Once, in an undersea kingdom, there lived an odd creature who wished to be human. She disguised her natural form, which was beautiful to some and monstrous to others, and travelled far from home. After years of dwelling on land, the creature became an expert in the ways of people, but her transformation came at a cost: she couldn’t speak. The humans thus remained unable to see themselves as clearly as she did, nor did they learn to see anyone else. As for the heroine, the Disney-fied story rewards her virtue by turning her into a “real” woman. But the traditional tale is harsher. The character is left to float above the ocean, belonging nowhere.
There’s a dark humor to reading “The Little Mermaid” as a passing narrative—that is, as a parable about a Black person who tries to pass as white. The instinct makes sense: passing stories—which include James Weldon Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” and Nella Larsen’s “Passing”—pose questions about who is human and who is not. In the late nineteenth century, these tales were the melodramatic concoctions of white as well as Black authors, and they tended to punish characters for suppressing their “true” natures. (Hence the “tragic mulatto.”) The dream of opportunity and safety was forgivable, but the deception wasn’t; or the ranking of races was correct, but the self-bettering impulse was presumptuous. Eventually, passing grew into a richer theme, one whose tropes—assumed identities, secret selves—evoked the depths of loneliness and belonging. Philip Roth knew this (“The Human Stain”), as did Danzy Senna (“Caucasia”) and Brit Bennett (“The Vanishing Half”). It is interesting, then, to consider the sort of narrator who might ironically compare herself to the little mermaid. Doing so reframes an old story to parody the passing genre; the analogy also announces, plainly, that the speaker feels like a freak.
Shifting versions of this speaker appear throughout “The Office of Historical Corrections,” an extraordinary new collection of fiction by Danielle Evans. The book, which follows the critically lauded “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,” from 2010, examines alienation and the phantasmagoria of racial performance—how certain interactions can seem so forced and strange that they might as well take place underwater. Lyssa, the protagonist of the first story, “Happily Ever After,” never liked the “Little Mermaid” movie, anyway. (She “knew a bad trade when she saw one,” Evans writes.) Lyssa works at a museum slash party venue built in the shape of the Titanic. Her white co-worker, dressed as a princess, entertains children above deck; Lyssa, for the sake of “historical accuracy,” stays below, running the gift shop. After a pop star rents the site to shoot a shipwreck-themed music video, the video’s director casts Lyssa as an extra, then invites her back to his hotel room. This potentially “bad trade” drives the plot, but the story’s real hazmat lies buried in the past: Lyssa’s mother is dead, from cancer, and Lyssa has been advised to undergo a preventative surgery, which she keeps putting off. Her delay owes to grief, anxiety about having children, and medical racism. (During her mom’s decline, Lyssa struggled to light on the precise qualities of face, dress, and tone that would secure for her family the same treatment that a white family would receive.) But Lyssa’s reluctance also has to do with a sense of herself as marked. As Evans writes, Lyssa “couldn’t remember walking around without suspecting that something inside of her wanted her dead. What future had there ever been but the imaginary?”
“Happily Ever After” possesses many of the watermarks of an Evans story. A youngish woman, usually of color, guards a wound that won’t heal—a mother lost to illness or, as in the book’s second tale, a sister shot by her husband. The protagonist is terse, isolated, with a fetish for self-sabotage that ranges from recreational to all-consuming. The backdrop is incongruously bright and fun, like a water park or a bachelorette party. Current events loom; there are references to rent prices in the Bay Area, melting ice caps, the attention economy. The American past also looms, and every horrific historical action has its equal and opposite tourist attraction—estranged relatives take a day trip to Alcatraz; a gentrifier bar called Dodge City trades on D.C.’s plague of gun violence. Evans evinces a special vigilance toward threats that are familiar, in the sense of both inherited and routine. To read her is to become aware of ambience, of the peculiar iridescence that short fiction can sometimes offer: the stories are infused with many things but not precisely “about” any of them.
