The Office of Historical Corrections(58)

“Like I was saying yesterday,” Susan said, “I’m sorry about my nephew, but we can’t tell you why he’s causing trouble. The downtown association had an emergency meeting yesterday and we’ll get the mess cleaned up. But my grandmother doesn’t know where Chase is any more than I do.”

“He hasn’t called in months,” said Mrs. Varner.

“We came,” I said gently, “to ask a question about you. About your mother, actually, if that’s all right.”

Mrs. Varner straightened up.

“You’ll find my mother’s not here to answer for herself. When they put her name on that sign I didn’t fuss, or pretend that wasn’t her in the picture, but if you came to ask me to speak ill of the dead, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“I put her name on the sign,” said Genevieve.

“Well then I guess you know what you think of her. I can’t imagine what you came here to ask me.”

“How much do you know about your mother before she came to Cherry Mill?” I asked.

“As much as anyone knows about their mother before she was a mother, I suppose. The stories I was told. She had a beautiful laugh and sang like a bird, but she wasn’t a big talker. She was in Chicago and working the counter of a flower shop when she met my father. It was love at first sight. My father walked in for a bouquet for the poor girl he was dating at the time and walked out with a wife. She came here with him and never looked back, and they were in love until they died a month apart, and they probably still are in the hereafter if it allows that sort of thing.”

“That’s a lovely story,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” said Mrs. Varner.

“It sounds a little bit like the story I heard about this woman,” I said, sliding the picture of Minerva to Susan and Mrs. Varner. “She worked at a flower shop too, but on the south side. When it closed, she disappeared, and eventually wound up in Wisconsin, where no one ever heard from her again. But say she didn’t vanish into thin air. Say your mother wasn’t originally from Chicago, but from Mississippi, say she came up on the train, in the colored car, where they would have made her stay because beige reads differently in Mississippi, and on the south side, than it does in a place where there wasn’t enough mixing to know what mixed looks like. Say when that south side flower shop closed up, she took herself to a neighborhood where the florists could survive the decade, one where they didn’t know what she was, and when she left that neighborhood she left with a man who brought her right here. Then say her big brother followed her. He did some work, not all of it legal, and came into some money, and bought a store for cheap, on account of it was the Depression and the land he wanted was way outside of Milwaukee and dirt cheap because the owner was trying to keep afloat. Maybe the owner thought it would all be a laugh because that Black man could give his last penny to have his name on the deed and they’d still never let him keep it, and maybe her brother should have known that, but wanted to think he could keep an eye on his sister without blowing her cover. Instead the building ends up burning down while the whole town thinks he’s inside of it, and while no one seemed to care about anything but getting the property, which, coincidentally, your father did, there was someone who loved the man enough to send an obituary notice down to the paper, to mourn him or to cover for him so the white men wouldn’t keep looking. It would make sense if that person was his sister, except a year later, with the place still a heap of rubble, there was his same sister in a photograph, laughing about having helped set the fire.”

Mrs. Varner tilted back in what I realized was a rocking chair, her face impassive, and kept rocking for just long enough that I wondered if she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard me, if, in fact, she’d been following at all. A tendril of her hair had flattened to her forehead in the heat, even with the shade of the porch.

“That’s certainly a story,” she said finally.

“Is this not your mother in the picture then?” I asked, pointing again to Minerva.

“There’s a resemblance. But it’s not a very good photo.”

“She never told you anything other than that she was from Chicago?”

“What my mother told me and what I need to tell you are not the same question. If that was my mother, she would have given up everything she had to have this life and give it to me. If that was my mother, the only reason she would have ever told me anything about any of it would have been as a warning.”

“We believe this is your mother,” Genevieve said.

“I don’t believe you can prove it. And if you could, if that man was her brother and he didn’t burn up with the building, someone must have woken him up in the middle of the night and told him to go. Someone must have cared that much, at least. If everyone thought he was dead, was she supposed to up and die too?”

“Is that what she told you, or what you told yourself?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Did you ever tell your grandson about any of this?”

“What would it matter? The thing about one drop of blood? It’s only you people who believe in it now.”



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The first time I was ever in a bar, I was with Genie. We were in high school, and not friends, exactly, but we knew the rules that applied to most of our classmates didn’t apply to us. By high school we had reached a kind of détente during school hours—I was writing mediocre poems and serving as class vice president, and Genie was on dance team and Model UN and captain of debate club. We each stayed out of the other’s territory. We both had boyfriends at high schools that were not ours, and when we went to what we thought of as real parties, the ones where nearly everyone was Black, we went with the boyfriends and didn’t consult each other, but when we went to school parties, we went as a pair. We blamed arriving at parties or clubs or shows together on our parents’ insistence that we keep an eye on each other in situations that could go badly, but in reality, both sets of parents believed their own daughter to be the sensible one; it was the two of us who our buddy system made feel safer.