The Office of Historical Corrections(45)
I had been sitting in one of a circle of metal chairs outside by the patio heat lamp, which glowed softly and was almost romantic, except that the patio faced Eleventh Street traffic and was sandwiched between a dog park and a rowdy sports bar. I caught Daniel’s eye as we were both surveying the landscape.
“Do you know what the problem with DC is?” he said casually, scooting his chair closer as though we were old friends in the middle of a conversation just arriving at a point of intimacy that required us to keep our voices down. It was a habit he had with everyone, something I came to understand as his journalism mode, the one that got people to drop their guards by strolling right past them, but at the time I felt seen, interesting.
“There’s only one problem?” I asked.
“Well, no. I mean the reason nobody ever tried to preserve anything until it was too late, the reason we’re going to lose all the mom-and-pop operations and corner stores and carryouts?”
“Money?”
“No and yes. The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they’re wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum. There’s always a white person out there who wants to overpronounce a foreign word, or try an exotic food, or shop for crafts, but no one wants to do that for Black folks. Once white people started thinking they were better at urban Blackness than Black folks, it was game over. My dad grew up three blocks from here, but his parents lost their town house to property taxes and he can’t even bring himself to drive into the city to visit me. Says he’s going to get himself arrested one day driving up Fourteenth Street, yelling out the window cursing Barry for selling the city out from under folks.”
“Wow,” I said. “Are we already at the part where we talk about our families?”
“I don’t like small talk,” he said. “Tell me about yours.”
I did. I was the child of two federal employees, raised in a city where integrated federal jobs had crucially sustained the Black middle class. The most bewildering part of leaving DC the first time was discovering that elsewhere people casually used “federal government” as a pejorative. I needed no convincing of the fatal possibilities of government overreach, of the way the fatalities told the story of who the nation considered expendable, but, even after the low points of the previous decade, I believed in government, or at least believed in it more than the alternative. That my country might always expect me to audition for my life I accepted as fact, but I trusted the public charter of national government more than I trusted average white citizens acting unchecked. I believed in government, I had come to understand, the way that agnostics who hadn’t been to service in decades sometimes hedged their bets and brought their babies to be baptized or otherwise welcomed into the religions of their parents’ youth. I had abandoned the actual religion I was raised with as soon as I got to college, but when in moments of despair I needed the inspiration of a triumphant martyr figure who made me believe in impossible things, I thought not of saints or saviors but of my mother.
When she was pregnant with me, she’d gone down to Louisiana on behalf of the Justice Department, charged with enforcing a school desegregation order that was nearly older than she was. She was twenty-five and six months pregnant, fresh out of law school and the sole employee sent to investigate. When she arrived, she was shepherded around by eleven different Black people who wanted to make sure that she knew the men in the truck who followed her with shotguns were the local Klan. By the time I was born, the people of that small Louisiana parish had nothing yet but faith and a high school in underfunded disrepair, but they believed in my mother and sent her home with a chest of handmade blankets and bibs and baby clothes, and by the time I was a year old, the parish’s Black high school had a science wing with lab equipment and new textbooks. That was the small victory so offensive to the local government that they had been willing to raise weapons in defense of it before the Justice Department in the form of my mother arrived. I asked her to tell me that story over and over, to tell me the name of the person who’d made me each doll or bib or blanket. It was my first experience of faith. It was part of why I’d jumped at the chance to come to IPH—I had imagined it was my best chance to be part of a legacy, something meaningfully bigger than myself.
* * *
—
Daniel asked so many questions about my parents and my childhood that I thought he’d forgotten we were flirting, or where the story ended—with me, with my job and my hopes for the future—but after a few minutes he let the conversation wander back.
“So, IPH? When I first saw you, I figured you for something depressing and corporate you were here to drink away your guilt about.”
“Is that why you didn’t start by asking what I do?”
“I never start there. It’s an easy trick for being the least predictable person at a DC party. Ask anything other than ‘What do you do?’ If people want you to know, they’ll still find a way to tell you.”
“So are you pleasantly surprised that I’m not a corporate sellout?”
“Do you really think it’s a good idea for the government to be in the business of telling people what the truth is?”