The Other Black Girl Read online

  The word “extracurricular” had hit Nella hard and fast in the eye, like a piece of shrapnel. The company basketball team, the paper-making club—those were extracurriculars. Her endeavors to develop a diversity committee were not. But she’d smiled and said thank you to her boss, who’d started working at Wagner years before Nella was even born, and tucked this piece of information into her back pocket for safekeeping. That was where she believed any dreams of letting her Black Girl Flag fly free would have to remain.

  But now the smell of Brown Buttah was hitting her nose again, and this time, there were telltale sounds: First, Maisy’s practiced joke about Wagner’s zany floor plan (“It makes about as much sense as the science in Back to the Future”); then, a laugh—deep, a bit husky around the edges, but still cocoa butter smooth at its core. Genuine, Nella could tell, as brief as it was.

  “… impossible. I swear, once you find where one person sits, you’ll never find them a second time!” Maisy cackled again, her voice growing louder as she led her companion closer to her office.

  Realizing that they would have to walk by her own cube to get there, Nella looked up. Through the small crack in her partition, she spotted the swath of dark locs, the flash of a brown hand.

  There was another Black person on her floor. And given Maisy’s spiel, this Black person was here for an interview.

  Which meant in the next few weeks, a Black person could quite possibly be sitting in the cube directly across from Nella. Breathing the same air. Helping her fend off all the Sophies of the Wagner office.

  Nella wanted to put a victorious fist in the air, 1968 Olympics–style. Instead, she made a mental note to text Malaika this latest Wagner update the earliest chance she got.

  “I hope your trip wasn’t too long,” Maisy was saying. “You took the train from Harlem, right?”

  “Actually, I’m living in Clinton Hill right now,” the Black girl responded, “but I was born and raised on One Thirty-Fifth and ACP for a while.”

  Nella sat up straighter. The girl’s words, which sounded warmer and huskier than the laugh that had fallen easily from her mouth, evoked a sense of Harlem cool that Nella had always wished she possessed. She also noted—with reverence and not a little bit of envy—how confident the girl sounded, especially when Nella recalled her own anxiety-inducing interview with Vera.

  The footsteps were only inches away now. Nella realized she’d be able to get a good glimpse at the newcomer if she slid over to the far right of her cube, so she did exactly that, pretending to leaf through the manuscript Vera was waiting on while keeping one eye trained on the strip of hallway that led to Maisy’s office. Almost instantly, Maisy and her prospective dreadlocked assistant made their way into her periphery, and the full picture came into view.

  The girl had a wide, symmetrical face, and two almond-colored eyes perfectly spaced between a Lena Horne nose and a generous forehead. Her skin was a shade or two darker than Nella’s chestnut complexion, falling somewhere between hickory and umber. And her locs—every one as thick as a bubble-tea straw and longer than her arms—started out as a deep brown, then turned honey-blonde as they continued past her ears. She’d gathered a bunch and piled them on top of her head in a bun; the locs that hadn’t made it hung loosely around the nape of her neck.

  And then there was the girl’s pantsuit: a smart-looking ensemble composed of a single-button marigold jacket and a matching pair of oversized slacks that hit a couple of inches above the ankle. Below that, a pair of red patent leather high-heeled ankle boots that Nella would have broken her neck just trying to get into.

  It was all very Erykah-meets-Issa, another detail Nella was filing away for Malaika, when she heard Maisy ask the girl to explain what “ACP” meant. And it was a good thing she had, because Nella hadn’t known, either.

  “Oh, sorry—that’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard,” the girl said, “but that’s kind of a mouthful.”

  “Oh! Of course. A mouthful indeed. Harlem is such a great neighborhood. Its history is just so rich. Wagner held an event at the Schomburg earlier this year—February I think it was—for one of our authors. It was very well received.”

  Nella fought back a snort. Maisy hadn’t attended this aforementioned event; what’s more, Nella was willing to bet her middle name that the Museum of Natural History was as far north as Maisy had ever traveled in Manhattan. Maisy was a kind enough woman—she made bathroom small talk as well as the next senior-level employee—but she was fairly limited in her sense of what “the city” entailed. Just the mention of Williamsburg, despite its Apple Store, Whole Foods, and devastating selection of designer boutiques, caused Maisy to recoil as though someone had just asked to see the inside of her vagina. Surely this dreadlocked girl could sense that Maisy had no true sense of Harlem’s “culture.”

