The Office of Historical Corrections(42)

Genie went straight from grad school to a fabulous job the same year I headed off for my visiting position; when I landed the tenure-track job a year later, she sent a note of congratulations written on stationery from her own higher-ranked university. For years I had only peripheral knowledge of her life—talks and publications, family photos shared on social media. She and James had a daughter, Octavia, who appeared to take to the camera the way Genie had as a child, and I watched her grow from baby-faced to long-limbed and theatrical. There’d been no note of congratulations when I joined IPH, and when Genie and her family stopped appearing in my social media feeds I thought maybe I’d been downsized from her Friends roster, having become professionally unimportant. When she reappeared, to my astonishment, it was to join IPH two years after I had. She was divorced, parted from her tenure-track job in her pre-tenure year under murky circumstances rumored to involve a lawsuit, had shaved her hair down to a crisp teenie Afro, and no longer went by Genie—it was Genevieve now.

The Genie I remembered would have had expansive ideas about our mission but would have spent years charming the director into coming around to them, while parroting her parents on the virtues of treading lightly. Genevieve said in our first office meeting during her first week that we were tiptoeing around history to the point that we might as well be lying to people. She wanted a guideline emphasizing that lies of omission were still lies. In the field, she amended a sign quoting the Declaration of Independence with portions of the worst of Notes on the State of Virginia. She was instructed not to come back to the National Portrait Gallery after she stood in front of the Gauguin for hours telling viewers about his abuse of underage Tahitian girls. She made a tourist child cry at Mount Vernon when she talked about Washington’s vicious pursuit of his runaway slaves, and she was formally asked by the only Virginia field historian to avoid making further corrections in the state. The following month she talked her way into the Kennedy Center and “corrected” hundreds of programs for that evening’s showing of a beloved musical where George Washington was written as a kindly paternal figure, noting that in real life Washington had not been a jovial singing Black man, and including an extensive list of his atrocities. She was, she protested when our director reprimanded her, not in the state of Virginia when she made the correction.

That was the only Genevieve clarification I had previously been called in for—less a clarification really, and more a minor PR campaign. I got complimentary tickets to the show and brought Daniel. A picture of us in the audience ran on the agency account, along with an apologia for having overstepped. We know the difference between history and artistry, the post said. I didn’t write it—I didn’t work online—and Elena had refused the assignment; the actual text was written by one of the two white men named Steve whom I couldn’t always tell apart because I’d never learned their last names. IPH hadn’t needed me to weigh in; they’d only needed my face, to show that I was one of the reasonable ones. My face only barely held up its part of the bargain—in the picture, Daniel looked quizzical and I was grimacing. I had never seen the show before and was inclined to agree with Genevieve’s critique, if not her methods.

I didn’t say any of that to the director, but I took Genevieve out for a drink at an upscale Black-owned bar on U Street to apologize. We had socialized minimally since she’d started at the agency, and though we blamed it on working mostly outside of the office, and Genevieve juggling joint custody, I knew it wasn’t scheduling that stood between us. I was sincere enough in being sorry for my role in things that we left the bar almost on good terms, but on our way back to Metro, we passed a bar with a young and multiracial crowd and a weekly hip-hop and classic rock dance party. Its name—Dodge City—was a nod to both its country-western decor and DC’s derogatory nickname from the ’90s, when the city was the country’s murder capital and so many people, most of them young and Black, were killed in its streets that a joke about the likelihood of being shot there became a way of saying where you were from.

Genevieve wanted to go inside and footnote the bar’s name on the cocktail menus with an explanation of the violence it referenced, and I had to threaten to call the director before she relented. I walked home, furious at still being the bad guy, and also remembering the way Genevieve’s parents had talked about the revival of U Street when we were children, the way Genevieve had adopted their disdain in adolescence, how much they’d spoken of the city’s past and future, and how little they’d wanted to be connected with the Black people living in its dilapidated present until most of them had been pushed out. Where was the correction for that?

Genevieve gave up on me again. For her remaining time at IPH, our interactions stopped at cordial acknowledgment. It was the kind of tension that in the beginning seemed it might still be resolved, but went on long enough that the grievance settled, turned so solid that trying to make pleasant chitchat around it would have felt disrespectful. Besides, I knew if I did resolve things with her, I would end up in the middle of whatever battle she picked next, and I couldn’t afford that. I told myself that in the institute’s good graces, I could still do some good.

If it had only been the occasional play or bar that Genevieve raised a fuss about, she might have lasted longer, but Genevieve’s most persistent and controversial grievance was the passive voice atrocity: wherever there was a memorial, she wanted to name not just the dead but the killers. She corrected every memorial to lynching, every note about burnt schoolhouses and destroyed business districts, murdered leaders and bombed churches, that failed to say exactly who had done it. She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others. She upset people. She jeopardized the whole project, and for nothing, said our more liberal colleagues. She was not correcting falsehoods, said the more conservative, she was adding revisionist addendums. They said these things to my face, assuming, because we did not seem to be friends, that I disagreed with her.