“Steel plows?” I repeated, my attention diverted. “They existed before the Civil War?”
She smiled primly. “John Deere invented the steel plow in 1830. In 1847 he set up his first major plant and retail store here in Illinois.”
“So the Birnbaums were already an economic power in 1858.”
“I don’t think so. I think it was the Civil War that made the family fortune, but the Ajax archives didn’t include a lot of specifics—I was guessing from the list of assets being insured. The Birnbaum plows were only a small part of the ship’s cargo.”
“In your opinion, who could have told Durham about Birnbaum’s plow shipment?”
“Is this a subtle way to get me to confess?”
She could have asked the question in a humorous vein—but she didn’t. I made an effort not to lose my own temper in return. “I’m open to all possibilities, but I have to consider the available facts. You had access to the archives. Perhaps you shared the data with Durham. But if you didn’t, perhaps you have some ideas on who did.”
“So you did come here to accuse me.” She set her jaw in an uncompromising line.
I sank my face into my hands, suddenly tired of the matter. “I came here hoping to get better information than I have. But let it be. I have an interview with Channel Thirteen to discuss the whole sorry business; I need to go home to change.”
She tightened her lips. “Do you plan to accuse me on air?”
“I actually didn’t come here to accuse you of anything at all, but you’re so suspicious of me and my motives that I can’t imagine you’d believe any assurances I gave you. I came here hoping that a trained observer like you would have seen something that would give me a new way to think about what’s going on.”
She looked at me uncertainly. “If I told you I didn’t give Durham the files, would you believe me?”
I spread my hands. “Try me.”
She took a breath, then spoke rapidly, looking at the books over her computer. “I happen not to support Mr. Durham’s ideas. I am fully cognizant of the racial injustices that still exist in this country. I have researched and written about black economic and commercial history, so I am more familiar with the history of these injustices than most: they run deep, and they run wide. I took the job of writing that Ajax history, for instance, because I’m having a hard time getting academic history or economics programs to pay attention to me, outside of African-American studies, which are too often marginalized for me to find interesting. I need to earn something while I’m job-hunting. Also, the Ajax archives will make an interesting monograph. But I don’t believe in focusing on African-Americans as victims: it makes us seem pitiable to white America, and as long as we are pitiable we will not be respected.” She flushed, as if embarrassed to reveal her beliefs to a stranger.
I thought of Lotty’s angry vehemence with Max on the subject of Jews as victims. I nodded slowly and told Blount that I could believe her.
“Besides,” she added, her color still deepened, “it would seem immoral to me to make the Ajax files available to an outsider, when they had trusted me with their private documents.”
“Since you didn’t feed inside Ajax information to the alderman, can you think who might have?”
She shook her head. “It’s such a big company. And the files aren’t exactly secret, at least they weren’t when I was doing my research. They keep all of the old material in their company library, in boxes. Hundreds of boxes, as a matter of fact. Recent material they guarded carefully, but the first hundred years—it was more a question of having the patience to wade through it than any particular difficulty gaining access to it. Although you do have to ask the librarian to see it—still, anyone who wanted to study those papers could probably get around that difficulty.”
“So it might be an employee, someone with a grudge, or someone who could be bribed? Or perhaps a zealous member of Alderman Durham’s organization?”
“Any or all of those could be reasonable possibilities, but I have no names to put forward. Still, thirty-seven hundred people of color hold low-level clerical or manual-laboring positions in the company. They are underpaid, underrepresented in supervisory positions, and often are treated to overt racial slurs. Any of them could become angry enough to undertake an act of passive sabotage.”
I stood up, wondering if someone in the Sommers extended family was among the low-level clerks at Ajax. I thanked Amy Blount for being willing to talk to me and left her one of my cards, in case anything else occurred to her. As she walked me to the door I stopped to admire the picture of the squatting woman. Her head was bent over the basket in front of her; you didn’t see her face.
“It’s by Lois Mailou Jones,” Ms. Blount said. “She also refused to be a victim.”
XIV