The Office of Historical Corrections(54)
After the letters, the family archive box was a relief. I had already seen Josiah’s Illinois death certificate, but Ms. Adelaide showed me the archaic family Bible, which she, as his oldest living child, was now the keeper of. His birth and death had been recorded along with everyone else’s. He had been the second child of four—an older brother who died young, a younger brother who had lived to be ninety, and a sister who had no recorded year of death. I asked if I could see a photograph of Josiah; Anthony brought me one from the wall, June brought me an album, and Ms. Adelaide rummaged through the box until she found the one she was looking for. In the photo from the wall, Josiah was an older man, but he had the same face he did in the photo I had seen in the file.
In the album, June pointed out for me a dozen pictures of him, and I watched him come back from the death he’d been assigned in 1937 and marry, grin lovestruck at his wife, wear the uniform of the plant he’d worked at, hold his babies on his lap, cut up dancing at their weddings and graduations, grow old. It was the photo Adelaide had pulled from the box, though, that made me certain I could close the file. The picture had been taken at the Chicago Savoy, late in the 1920s judging by the fashion and the posters in the background. Josiah had his arm around a cream-colored woman with roller-set hair, and they both wore grins and roller skates, both looked delighted and post-dance breathless. I’d seen that smile—literally, I’d seen the same smile in the photograph in his obituary, the same light suit and dark shirt and patterned tie, the same hat jauntily askew on his head. Our file had been missing the woman, and all the evidence of the decades he had yet to come, but I had the same man.
“We’ll get this cleared up for you,” I said after I’d scanned the photo with my phone. “Probably what will happen is the sign will come down, and hopefully that will keep that man from bothering you anymore anyway, if the police don’t follow up.”
“Don’t hold your breath on them,” said June.
“Can’t they just fix the sign to say they burned his place down and he escaped?” asked Anthony. “They still stole.”
“They did,” I said. “But our sign was just a correction of the original sign. We’ve had a hard time with cities even wanting to memorialize the dead. I don’t see much chance of getting anyplace to make a note of every piece of land or property that was stolen. And we can only correct what’s already there to be fixed. I’m sorry.”
“At least he made it out of there for us to be here,” said June.
“Can I ask if you know what he was doing here in the first place? In Wisconsin?” I asked. “Not a lot of Black people or work for Black people here in the middle of the Depression. Why did he leave Chicago?”
Ms. Adelaide took a sip of her tea and sat back in her chair. Instinctively, I leaned forward to hear her.
“Of course, I wasn’t around back then. And he didn’t talk about it much. But Ma’dear did sometimes. She had four children. Three boys, including Daddy, and Minerva in the middle, but Minerva was always treated like the baby girl. That’s her in the picture with Daddy. He came out to Wisconsin looking for her.”
Although my official assignment was finished, clean enough that I thought my answers would satisfy even Genevieve, I couldn’t help myself. Curiosity was an occupational hazard. I asked how it was Minerva had come to need finding. According to Ms. Adelaide, Minerva had been born restless, which, in her defense, being born a Black woman in Mississippi in 1910 might make a person. The whole family—Josiah, Minerva, their parents, and their two brothers—had left rural sharecropping and gone to Jackson after the first wave of great migrators made room for them to find work in the city. It was supposed to be the oldest brother, Elijah, who first left Mississippi for Chicago to test the waters and get a job that would send home train fare for the rest of the family to come up, but when he’d almost saved the money to go, Minerva, who was sixteen then, stole it from the coffee can under the floorboards and added her own paltry savings. It was enough to get her out of town. “Too big for her britches and too big for a small town,” Ms. Adelaide put it. Minerva had been reading The Defender and was certain that in Chicago, fame and fortune awaited her and she could send for everyone else sooner than Elijah would. By the time she realized the Chicago that greeted her was already overrun with buxom light-skinned country girls who had pretty faces and decent voices and thought they could model or sing, and no one had been waiting for her in particular, she was already there and didn’t have train fare home.
After nearly a year as a boardinghouse maid, where Minerva found herself terrible at cleaning and in constant need of the lady of the house’s interventions to keep boarders from making passes at her, she got her bearings. With the recommendation of the landlady, who found her cleaning subpar, but appreciated what she could do with flowers and decor, Minerva got a job as the apprentice florist at a Black-owned shop that got most of its work from being partnered with one of the neighborhood’s Black funeral homes. She was pretty and charming enough to upsell grieving families, and passing contact with the dead and grieving didn’t make her squeamish, so she was good at the work. The family who owned the shop treated her well, kept her busy, and paid her a decent wage.
Elijah broke his leg the next farming season and never did leave Mississippi, where he married and started a family, so it was Josiah who came up a few years later. When he came to Chicago in 1928, it was Minerva who taught him to navigate the city. It was her beside him in the photograph I had seen, the little sister who, even grown, brought out the laughter in him. The photo must have been from the last of the good years, because by the ’30s there was no more Savoy money, no more Brownie camera or anything that could be sold for cash, and no work for Joe—he had a city name now, but no city job anymore. Minerva rode it out OK for a while, because even if funerals and flower arrangements got smaller, people didn’t die any less often because they were poorer, and the death industry seemed Depression-proof. But she didn’t have enough for two people to live on, and Joe followed the promise of work from recruiter to recruiter, and city to city for a few years, during which he blamed his not hearing from Minerva on his lack of a permanent address. By the time he resettled in Chicago, three years later, the florist had gone under and Minerva was gone, and no one could say where.