The Other Black Girl: A Novel

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  She’d been hearing this tortuous song ever since she’d left Wagner fewer than twelve hours earlier. Throughout her entire train ride between Wagner and McKinley’s, she’d been convinced everyone was looking at her. Was she being watched? Followed? Was that man who was standing by the doors looking at her because he wanted to knock her down and take her wallet, or because he didn’t like the idea of Black people working at Wagner? Had his own son been denied internships at Wagner year after year, and he’d decided to take it out on the one person he thought nobody would miss?

  Each new stranger made the note weigh heavier upon her shoulder, to the point that by the time she’d been carded by the McKinley’s bouncer, waved hello to a familiar regular, and headed straight toward the bar, she had already unearthed the envelope from her bag. And as soon as she reached Malaika, she dropped it onto the table like a stick of dynamite she could hold no longer.

  “What’s this?” Malaika asked, picking up the envelope and holding it up to the dim bar lighting, as though that would make a difference.

  Nella signaled for Rafael to make her the usual. “Didn’t you read any of my texts? Jesus Christ.”

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you understood that my hand is generally too far up Igor’s ass for me to concern myself with the worries of my own people,” Malaika said, eyebrows raised in mock amusement. “What is this? A wedding invitation or something?” She gasped suddenly, clutching her heart. “Is this your wedding invitation?”

  Nella knitted her own eyebrows as she peered over at the bourbon cocktail Malaika was on the edge of finishing. “Mal, how many of those have you had?”

  “This may or may not be my third. Igor let me go kind of early today because he wanted me to swing by the dry cleaners before they closed. So I figured, why the hell not?”

  “Ohkay.” For a moment, Nella wondered—and not for the first time, either—if perhaps she and Malaika should consider hanging out at an ice cream shop instead of a bar every once in a while. The moment passed fairly quickly, as it always did. “Just open it. Please.”

  Malaika picked up her drink and threw the last of it back long and slow, like a woman about to do something extremely dangerous. She set it down, swiped at the moisture above her lip that her previous act had left, and got to work on the envelope.

  And strangely, it was work. The top flap had managed to re-glue itself shut, and to Nella’s exasperation, it took Malaika much longer to open than it should have. But Malaika’s reaction to what was inside was satisfying enough to make up for the delay: She threw the envelope on the ground as quickly as she would have thrown a used tampon.

  “What the hell,” she said once, and then again, as she retrieved the notecard from the floor. “Where did this come from?”

  “I have no fucking clue.” Nella thanked an apprehensive-looking Rafael for her Aperol spritz. It was clear that he wanted to stick around and hear what had garnered such a visceral reaction from Malaika, but another couple had just started to place their jackets on the barstools a few seats down. He gave Nella a modest bow, his sandy hair falling in his face, and ran over to greet them sunnily.

  “It just… it just showed up on my desk today. At the very, very end of the day.”

  “And you have no clue who could have left it?”

  “Nope.”

  “And no clue when someone could have dropped it off?”

  “My desk is always covered with papers, so… no. It could have been any time of the day.” Nella took a good, long sip of her drink, the shock of bitterness sobering her thoughts a bit.

  “Hmmm.” Malaika bit her lip. “Could it be a disgruntled author?”

  The thought had flashed through her mind on her way over, but it had dissipated almost as quickly as it had come. There was no way that Colin’s disdain for her feedback on his Black character had outweighed his desire to receive his next scheduled payment for Needles and Pins. The man might have been fragile, with a delicate sense of self-worth, but he wasn’t stupid. “Funny you say that. A certain disgruntled author did cross my mind on the way over here… but there’s no way.”

  “Who?!”

  “Colin. He flipped out on me yesterday,” Nella explained. “I told him my thoughts about Shar. But that’s a story for my next drink.”

  Malaika furrowed her brow in concern. “Shit. Really?”

  “Yeah. But there’s no way he would even think about doing that to me. He’s too obvious a culprit, especially since he has a history with harassment.”

  “Harassment?” Malaika scoffed. “Do you hear yourself right now?”

  “It happened years ago, and Richard apparently put Colin through the ringer when the tabloids got ahold of it. Colin’s been on his best behavior ever since. Kind of.”

  Malaika sighed. “Okay. Maybe not him. But what about Vera?”

  Nella almost spilled her drink on herself. “You can’t think—?”

  “Well, you haven’t told me anything yet, but I’d imagine Vera was pretty mad about the Colin thing.”

  “Yeah, but… it would be so obvious if she did something like that. Vera’s not that stupid, or petty.”

