The Office of Historical Corrections(43)

My problem, alas, had never been as simple as Genie being wrong. In fourth grade, she’d been right about my hair: I had insisted on doing it myself, and my parents were willing to let me learn through trial and error. In high school, Genie might have found a nicer way to put it than “You know they only keep telling you you’re a good poet because they expect us to be illiterate?” but my poetry wasn’t actually as good as teachers’ praise for it. In grad school, Genie asked me once what my parents wanted for me, and I said that they just wanted me to be happy. Genie said “That explains a lot then,” and I said “What?” and Genie said “I’ve met a lot of Black women who had to learn it was OK to choose to be happy, but you’re the only one I know who was raised to expect it.”

It was hard to reconcile people-pleasing Genie with abrasive Genevieve, but they had in common usually being correct. IPH disagreed and had forced her out after just over a year and a dozen write-ups for policy violations. Being indignant on Genevieve’s behalf was unsettling. The very fact of Genie being Genevieve was unsettling. Just as I was accepting that I had grown into as much of a different person as I was ever going to become, Genevieve showed up proving it was still possible to entirely reinvent yourself. Perhaps in whatever years Genie was turning into Genevieve, I was supposed to have been turning into someone called Cassandra. Worse, perhaps I had already turned into Cassandra; perhaps it was Cassandra who made her white colleagues feel so comfortable that they whispered to her while waiting for the coffee to brew or the microwave to ding, “Genevieve—she’s a lot, isn’t she?” Cassandra whom the director trusted to fix Genevieve’s missteps on behalf of the U.S. government. Perhaps I’d been Cassandra for some time now, walking around using some bolder girl’s name.



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In the director’s office, I opened the blue folder with a suspicion that it would become obvious to me why I had been chosen for this assignment, why this particular Genevieve problem needed a Black woman’s face. The issue surrounded a memorial plaque in Cherry Mill, Wisconsin, a small town in the Fox River Valley, about an hour northwest of Milwaukee. Technically, we were federal; Wisconsin was not out of bounds—we could make corrections on vacation, even—but no one from the DC office would be sent there without special circumstances, so what Genevieve had been doing in Wisconsin was for her to know and the clarification file to guess. A generation ago someone would have stopped her from going at all: Cherry Mill had been a sundown town by reputation if not actual ordinance. From the dawn of its existence through the 1980 census it had zero Black residents, officially. In 1937 it apparently had one, briefly, though he was gone before a census caught him: a man named Josiah Wynslow. He’d gone from Mississippi to Chicago and Chicago to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee he’d come into luck—somehow he’d leaped from his job at a meat-packing plant to one as a driver and general errand boy for a Milwaukee tanner who, having watched what the war, the Depression, and the sheer passage of time did to industries and the workers in them, moonlighted as a radical socialist. He died, childless and ornery enough to leave Josiah most of his money. It was less than it would have been before the Depression, much less than it would have been when the tanning industry was in its heyday, but it was still a small fortune for a Black man a decade removed from Mississippi sharecropping.

It was hard to say from the record what his boss meant of the gift—whether it was a gesture of kindness, or a final experiment, or a fuck-you to the society he felt had failed itself—but Josiah took the money, sold his share of the business, and left the city. Even Milwaukee, eventually one of the Blackest cities in the country, barely had a Black population in the ’30s, and what there was had been redlined into two diminishing neighborhoods and waxed and waned with the fortunes of the plants that occasionally recruited from Chicago. Josiah, for reasons the file knew not, left Milwaukee for the even whiter and more openly hostile Cherry Mill, where he bought a defunct printing shop from a white man who was about to lose it to the bank, with the apparent intention of turning it into his own tannery and leather goods shop. On the subject of race, Wisconsin was a strange cocktail of progressivism and old-fashioned American anti-Blackness. It had passed one of the earliest civil rights ordinances in the country in 1895 but immediately reduced the remedy for discrimination so much that it wasn’t worth the cost of court to sue. Portions of the state had been welcoming enough, if pushed by protest, in its early history, but as in many northern cities, as the number of Black residents grew, so did the number of restrictions on where they could live, socialize, be served, or own property. There had never been a lynching in the state of Wisconsin, the heyday of the Klan was over, and Wisconsin had stayed so white for so long that for decades its local Klan mostly harassed Italians, but no place remained unwelcoming through innocence. There were no restrictive covenants in Cherry Mill when Josiah arrived because previously there had been no one in town to restrict. The man who sold him the location took the money and ran before he had to answer to his neighbors, but find out the neighbors did, and Josiah was repeatedly told to leave town and leave the deed behind or have it taken by force. Repeatedly he did not go.

Josiah was thirty in 1937, old enough to remember the South before he’d left it and the Midwest when he’d arrived, Tulsa and Chicago in 1919, and St. Louis before that, still raw in communal memory. He should have known better than to stay put, and still he stayed put, stayed for months, until a group of concerned citizens came in the night and set the place on fire. He had not finished clearing out the old printing debris and had already hauled in some of his tanning supplies; the basement was stocked with barrels of lye and the place was completely engulfed before he had a chance to get out. For years, this had been openly bragged about, a warning to anyone who might try it next. By the ’60s it had become a quiet open secret, and then a nearly lost memory, until it was rediscovered by a graduate student in the late ’90s doing archive work with the local newspaper. The result of the ensuing town meetings and public shame was a memorial plaque that went up at the former site of the building where Josiah died.