The Office of Historical Corrections(49)
The candy store that we were looking for, the one that stood on the lot that had once been Josiah’s, was a redbrick building, but someone had painted a scattering of bricks in bright primary colors, zigzagging down the exterior. The marquee advertised it as the sugar mill, with a giant lollipop and candy apple, and a handwritten sign in the window suggested the cherry taffy or the brandy fudge, both of which were homemade and on sale. Through the windows I could see the checkered floor and wooden countertops. I distrusted, in general, appeals to nostalgia—I loved the past of archives, but there was no era of the past I had any inclination to visit with my actual human body, being rather fond of it having at least minimal rights and protections. I tried to think of what this block would have looked like when Josiah first set eyes on it, what about it would have called to him.
The sign I had come to see faced the small lot where Nick parked the car. It was unobtrusive, easy not to notice if you weren’t looking for it, which had, according to the file, been a source of some contention when the first sign went up in the ’90s. The store owner won the placement debate, arguing that she didn’t mind having the sign, but no one wanted it to be the first thing children saw when they came to get sweets. Genevieve’s new sign was brassier, but still located in the same spot, on the side of the building, near the parking lot:
In 1937 African American shopkeeper Josiah Wynslow was killed when a mob intending to keep Cherry Mill white burned down the original building while he was inside. This type of violence was at one point frequent all over the country, and though there were few official restrictive covenants in Wisconsin then, in part because the African American population was so minimal, racial restrictions and the boundaries of “sundown towns” were often enforced less officially through violence or intimidation. Citizens involved in the burning of the store and the murder of Josiah Wynslow were never charged or punished in any way, though many publicly bragged about their responsibility for the crime. The names of the individuals known to be involved are Gunnar West, Anderson Piekowski, Gene Norman, Ronald Bunch, Ed Schwartze, Peter Detry, and George and Ella Mae Schmidt. George Schmidt took over the property after the murder and sold it at a profit in 1959.
I checked the file. The original sign had started off the same way, but where the identifying names appeared in Genevieve’s sign, the original final line had read Today in Cherry Mill we welcome all as friends and visitors, and are glad to have learned from the past.
In the front of the shop, a woman was standing in the window flipping the closed sign to open. She was a collage of reds, candy apple lipstick, and hair the color of grenadine, her dress a faded burgundy and her skin freckled and sun-blushed pink. She waved.
“Welcome,” she said. “We’re open now if you have a sweet tooth.”
“It all looks wonderful,” I said, “but unfortunately today calls for caffeine before sugar and business before pleasure.”
“Business? Are you here with the young lady who came by earlier? The one who kicked up all the fuss a few months back?”
“What lady?” I asked, forcing a smile and arriving at the answer to my own question even before I heard her description of Genevieve.
* * *
—
Genevieve was sitting in the window of the coffee shop, reading the morning paper. She had let her hair grow out a bit since I had seen her last, and now it haloed her face in curls. She was as put together as ever; the heat that threatened to burn everyone else only seemed to make her glow. As though in solidarity with the sun, she wore a bright yellow dress. She put the paper down and raised her eyebrows when she saw me. I told Nick to wander and let me figure out Genevieve on my own. His plan seemed to be merely to walk up and down the block; as I waited for my coffee and then joined Genevieve at her table, I kept catching flashes of him passing the window.
“I heard you were coming,” Genevieve said.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I have some free time. My ex has Octavia for the month.”
“Why is this what you’re doing with your free time?”
“You may recall that I am out of a job of late. But as neither IPH nor academia holds a monopoly on the historical record, I’m not necessarily out of a profession. A little bird at project headquarters told me something interesting might be happening here, so I pitched a feature piece on it.”
“You’re a journalist now?”
“I’m a storyteller, in any medium. For all I don’t love about the West Coast, it’s lousy with TV people, one of whom thinks if I can create some buzz there might be a market for me yet. History Exposed with Genevieve Johnson.” Genevieve fanned out her hands and framed her camera-ready face. “So here I am. And here you are. Buzz buzz buzz. Have a coffee. It’s not bad, for Wisconsin.”
“Why would it be bad? They fly the same coffee beans here as everywhere else in the country,” I said.
“Wow. Already defensive of the good white people of the Upper Midwest. They’re going to feel so much better when you take my mean old sign down.”
“I’m not here to take your sign down because it makes people uncomfortable,” I said.
“Oh, nice. You decided to finally stand up for something after I was gone. Why are you here then?”
“Genie. This was my job before it was yours and for longer. Just let me do my job. And if you’re hitting up people at the office for gossip, next time get the whole story.”