The Office of Historical Corrections(55)

“She just disappeared?” I asked.

“For a while she did,” said Ms. Adelaide. “Some people said she’d gone back to cleaning houses, and some people said they’d seen her making time with some white man, but he wasn’t around either by the time Daddy got back to town. When my grandparents finally came up to Chicago, they had a letter she sent home to Mississippi, saying she was doing all right. It was years old at that point, but it was the last anyone had heard from her, so when Daddy saw the postmark was from Wisconsin, he at least had an idea of where to go after her.”

“Did he find her?”

“Not the way he told it, but I don’t think Ma’dear ever believed that. Minerva never came back anyway. Back then I suppose a white man could have done anything with a Black girl once he got tired of her. But the way Ma’dear talked about Minerva, seemed she’d have just as likely killed that man as let him put a hand on her. Always had her eyes on something bigger. You know the type. Couldn’t stand the thought of just being a regular Black girl and having to do like everybody else. Ma’dear always figured my daddy found her and she told him she didn’t want to be found, that she would rather be disgraced or come to a bad end than come back home.”

I looked more closely at the woman in the photograph. In the picture she was barely more than a teenager. Her mouth was open in a laugh, but her eyes were steel. It was unclear who was wobbly on their skates, but in the picture she and Joe were hanging on to one another like they were each the only thing keeping the other person upright.

“You see?” said Ms. Adelaide. “You can see the trouble in her. Like I said. You know the type.”



* * *



? ? ?

I left the Robinsons with an anticlimactic sense that my job was both done and forever undoable, a simple matter of reconciling the record books and an impossible matter of making any kind of actual repair. I had three messages from Genevieve, one telling me that she’d heard more Cherry Mill gossip than she cared to but knew nothing about the current whereabouts of White Justice, another telling me she was safely in her B & B for the night and I could find her there if I wanted to tell her what I’d found, and a final message in which she essentially repeated the second message, but with a desperation that sounded disorientingly unlike her. “Come on, Cassie,” she said. “Call if you find something out. I need this.” I had one message from Nick, who had reservations at a tiny place where he was on a first-name basis with the owner, asking if I’d meet him there for dinner, and one message from Daniel, who I called back right away. He was concerned, and we picked up the conversation as though we were not fighting. I summarized my trip so far, being honest enough to say that Nick had come with me to Cherry Mill, but not volunteering where I’d slept. I told him about Genevieve, and the graffiti, and the Robinsons, and my nagging question: Who had taken the time to write to Wisconsin’s struggling Black paper and report that Josiah was dead, and beloved, when his family knew he was very much alive?

“Maybe he wrote it himself?” I thought out loud. “To prove his own death and buy himself time to start over? To leave a record of what happened?”

“The man was running out of town and stopped long enough to write his own obituary? And call himself ‘beloved’? He doesn’t sound like a man with more ego than sense.”

“Give me a better idea then,” I said.

“What about the sister?”

“What about her? No one knows where she was.”

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t know where he was.”

“So what happened to her?”

“Cassie. What happens to Black people when they don’t want to be Black anymore?”

The answer felt obvious now. If you wanted to hide Blackness from white people, you went where they would least suspect it. At the turn of the twentieth century, a Black Milwaukee lawyer claimed offhand that hundreds of the white people in Milwaukee were actually Black people passing. There was nine-to-five passing for employment, and there was sometimes passing, and then there was the kind you disappeared into, the kind you might not come back from. You know the type, I thought. You know the type. A second answer to the question nagged at me. I felt confident Daniel was right and queasy about the possibility that I might also be. I got off the phone before I could say it out loud and make it real. I told Daniel I had to call Genevieve, but instead I took a nap and a shower. I dressed with the intention of having dinner alone at the hotel bar, but when I got to the lobby I felt daunted by my own suspicions, and annoyed by the dinging of my phone, and so I muted it and kept walking to the parking lot, where I got into my car and drove to meet Nick, as I supposed he’d known I would.

Outside, the restaurant was an inconspicuous old farmhouse with a chalkboard sign, but inside it had been redone, rustic, and chicly minimalist. The tables were unfinished wood and the chairs were modernist and metal. The ceiling beams were exposed and the wood flooring was salvaged, but the art on the wall was blocky and bright. Schubert piped in from invisible speakers and the menu was the genre of farm-to-table where the waiter introduced meat and produce by county of origin. I sulked through two glasses of good wine before we were done with appetizers.

“Smile,” said Nick. “You’re at the best hidden gem in Wisconsin.”

“I’m pretty sure the best hidden gem in Wisconsin has cheese curds and three-dollar spotted cow.”