  Nella wished she could see the look on the Black girl’s face, but they’d already started to enter Maisy’s office, so she had to settle for a chuckle in its place. It was subtle, but in the milliseconds that passed before Maisy shut her door, Nella was able to detect amusement at the end of that chuckle—an exasperated kind of amusement that asked, without asking, You don’t spend time with Black people often, do you?

  Nella crossed her fingers. The girl probably didn’t need it, but she wished her luck, anyway.

  2

  August 6, 2018

  Nella cleared her throat and ran her left thumb down the edge of the manuscript, then across its bottom. She knew that she might cut herself deep enough to bleed if she moved her finger any faster, but she also knew that with this risk came the possibility of a reward—an excuse to flee and win a few precious minutes of stall time—and such a possibility was tempting.

  “Well?” Vera placed both elbows on her desk and craned her head forward, too, a tic that justified her biweekly appointments with her chiropractor. “Tell me what you thought about it.”

  “Well… there’s a lot to talk about. Where do I begin?”

  It was a question Nella had spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to answer. There was no way she could begin with the truth: that it had been difficult for her to finish Needles and Pins without stomping across the kitchen floor in her socked feet, opening a window, and throwing the pages out onto Fourth Avenue so they could be chomped into bits by oncoming traffic. That at around midnight, she’d taken a break to jot down a list of all of the things she’d hated about it, then torn the list up before feeding the pieces of paper to a Yankee candle. How she’d taken a ten-second video of the burned bits and sent it to Malaika, who texted back, in all caps, GREAT. NOW GO TO BED, WEIRDO.

  Nella might have deserved this scolding a tiny bit. The book wasn’t altogether terrible. It did a nice job conveying the bleakness of the countrywide opioid epidemic, and it contained a few particularly moving scenes rife with moving dialogue. A family of ten finally confronted long-buried secrets; a baby escaped a precarious situation unscathed. The book’s heart appeared to be in the right place.

  It was just that one of its characters was not: Shartricia Daniels.

  Nella would never be able to confirm it, but she sensed that Colin Franklin’s first draft had been written exclusively about frustrated white characters living frustratingly white lives in a frustratingly white suburban town. After reading this draft, someone—a friend or an agent or maybe even Vera herself—must’ve suggested he throw some color in there.

  Now, Nella was no fool. She understood that characters of color were en vogue, as was maintaining vigilance when it came to calling out anything that lacked proper representation. Nella wasn’t the one doing the calling out, but she closely monitored social media so she could support whoever did. She read think pieces by day and retweeted that the Oscars were indeed too white by night, and following the infamous Black-boy-in-a-monkey-hoodie incident, she took a six-month-long break from shopping at H&M—a big deal for someone who loved buying cheap basics in the summertime. She could see the common thread of perceived subhumanity tha
t ran between the cultural faux pas of major corporations and the continuous police killings of Black people.

  And of course, she wasn’t alone. She could always count on the Internet to cry foul on the latest trend. Perhaps the loudest voice of all was Jesse Watson, a nationally known, outspoken blacktivist whom Nella and Malaika and over a million other people followed on YouTube. The mere mention of his name, which rested quite comfortably on the more extreme side of the social activism spectrum, often tinted dinner table atmospheres faster than Cheetos-stained fingertips, and his supercharged manner of speaking suggested that this was exactly what he wanted.

  Sometimes, Nella felt Jesse went just a tad too far in his YouTube videos, like the time he made a ninety-minute video on why all Black people should abandon CP Time. But in other instances, he made so much sense that it hurt, like his post on why “well-meaning white folks” were sometimes far worse than white folks who wore their racist hearts on their sleeves. So, as Nella considered why she distrusted Needles and Pins so much, she also considered what Jesse had said about white people who went out of their way to present “diversity”: “With heightened awareness of cultural sensitivity comes great responsibility. If we’re not careful, ‘diversity’ might become an item people start checking off a list and nothing more—a shallow, shadowy thing with but one dimension.”

