The Office of Historical Corrections(57)
I arrived before Genevieve and waited for her in a plastic booth. It was the hour of the day when the diner was mostly empty except for truckers, who ate silently and alone. I drank my coffee and hoped for the clarity of Genevieve telling me my eyes were bad and my deductive skills were bullshit, but when she arrived and slid into the booth across from me, and I showed her the two pictures side by side, Genevieve caught on faster than I had.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “White Justice isn’t white?”
“You want to try telling him that?”
“Sure. Let’s find him and slap on a correction sticker citing the one drop rule. Problem solved.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections finds that you are in fact Blacker than the Ace of Spades.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections regrets to inform you that you are so Black you got marked absent in night school.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections has concluded that you are so Black your credit score dropped one hundred points as soon as the bank saw you in person.”
“The Office of Historical Corrections wants you to know that you are so Black the apartment you went to see was coincidentally just rented right before you got there.”
“I like it when we’re friends,” said Genevieve.
“You could have fooled me,” I said.
“You called me,” said Genevieve.
* * *
—
I followed Genevieve’s car back to Cherry Mill. We had decided to start with Susan, our only direct line to Ella Mae, but didn’t have a plan beyond that. It was only because there was no plan that there was a “we.” We both parked in the same downtown lot as the day before, and I looked in the direction of the sign and the graffiti, but it had all been covered with a white tarp that was affixed to the side of the building, I supposed until it could be powerwashed or muraled over. It covered everything: White Justice’s artwork, but also the original sign. The coffee shop was just opening for the day, only Susan and two customers inside, and the homey haphazard upholstered chairs and twee memorabilia marking the walls made me feel more on edge. Susan greeted us warmly, but her face pursed when I asked if it would be possible for us to speak to her mother.
“If this is about my nephew, I promise you we haven’t heard from him,” said Susan.
“It’s not about the graffiti,” I said. “We’d like to talk to her about your grandmother.”
“My mother gets tired easy,” Susan said. She was reluctant to say anything further, but when we said politely that we’d just look up the address and go ourselves instead of troubling her, she agreed to bring us over if we could wait an hour for the shop’s other employee to show up. I ordered muffins because I felt irrationally guilty about being in the shop without buying anything, and too jumpy for a second cup of coffee. For an hour, Genevieve and I sat together in the cozy chairs and waited.
“And you thought I didn’t have a story,” she said.
“We don’t even know what the story is,” I said.
I was not looking forward to the rest of the day, but Genevieve, I could see, was excited about it. It was one of the differences between us that had been true even when she was Genie—she liked talking to people more than I did. She had the nerves for the uncomfortable conversations I only forced myself to have in the interest of the larger purpose. In grad school, though I wasn’t proud of it, I’d sometimes mocked Genie’s areas of focus, joked to our peers that she’d gotten as far from studying Blackness as she could. I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough. But I was also jealous because Genie’s primary sources were long dead, discoverable only through paper trails. Mine I often had to track down and ask to speak to me about the worst days of their lives, a task I categorically knew that Genie would have been better at.
* * *
—
Susan drove us a few miles to her childhood home, which was sturdy and wood framed and had been in the family for generations. Abigail still lived there, as her parents had before her and her father’s parents had before that. Owen Varner, Abigail’s husband, had died a decade earlier, but the inside furniture tended toward plaid and the decor toward hunting trophies, and though the animals he’d mounted must have been dead for more years than he had, their glassy-eyed awe made them seem still afraid. In the living room, there was a portrait of a younger Abigail and Owen, and Abigail looked enough like her mother that I had to look twice to be sure the portrait was of her and not her parents. The sunporch where Susan led us was lighter than the living room, its furniture fraying wicker. Susan offered lemonade, and while we waited for her to bring it I looked up, the peeling paint on the porch roof showing glimmers of blue and green beneath its current coat of white, and tried to remember whether painting your porch haint blue was a Black tradition or just a southern one. Susan returned with a pitcher of lemonade and then left and came back again with her mother on her arm. Abigail Varner was eighty-eight years old, and though she walked slowly and seemed to need Susan to steady her, her voice was sharp and clear when she greeted us, and her face could have passed for two decades younger.