The Office of Historical Corrections(47)

I went back to my documents. The researcher tasked with assembling clarification files had done a thorough job. In the file there was an article about the fire from the Appleton Gazette and an obituary that had run later, in the Wisconsin Enterprise-Blade, calling for an investigation that of course never came. The Gazette article focused on the chemical cause of the fire and included a photograph of the damage, but the obituary included a grainy photograph of Josiah himself, and a bit of biographical detail. Josiah Wynslow had dimples and an easy smile. In the photo he looked younger than he had been when he died, but the stylish hat and suit made me think the picture had been taken in Chicago and not Mississippi—somewhere there was still a before Joe, a Mississippi boy who hadn’t yet followed the great migration north. So much violence and lack waiting on the other end of the violence and lack that people poured out of the South to escape, and still they kept believing there was someplace in this country where they could be Black and be safe and make a home. Chicago, at least, had the pull of community in its favor, had decades of sales pitches calling the Black Belt up north, decades of people who had already learned to call the city a home. How was it that Josiah Wynslow had left Chicago and come to believe he could make his home in a place where no one wanted him, had wanted to stay there badly enough to die or cheat death?



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Officially, I was staying at a Ramada off the highway somewhere between Cherry Mill and the Milwaukee airport. Unofficially, I had texted Nick from National before my plane took off, and while it was possible his number had changed since we’d last been in touch, or that he was no longer in Milwaukee at all, or that he would choose to ignore my message, I was entirely unsurprised to see him waiting for me at the arrivals gate. His hair was shorter than I was used to it being, and it made his eyes, already a startling blue, stand out conspicuously. We had parted last on bad terms too inconclusive to be permanent. A few years ago he’d come to DC for a conference, and when we’d tried to have a friendly drink, he’d chastised me for leaving my position at GW, accused me of both wasting my talents and working in the service of empire, which seemed contradictory: my job could be menial or it could be gravely problematic, but not both. Now he seemed contrite—he offered a ride and a home-cooked meal. I was committed enough to the premise that we were harmless to each other to insist he drive me first to check into my hotel, and to keep the room keycard in my pocket as though I would need it later, but honest enough that my suitcase didn’t make it out of the trunk until we arrived at his loft.

I’d met Nick in graduate school in a different state, and our time in this one had overlapped only by a single summer, at the end of my visiting gig in Eau Claire, and just before he’d started teaching at UW-Milwaukee. I spent most of that summer with him in his half-unpacked apartment, a cookie-cutter basic one bedroom I imagined exactly mirrored the apartment on the other side of the cheap plasterboard walls. When he said he lived in a loft now, I expected he’d stayed in the city and moved into something more aesthetically pleasing, one of those abandoned industrial spaces gone pricey, cavernous, and artisanal, with concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling windows, but, in fact, he lived in what my younger self would have called the woods, though I now knew it was merely rural, and that only barely. Nick’s childhood had been odd: he’d grown up monied half the time and rurally pragmatic the rest; his mother was the abandoned first wife of a man who went on to money. He’d gone to boarding school and then come home in the summer to be working middle class; he looked every bit the overgrown prep-school boy, but those summers were the roots he tended to play up. His house was a converted barn, and though I would not have put it past him to have taken his desire to transcend his patrician roots so far that he was now supplementing his academic work with farm labor, he explained that he had bought the barn from the family who used to run the place, and though one of the farmer’s children still lived in the house across the field, there was no farming happening anymore, the farm not having the capital to invest in the dairy industry’s turn to mechanical labor or the cushion to survive without an investment.

“I did a lot of renovations myself,” he said. “But there’s no livestock involved, so I hope you didn’t come all this way to see me milk a cow.”

“I didn’t come all this way to see you at all,” I said.

When he’d moved here, he’d said it was because teaching at a state school better suited his praxis, though quietly I had heard his leaving had been slightly more contentious than that, that it involved a badly ended affair with a graduate student, which I believed insofar as I had also been a graduate student there, though to the extent that our involvement had ended, it was me who had ended it both times, in each case saved from my own worse impulses by a job in a different state. When we met, Nick was a junior professor and soon to be divorced. We had a two-body problem, he told people, but just going on offhand gossip, by my count there had been at least nine other bodies involved on his part alone by the time his wife called things off.

Such was his level of charm that it was hard to be disgusted by it: Nick expected a door to open and it did; he expected to be adored and he was. Before Nick, I had been eating at the same three restaurants and drinking at the same two bars for years because it spared me the exhaustion of walking into a new place and convincing them I belonged and they should treat me kindly, of greeting clerks and waitpersons in my PhD voice, dropping the name of the university when necessary, generously overtipping. It was a revelation to move through the world with Nick, to see how little attention a white man needed to devote to that kind of performance, how much of his worry about how other people saw him could be consumed by the frivolous, how easy it was for me to be assumed respectable merely by association. It was in some ways the thing I’d liked least about him, even less than things that were actually his fault: when I went places with him, things were easier; when I was with him, the do they know I’m human yet question that hummed in me every time I met a new white person quieted a little, not because I could be sure of the answer but because I could be sure in his presence they’d at least pretend.