  Shartricia was less than one-dimensional. She came off flatter than the pages she appeared on. Her white male creator had rendered her nineteen and pregnant with her fifth child, with a baby daddy who was either a man named LaDarnell or a man named DeMontraine (Shartricia could not confirm which because both men had fled town as soon as they’d heard). She cussed and moaned in just about all of her scenes, isolating herself from the reader just as much as she isolated herself from her family and non-opioid-addicted friends (of which she had few). Then, there was the kicker: Her name, “Shartricia,” was her uneducated crack addict mother’s attempt to honor the color of the bright green dress she’d been wearing at the club when her water broke.

  Okay, so maybe Nella had found this last detail both vexing and endearing. But everything else about Shartricia’s character felt icky—especially her voice, which read as a cross between that of a freed slave and a Tyler Perry character down on her luck. Still, even with all these thoughts swirling in her head, Nella didn’t know how exactly to express any of them to the white woman who was sitting in front of her, asking what she thought. The white woman who just happened to be her boss and Colin’s editor.

  “I think this book is very… timely,” Nella said, opting for the buzzword that everyone at Wagner liked to hear. “Timely” meant coverage on NPR and Good Morning America. It meant “adding something new to the conversation,” which was what Colin Franklin always sought to achieve in his long list of ripped-from-the-headlines books that included a murderous sister wife, a deadly school shooting, and a sexy serial killer.

  Vera nodded eagerly, her light brown bangs undulating above gleaming gray eyes. “Timely. You’re right. He refuses to shy away from the hardest parts of the opioid epidemic.” She jotted down one or two words on the yellow notepad that sat just beneath her elbows and then tapped her pen on her cheek the way Nella had seen her do in countless meetings. “And do you feel like anything in the novel didn’t particularly land the way it should have?”

  Nella examined Vera’s expression carefully, searching for what Vera wanted her to say. The last time Nella had critiqued a book that her boss favored—six months earlier—Vera had dipped her head and told her that her feedback had been spot-on. But then, when it came time for Nella to overnight the marked-up pages along to the author, she happened to notice her comments on the last few pages hadn’t made it in. She flipped through the first chapter and hadn’t seen any of her comments on those pages, either.

  It hadn’t bothered Nella too much at the time. She’d planned to bring it up at their check-in. But that talk had failed, and now Nella was left wondering what her true purpose as Vera’s assistant was. If Vera didn’t trust her opinion, then Nella would never be more than just an “assistant”; if she didn’t become more than just an “assistant,” she’d never become an editor. It was a dream she’d been nursing for ten years, ever since she decided to join the newspaper staff during her junior year of high school. She loved sliding words and paragraphs around in a game of literary Tetris. The act of editing soothed her, and while she’d be the first to admit she had an inclination toward Black writers yearning for a space to tell Black stories, she’d happily edit just about anything thrown her way. She was excited by the prospect of being able to make a living off editing, and the idea of having a say in what people were reading and perhaps—in the future—what people would write? That was monumental.

  Not too long after Vera called the diversity meetings “extracurricular,” dashing Nella’s hopes for a promotion anytime soon, Nella met up with Malaika at their favorite Mexican spot. Enchiladas usually salved her wounds, but Nella spent a good minute and a half staring at her plate before finally positing the question that she and Malaika always asked one another when they’d been slighted: “Do we think it’s a race thing? This no-promotion thing?”

  “Maybe.” Malaika had swept up the near-empty bottle of habanero hot sauce and shaken it all over her plate for the third time, smacking the bottom to get every last drop into her side of guac. Then, unsatisfied, she’d leaned over and swiped a bottle from the table next to them. The white couple sitting there looked befuddled, but said nothing—they hadn’t been using it, anyway—and they even offered a cheerful you’re welcome when she thanked them and handed it back.

