“I read Ms. Ballantine’s interview in the Defender. Do you know what happened to her in the fifties? The reporter asked if she were bitter-was that because of the U of C firing her?”

The archivist turned reflexively to the article, but didn’t look at it. “Mr. Whitby was guessing she’d been blacklisted, but I don’t think he’d found any evidence to confirm that. She was never called to testify before Congress, and except for that one letter, I’m sure you saw the one she wrote when she was so angry about Congress canceling the Theater Project, she never discussed Communism.”

“What about something called `the Committee’? You know the one I mean? Could that have been considered a subversive group?”

He flipped through the plastic sleeves until he found the references, but he couldn’t shed any light on them. “I know Mr. Whitby wrote for her file under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s like so many of those files: most of what you want to know is inked out so you can’t read it. Since September 11, they’ve made it harder to find out what records they’re keeping on the citizens. It’s kind of frustrating, our own government spying on us, then not letting us see what they claim we’ve been up to.”

When I asked if there were other Ballantine papers anywhere-a diary, or financial records, Reed shook his head again. “If there are, they’re not in a public archive. Her estate didn’t amount to much, and even though she was highly respected in the black community, no one had the kind of

money to do preservation or restoration in her home-it had to be sold to pay her debts. If there was some kind of trove of documents, I’m thinking they’re in the CID landfill by now.”

Reed paused to answer a question from a woman who’d been waiting for several minutes, then turned back to me. “Mr. Whitby did go through her old house. After she died, the bank or whoever bought it cut it into a bunch of little apartments, but Mr. Whitby hoped something might have been left in a basement or crawl space.”

“Did he find anything?”

Reed slowly shook his head. “That may have been why he called me, maybe a week or ten days ago. I wasn’t in and he left a message for me. I never did reach him when I tried calling back, but that could have been it-he knew I shared his interest in Kylie. If he’d found some papers, well, he would have wanted to show them to me.”

Another patron was trying to get the archivist’s attention. I turned to leave, feeling frustrated at how little information I was able to collect.

As I walked away from his desk, Reed called out to me, “Let me know what you find out about Mr. Whitby. If you get to the truth, it may not make the evening news, you know”

A sad commentary. Kylie Ballantine’s life should have been seen on stage, under spotlights, but she’d died in the wings, and now Gideon Reed was afraid her lone champion was going to vanish into the same shadows.