The Office of Historical Corrections(61)

“In 1937 African American shopkeeper Josiah Wynslow was believed to have been killed when a mob intending to keep Cherry Mill white burned down the original building while he was inside. In fact, he escaped with his life, though the circumstances of his escape remain unclear. 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. George Schmidt took over the property after the murder and sold it at a profit in 1959. Ella Mae Schmidt is believed to have been Josiah Wynslow’s biological sister, passing as white for so long that her own children and grandchildren never knew the truth of her connection to Josiah or their own ancestry.”



“Say it again,” said White Justice, cocking the gun.

“You heard me,” said Genevieve.

“I’m not a nigger,” said White Justice.

“Neither am I,” said Genevieve.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t know what I was waiting for to know that I could open them, and then I heard the clear crack of the gunshot. Rain, I wanted to think. Thunder. But I knew what I’d heard, and I kept my eyes closed. I pictured Genevieve, not now, but years ago, the last time I remembered seeing her through my own tears, the first time I remembered hearing a sound I thought was a gunshot. It hadn’t been a real one. Our high school was doing active shooter drills and an administrator had sprung for the too-authentic training module, and I had missed class the day they’d warned everyone to prepare. When the noise came over the loudspeakers I hid in a hall closet instead of going to the nearest assigned safe room and stayed there panicked for more than an hour, even after the next class bell rang and the hallways were full of clearly alive people and it started to dawn on me that it had only been the facsimile of the violence I’d been waiting for. I stayed in the closet until a teacher noticed I was missing, and Genie offered to look for me and walked the hall calling my name. Even once I left the closet, I couldn’t get it together to go to class, and so Genie had walked me to the girls’ room and let me cry it out, and when I finally finished she asked, “Are you done now?”

“I didn’t know it was fake at first,” I said. “You always think when something like that happens you’re going to be the bravest version of yourself. I thought I was ready, and I wouldn’t be terrified.”

“Oh, Cassie,” Genie said. “No, you didn’t.”





Acknowledgments


It would take another book to properly express gratitude for everyone who has made me feel like a part of their community, lucky to be a writer, lucky to be a reader in this moment, and able to write these stories.

Thank you to my agent, Ayesha Pande, a friend and advocate whose faith in my work kept me working. Thank you to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whose patience let this be the book it needed to be, and to Sarah, Alison Fairbrother, and Delia Taylor for being smart and careful readers whose feedback and conversation elevated the writing and made the work of revision a pleasure. Thank you to everyone at Riverhead for taking such good care of my first book, being so supportive of this one, and not yelling at me when I said I was writing stories and a novella.

Thank you to Yaddo, Ragdale, and the Ucross Foundation for residency space; thank you to PEN America, the National Book Foundation, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Paterson Fiction Prize, the Nellie McKay Fellowship at UW?Madison, and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support of my career; thank you to the Literature Department at American University, the Creative Writing Program at UW?Madison, and The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University for providing community and writing time. Thank you to the colleagues in all three places whose work provided inspiration and whose kindness made three different cities feel like home.

Most of these stories were initially published in literary magazines. Thank you to American Short Fiction, Barrelhouse, Callaloo, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Medium, and The Sewanee Review for giving them homes, and thank you to the editors who solicited or selected them and whose early input made the stories stronger: Zinzi Clemmons, Nate Brown, Adeena Reitberger, Roxane Gay, Adam Ross, and Tom McAllister. Thank you to Heidi Pitlor, Meg Wolitzer, and Roxane Gay for honoring two of these stories with inclusion in Best American Short Stories. Thank you to Susannah Tahk and Liz Wyckoff for reading the earliest versions of several of the stories, to Liz again for fielding some Wisconsin records questions for the novella, and to my colleague Jean McGarry for her feedback on a later pass of the book.

For being my community during the years I needed it most, thank you to Liz, Susannah, Brigitte Fielder, Jonathan Senchyne, Jennine Crucet, Rachel Louise Snyder, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Brandon Dorman, Erin Gamble, Lily Wong, Melinda Moustakis, Nate and Thea Brown, Adeena Reitberger, Sara Ortiz, Nandini Pandey, Alice Mandell, Charles Huff, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Elena Diamond, Patrice Hutton, Shangrila Willy, Jeanne Elone, Miriam Aguila, Afua Bruce, Jordan Zweck, Colin Gillis, and Tia Blassingame. Thank you to my family, especially Georgette Dawn Bedoe Brown and, as ever, my father, Walter Evans, for their love and support.

This book is, among many other things, about grief and loss, and about women unwilling to diminish their desires to live full and complex lives. It is indebted to many people who have openly shared their griefs and their joys with me, but was also shaped by my own losses during the years I was writing it. I am thankful for my memories of my aunts Carolyn Evans (1949?2016) and Susie Fillyow (1956?2017), without whom there is less warmth and laughter in the world. Thank you to Beth Ausbrooks (1930?2017), whose life was an example in deciding what was possible instead of letting the world decide it for her.