It would be a mistake, for instance, to reduce the book to its sociopolitical observations. Still, the plots are seductively topical, as in the story “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” which documents the apology tour of a caddish “genius artist.” Have I mentioned how funny Evans can be? Here she is describing the man’s previous, unsuccessful attempts at making amends: “I do concede that I owe you an apology for the way that I phrased things,” he texts his “Short-Suffering Second Ex-wife.” “There was probably a kinder way to express my frustration with your unreasonable expectations than to say that you just didn’t understand why so many women I had history with were still in my life because you’d never known what it was like to be as successful as I am, and, as a woman, in order to understand it, you’d have to imagine what things would be like for you if you were beautiful.” Into my veins, as Twitter would have it. Yet the story, with its outrageous jokes, turns genuinely profound, an autopsy of good intentions that finally aimed too low. What kind of apology is possible, Evans asks, when you lack the empathy to fully grasp what you should be sorry for?
The question resurfaces in another story, “Boys Go to Jupiter,” which maps the fallout when a white college student, Claire, allows her summer boyfriend to photograph her in a Confederate flag bikini. The picture goes viral, and Claire, refusing to back down, seizes the chance to brand herself as a Southern “heritage” zealot. Evans is sharp on the days-after contents of Claire’s inbox: “Someone using the email thinks she is a cunt. Twenty-two different rednecks from around the country have sent her supportive pictures of their penises.” The story slyly suggests that white people practice their own forms of passing—earlier, Claire dismissed Lost Cause iconography as trashy—and it exposes, too, the silliness of using “likability” as a metric for fictional characters. Claire’s complexity renders her more legible, not less. Her mother, like Lyssa’s, has died of cancer, and she resents her Black best friend, Angela, whose mother is alive. One is reminded that bigotry is not sorcery, that it comes from somewhere—and yet, as Evans traces Claire’s hateful behavior back to grief, she falls pointedly silent on the subject of the campus’s Black students. We do not know, for instance, how Claire’s Black hallmate feels, sharing a dorm with her, or what it’s like to be a Black classmate watching the campus Libertarians defend Claire. This omission functions as provocation: it’s as if the reader, in allowing compassion for Claire, forfeits the right to know anything real about her Black peers. For Evans, one senses, this isn’t a “gotcha”—it’s a problem with no easy answers.
The last section features a novella, also called “The Office of Historical Corrections,” which symphonically unites the book’s themes. Cassandra is a historian at a made-up government agency, the Institute for Public History. For the most part, her brief—to root out instances of whitewashing and amnesia—has her wandering an assigned Zip Code in D.C., issuing friendly “corrections” to owners of bakeshops and the like. (“We’re a public service. Like 311!” she informs some cupcake vendors, before fact-checking their sign: Juneteenth does not celebrate the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.) But her bureaucratic veneer chips when she’s sent to Cherry Mill, Wisconsin, to investigate an arson and murder case from 1937. It turns out that the Black owner of the burnt building may have escaped the flames, aided by one of the perpetrator’s wives, a woman haunted by secrets. This is the historical scenery; on the apron stage of the personal, Cassie’s research collides with the crusade of Genevieve, a former colleague and childhood friend, who’s investigating the same case. The two women represent—maybe to the reader, but more so to each other—opposing ways of embodying Blackness. As a kid, Genevieve projected glossed perfection (debate team, impeccable manners) but years of twice-as-good-for-half-as-much have radicalized her, causing her to reject the I.P.H.’s conciliatory tone. Cassie, meanwhile, grew up with less pressure and more freedom. She defers to caution at work, and her boss occasionally deploys her, all dark skin and reassuring smiles, to defuse P.R. crises, including those sparked by Genevieve.
It’s not spoiling much to say that the twisting, turning novella finally drops the collection off back where it began: with a woman yearning to be treated as human. But Evans, reprising her fairy-tale motif, offers no cartoonish certainties. She regards her characters with real curiosity and edges their discoveries with real terror. A violent, far-right militia crops up, which reactivates questions of what monstrosity means, what beauty means, and where each can be found. I was moved, reading Evans’s stories, by a sudden, flooding feeling of familiarity. Here were themes from childhood picture books, problems that seemed native to the past, and yet they rushed back, louder than ever. Metaphors amount to their own form of passing, obscuring realities that can only hide for so long. Is it worth surrendering your voice to be safe? Conversely, is it worth sacrificing your life to be heard? Suppose that the creature weighing these things is a mermaid. Now suppose that she’s been human from the start.
