The Office of Historical Corrections(38)
I had been at IPH for four years then, and I wanted to take my charge seriously. To keep from falling into routine, I assigned myself a different DC neighborhood each month. For June, I was in Capitol Hill, where shortly after correcting a tourist who thought the Rayburn Building was named after Gene Rayburn, I realized it was lunchtime. The block surrounding me was cluttered with restaurants that had puns for names and sold expensive comfort food from ostentatiously nostalgic chrome countertops; it all felt sinister and I had settled on pizza when I walked past a bakery, its pink awning reading cake everyday count in loopy cursive that mimicked frosting. I hated the name—the attempt at a double entendre failing to properly be even a single entendre—but it was Daniel’s birthday, and I caught the towering cupcake trees in the window display, heaps of red and cocoa and gold. Cupcakes would seem light and full of options, I thought, and so I walked in and considered flavors before deciding cupcakes were wrong, a variety of cupcakes would say I was a child who could not make up her mind, or else invite him to imagine the opposite—me fully domesticated and walking triumphantly into a PTA meeting, as if that were the future I was waiting for him to offer me. I walked farther down the counter, past the wedding cakes, and the photorealistic DC landmark cakes, and the cakes carved into shoes and champagne bottles and cartoons, looking for something unobtrusive.
The correction was so minor that four-years-ago-me would have decided it wasn’t worth it. A display cake read juneteenth! in red frosting, surrounded by red, white, and blue stars and fireworks. A flyer taped to the counter above it encouraged patrons to consider ordering a Juneteenth cake early: We all know about the Fourth of July! the flyer said. But why not start celebrating freedom a few weeks early and observe the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation! Say it with cake! One of the two young women behind the bakery counter was Black, but I could guess the bakery’s owner wasn’t. The neighborhood, the prices, the twee acoustic music drifting out of sleek speakers: I knew all of the song’s words, but everything about the space said who it was for. My memories of celebrating Juneteenth in DC were my parents taking me to someone’s backyard BBQ, eating banana pudding and peach cobbler and strawberry cake made with Jell-O mix; at not one of them had I seen a seventy-five-dollar bakery cake that could be carved into the shape of a designer handbag for an additional fee. The flyer’s sales pitch—so much hanging on that We all know—was targeted not to the people who’d celebrated Juneteenth all along but to office managers who’d feel hectored into not missing a Black holiday or who just wanted an excuse for miscellaneous dessert.
“Excuse me,” I said, my finger still resting on the countertop above the flyer. The young Black woman turned around.
“You want that cake?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Hi. I’m Cassie. I’m with the Institute for Public History.”
The white woman turned around, but both women looked at me without registering that the name meant anything.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “We don’t give orders or anything. We’re a public service. Like 311! But I thought you’d like to know that this flyer’s not quite correct. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September 1862. Juneteenth is celebrated nationally because it’s become a holiday for the whole diaspora, but it actually recognizes the date slaves in Texas learned they were free, which was in June 1865, after the end of the Civil War.”
“Mmkay,” said the white woman.
“I’m just going to leave a note. A tiny correction.”
I pulled out a corrections sticker—double holographed and printed, at considerable expense, with a raised seal; though easily mocked they were almost never properly duplicated. I typed the correction into the office’s one futuristic indulgence—the handheld printers we’d all been issued when we were first hired—and ran a sticker through it to print my text. I signed my name and the date, peeled it from its backing, and affixed it to the counter beside the flyer.
“There,” I said. “No biggie.”
I smiled and met both women’s eyes. We were not supposed to be aggressive in demanding people’s time—correct the misinformation as swiftly and politely as possible (guideline 3)—but we were supposed to make it clear we were available for further inquiry or a longer conversation if anyone wanted to know more (guideline 5). We were supposed to be prepared to cite our sources (guideline 7).
“You gonna buy a cake?” said the Black woman. “Or you came in about the flyer?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes. I’m kind of dating someone and it’s his birthday. I was trying to decide what kind of cake would be best. Or I don’t know, maybe cupcakes are better. Do you have any favorites?”
“Ma’am, if you show up for your man’s birthday with you and a cake and he complains about it, you’re not even kind of dating him anymore. It doesn’t matter the kind of cake.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Give me that one.”
I pointed at something labeled blackout cake. “Like an Oreo cookie without the cream” said the description. I could tell Daniel I had bought him the blackest cake in the store. The boxes were pink with whimsical phrases written in gold; I asked for the one with cake for days on it. I would let him decide whether to make the dirty joke, or complain about the cultural appropriation of white-owned businesses, or go with the obvious Oreo commentary. I would leave out the bit about my correction. Daniel was a journalist, skeptical by both nature and training, and he found my work suspicious at best.