  Such a gesture more or less summed up this brazen person whom Nella had come to befriend a few summers earlier at a karaoke bar in the Village. The two had first met when she asked Malaika to jump on a mic at the last minute to help her rap through “Shoop,” since Nella’s original Pepa had been sick from one too many Bloody Marys at brunch. They’d been best friends ever since, constantly comparing notes on online dating disappointments and homegrown hair care regimens (like Nella, Malaika’s curls were also 4C, although she’d been natural since day one, and therefore had a fro-mane that rivaled Pam Grier in her heyday).

  Their most vital notes of all, though, came from comparing Black Female Experiences. They had remarkably different backgrounds—Nella had been raised in a mostly white suburb of New Haven, while Malaika had grown up in Atlanta around a whole mess of Black people. But they’d had zero problems finding common ground. Nella believed this had something to do with the fact that they’d both been raised on Black ’90s sitcoms and smooth jams from a very young age.

  Malaika had also been her own kind of Oreo for much of her life, which was why she’d taken a bite out of her torta and said, in her best Dr. Phil twang, “Maybe Vera also sees you as competition. Maybe she feels that fully accepting you will somehow validate the secret fear she has that every woman under the age of thirty is out to get her job. Maybe… she’s jealous.”

  At this, Nella had given her a skeptical look. “You obviously haven’t met this woman. Or me. I wear Keds to work. Keds. Not even the fancy kind. The basics.”

  Malaika had swatted this away. “Well, that’s your own fault, but hey—lemme ask you this. Do you see any other white assistants getting promoted that have been there for less time than you?”

  “No,” Nella had admitted, “I guess pretty much every editor has been stingy about upward mobility—even for the white assistants.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “So… we don’t think it’s a race thing?” Nella still wasn’t convinced.

  “Hell, yeah. That’s a factor, too. She’s protecting what’s hers for as long as she can… you know, the way some white people insist on only reproducing with other white people because they want to preclude the population of mixed-race babies that’s obviously gonna rule the country by 2045. But here’s what I say to myself whenever Igor gives me shit at work about little things that don�
��t really matter, like his Twitter bio. Girl—I’m saying this to you now, Nell, not me—you are a double threat. You understand me? You’re not just Black, you’re Black and you’re young. And if she’s smart—and she must be, since she’s been doing this for what, thirty years?” Malaika paused, continuing only after Nella confirmed this with a nod. “If she’s smart, she knows that girls like you…” She smiled a small, silly smile. “And me… are the future.”

  Nella had appreciated this sentiment enough to laugh and clink her glass with Malaika’s as she had many times before. There in that indistinguishable restaurant, tucked away beneath the less-trafficked folds of the Lower East Side, the talk had felt like a warm, fuzzy Snuggie. But now, in the bright light of Vera’s large office, one window glaring out onto Central Park—hours after Nella had struggled to read a white man’s bizarre depiction of a pregnant Black opioid addict—she was beginning to feel a chill. And the source of it seemed to be her boss.

  “Did anything land the way it shouldn’t have?” Nella repeated. “Well, um, the characters were pretty solid. But there were one or two that didn’t quite work for me.”

  “Okay. Say more,” Vera pressed, knitting her eyebrows more tightly together.

  Nella didn’t want to say more, but if there was one thing Vera didn’t like, it was people who were afraid to say more. Especially women. It was partly why she’d hired Nella, Vera once told her at a holiday party, after partaking in a little too much nog. She had found Nella’s literary tastes “raw and bold and unique” when they’d first met. Which was pretty funny, since after meeting Vera for the first time, Nella had been sure she’d blown the interview entirely.

  Nerves… Nella had had many of them. They’d hovered around logistics, like potential MTA mishaps and navigational failures and the worry that the inch-long run in the crotch of her stockings wouldn’t make it through another wear. But she’d also worried that she and Vera would have zero chemistry. She’d never really worked a proper Manhattan office job. She didn’t know what to expect, save for what she’d seen in television shows and movies, and a part of her deeply worried that all of the things she’d seen—severe hierarchy, homogeneity, and rigidity—were true. Nella had grown accustomed to working behind bars and coffee counters, which spoiled her with exposure to all kinds of people with all kinds of occupations. Such jobs had also allowed her to wear whatever she wanted, whereas she didn’t think she could have shown up to her interview with Vera wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt.