The Office of Historical Corrections(40)

The most persistent of our resistance came from the Free Americans, a group of white supremacists who preferred to be called white preservationists. Their leader had turned forty last year but was frequently described by the press as having boyish charm. He was soft-spoken and had a doctorate in psychology. He claimed to hate both violence and the spotlight, but he frequently appeared on television and at marches that turned into brawls. A few years earlier he’d been on the cover of a national magazine in a tailored suit and ascot, which had become such a joke that all members now wore ascots, though many continued to mark themselves by getting the same tattoo: an elk’s head with free men free fists no free lunches written between the antlers. Violence seemed to turn up where they did, but officially they were deemed responsible for only three deaths: an anarchist kid beaten after dueling protests, a Salvadoran man heckled and stabbed on his way home from work by a rowdy chapter leaving a bar, and a white college student shot and dumped into a lake after she argued with her boyfriend about his affiliation with the group. They had never physically attacked an IPH agent, though the Oakland field agent quit after an upsetting run-in. They staged protests against us, following a field historian around for the day, or papering over all of the corrections stickers in a given city with their own revisions, but they were more interested in the publicity than in us specifically, we’d realized, and when the press around us was quieter, mostly so were they.



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I made only three corrections after the bakery, and then I circled the reflecting pool several times without hearing anything more incorrect than celebrity gossip and unscientific speculation about the mating habits of ducks. I suspected that under its ornamental and slightly profane box, my cake was melting, so I decided to bring it safely to the office refrigerator and use the rest of the afternoon to type up reports. In the lobby, I flashed my badge at the security guard and took the elevator to the seventh floor, where we had been shoved into an open office space that a different government agency had argued its way out of based on studies showing reduced efficiency.

I didn’t mind the close quarters; I wasn’t confined to my desk most of the time, and when I was there Elena was on the other side of it. We had started together at the beginning of the enterprise and bonded quickly: Elena worked online and I worked in the field; Elena was a Chicana from LA and I was a Black girl from DC; Elena had a husband and three kids and I had what Elena charitably called a free spirit, but we shared an urgency about the kind of work we were doing, a belief that the truth was our last best hope, and a sense that our own mission was less neutral and more necessary than that of the white men we answered to at the office.

“What’s the cake for?” Elena asked.

“Daniel’s birthday,” I said.

“Hmm,” said Elena.

“What?”

“I guess it’s your turn to make the effort.”

“It’s not about effort. That’s the whole point of not really dating. It’s easy. No one has to make the effort.”

“Hold on, I’m writing down the date.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t correct you until a year from now. Guideline 2.”

“See, I almost brought you a cupcake, but then I remembered you’re mean.”

“You really didn’t bring me a cupcake?”

“I actually was going to, but I had to make a correction in the bakery, and I got flustered and forgot. Plus the girl who worked there already thought I was crazy.”

“You corrected a cake?”

“I corrected a flyer in a cake shop.”

“Well, boss wants to see you. He left a note.” Elena pointed to my desk. “Maybe don’t lead with the cake bit.”

I read the note, but it was inscrutable. I could not recall being involved in anything controversial lately—my recent corrections had been rather uniformly underwhelming—but our supervision was so generally lax that I felt like I’d been called to the principal’s office. The director had been running a prestigious university’s ethnomusicology institute before he’d been invited to steer the organization. While he managed most days to look the DC part in suits and close-cropped hair, and he kept all the institute’s moving pieces more or less moving, he had the energy of a man who had intended to spend his golden years playing guitar on the beach and was daily bewildered by what had gone wrong.

“Cassie,” he said when I walked into his office. “We have a Genevieve problem. It might take some legwork to sort out.”

He tapped a folder on his desk. A clarification request. The requests that made it past initial review were mostly cases where the historian’s initial correction had been overzealous, frequently violations of guideline 6: we do not posit certainty where the facts are actually murky or disputed, or intervene in a dispute over something so trivial that the relevant information cannot be verified except by weighing the accounts of the disputing parties. Presently, though, the institute was working its way through a backlog of clarification requests all triggered by the recently departed Genevieve Marchand.

Genevieve had been gone from IPH for six months, but she had been regularly reappearing as my nemesis for most of my life. We first met in the fourth grade, when Genevieve was still Genie and had, until the moment of our introduction, been the only Black girl in her class at the private school where I landed a scholarship. Our parents moved, broadly, in the same Black professional circles, but my father was a lawyer who had started with the Bureau of Consumer Protection and then moved into the sort of lawyering that advertised on the radio stations that were banned in Genie’s home (No Money? No Problems! At 1-800-TROUBLE your lawyer gets paid when you do); Genie’s mother was a sitting judge. My mother had recently moved from civil rights work in the Department of Justice to civil rights work in the Department of Education; Genie’s father owned part of a tech company and had his name on a wing of our school. My parents were first-generation upper middle class, and Genie’s were nearly as old money as Black money got to be in the U.S., which is to say, not terribly old but extremely proud of it.