard, and I kept my eyes closed. I pictured Genevieve, not now, but years ago, the last time I remembered seeing her through my own tears, the first time I remembered hearing a sound I thought was a gunshot. It hadn’t been a real one. Our high school was doing active shooter drills and an administrator had sprung for the too-authentic training module, and I had missed class the day they’d warned everyone to prepare. When the noise came over the loudspeakers I hid in a hall closet instead of going to the nearest assigned safe room and stayed there panicked for more than an hour, even after the next class bell rang and the hallways were full of clearly alive people and it started to dawn on me that it had only been the facsimile of the violence I’d been waiting for. I stayed in the closet until a teacher noticed I was missing, and Genie offered to look for me and walked the hall calling my name. Even once I left the closet, I couldn’t get it together to go to class, and so Genie had walked me to the girls’ room and let me cry it out, and when I finally finished she asked, “Are you done now?”

  “I didn’t know it was fake at first,” I said. “You always think when something like that happens you’re going to be the bravest version of yourself. I thought I was ready, and I wouldn’t be terrified.”

  “Oh, Cassie,” Genie said. “No, you didn’t.”

  Acknowledgments

  It would take another book to properly express gratitude for everyone who has made me feel like a part of their community, lucky to be a writer, lucky to be a reader in this moment, and able to write these stories.

  Thank you to my agent, Ayesha Pande, a friend and advocate whose faith in my work kept me working. Thank you to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whose patience let this be the book it needed to be, and to Sarah, Alison Fairbrother, and Delia Taylor for being smart and careful readers whose feedback and conversation elevated the writing and made the work of revision a pleasure. Thank you to everyone at Riverhead for taking such good care of my first book, being so supportive of this one, and not yelling at me when I said I was writing stories and a novella.

  Thank you to Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Ucross Foundation for residency space; thank you to PEN America, the National Book Foundation, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Nellie McKay Fellowship at UW−Madison, and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of my career; thank you to the Literature Department at American University, the Creative Writing Program at UW−Madison, and The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University for providing community and writing time. Thank you to the colleagues in all three places whose work provided inspiration and whose kindness made three different cities feel like home.

  Most of these stories were initially published in literary magazines. Thank you to American Short Fiction, Barrelhouse, Callaloo, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Medium, and The Sewanee Review for giving them homes, and thank you to the editors who solicited or selected them and whose early input made the stories stronger: Zinzi Clemmons, Nate Brown, Adeena Reitberger, Roxane Gay, Adam Ross, and Tom McAllister. Thank you to Heidi Pitlor, Meg Wolitzer, and Roxane Gay for honoring two of these stories with inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Thank you to Susannah Tahk and Liz Wyckoff for reading the earliest versions of several of the stories, to Liz again for fielding some Wisconsin records questions for the novella, and to my colleague Jean McGarry for her feedback on a later pass of the book.

  For being my community during the years I needed it most, thank you to Liz, Susannah, Brigitte Fielder, Jonathan Senchyne, Jennine Crucet, Rachel Louise Snyder, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Brandon Dorman, Erin Gamble, Lily Wong, Melinda Moustakis, Nate and Thea Brown, Adeena Reitberger, Sara Ortiz, Nandini Pandey, Alice Mandell, Charles Huff, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Elena Diamond, Patrice Hutton, Shangrila Willy, Jeanne Elone, Miriam Aguila, Afua Bruce, Jordan Zweck, Colin Gillis, and Tia Blassingame. Thank you to my family, especially Georgette Dawn Bedoe Brown and, as ever, my father, Walter Evans, for their love and support.

  This book is, among many other things, about grief and loss, and about women unwilling to diminish their desires to live full and complex lives. It is indebted to many people who have openly shared their griefs and their joys with me, but was also shaped by my own losses during the years I was writing it. I am thankful for my memories of my aunts Carolyn Evans (1949−2016) and Susie Fillyow (1956−2017), without whom there is less warmth and laughter in the world. Thank you to Beth Ausbrooks (1930−2017), whose life was an example in deciding what was possible instead of letting the world decide it for her.

  My love and gratitude forever to my mother, Dawn Valore Martin (1957−2017), whose determination made me believe in the possibility of a better world, whose love made me believe in myself, whose lov
e for telling stories made me believe in their power, and for whom I will be trying to find the right words for the rest of my life.

  About the Author

  Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, winner of the PEN America PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Paterson Prize, and a National Book Foundation "5 under 35" selection. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories. She teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

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