  Malaika delivered her favorite Are you being for real look. “I’ve watched Lifetime Movie Network. I know how power-hungry white women operate. They do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top, all sneaky and shit. And once they’re at the top, you bet their asses they’re gonna do anything they can to keep their place there. Steal a baby, cut up somebody’s dog. Sneaky things.”

  “You mean some of them. Not all of them. Also,” Nella added, even as an image of a distraught Vera standing above her with a box cutter and some packing tape flashed through her mind, “if Vera really wanted to fire me, she would have just fired me already. She’s been at Wagner long enough to have the clout.”

  Malaika snorted. “You know and I know that it’s not that simple.” She picked up the envelope again and reread the note aloud the way she would have read a Dr. Seuss book. “ ‘Leave Wagner. Now.’ If this isn’t a hate crime, I don’t know what is.”

  “It would have been a hate crime if it had said, ‘Leave Wagner now, nigger.’ ”

  “Oh… but it’s there.”

  Nella reached for the paper. “It is?”

  “No, it’s not there, literally. But it’s there. Look, girl,” she continued when Nella rolled her eyes. “You are Black. The fact that you’re Black colors every single thing anyone ever says to you—pun intended,” she added, before Nella could. “Whether they admit it or not.”

  “I know what you mean. And you’re sort of right. But—”

  “And with that anonymous article that was published last month—the one about the Black girl working in a white space—didn’t you say that your BFF Sophie accused you of writing it?” Malaika gasped, clutching her chest. “What if they think you wrote it and they’re trying to get you out?”

  “I said they’re pretty nuts. I didn’t say they were the literary KGB.”

  “I mean… maybe not, but remember when Vera told you to chill out on all the I’m Black and I’m Proud ruckus you were starting?”

  “Yeah. But that was different. And I plan on starting that ruckus back up again, by the way,” Nella added, even though the thought of trying to resuscitate Wagner’s Diversity Town Halls sounded just as appealing as sticking her hair into the nearest burning tea candle. “It’s just… I’ve never had something like this happen before, you know? I know I’m definitely gonna sound like one of those crazy people in denial when I say this—”

  “Yes, that is your usual style.”

  “—but during my time at Wagner, I’ve never had anyone be pointedly racist toward me. At least, nothing beyond, like, microaggressions. Trust me, you’d know by now.”

  Nella hadn’t been just bullshitting to make herself feel better. It had been the truth. Ask her how much it pained her to be the only Black person in the room, and the answer varied depending on the day. It pained her to have to blacksp
lain cultural moments to people who didn’t understand them, like the seriousness of Kanye’s mental breakdown or the significance of seeing Black women wearing protective scarves in Girls Trip. And no, Nella had not read every Notable Black Book with gusto (she’d started The Bluest Eye at least five different times and had never gotten past the first chapter), so she could not speak to how this or that upcoming Black writer compared with Toni Morrison in her prime.

  But Nella would be lying if she didn’t admit that deep down, a small piece of her was proud of how utterly different, dare she say radical, her world viewpoint felt from the homogenous throes of Wagner Books. No, from all publishing. She may have been unsuccessful at getting her colleagues to hire people outside of their usual demographics, but she had at least gotten her foot in the door. She’d made people think about race, even if they didn’t realize they were thinking about it, by simply being present at meetings, or being friendly in the kitchen.

  And, even deeper down—thousands of feet past this last thought, swimming around in the depths of a place one might call “pride”—was Nella’s suspicion that many of her coworkers at Wagner, Vera included, looked upon her with a sort of reverence. With awe. Imagine how much harder she must’ve had to fight to get here, she imagined them saying to one another behind closed doors when they considered the Ivy League names and publishing internships that were missing from her résumé. She didn’t come from a long line of people in the book business. She’d had a much harder time elbowing her way into the fray than most; this went without saying.

  “Even if it is true that nobody has ever committed any pointedly racist act against you there, ever,” said Malaika, cutting into Nella’s thoughts, “let’s talk facts. Fact one: You’re Black. Fact two: You’re Black. Fact three: How many white people do you think have gotten a note like this at Wagner? Or ever? These are facts, my friend. Straight-up facts.”

  Nella remained silent. She both loved and hated whenever Malaika got really tipsy and really real with her, which usually happened around nine p.m. and almost always happened after two drinks and no food.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho, but wait,” Malaika squealed, nearly choking on an ice cube. “Fact four: You’re no longer the only one! I forgot about that other Black girl. What’s her name again?”

  “Right. Hazel.” Nella herself still sometimes forgot that Wagner wasn’t all white anymore, perhaps because she and Hazel felt like extensions of one another, two sides of the same coin. “I should have checked her desk before I left to see if she got one, too.” She searched for a memory of what her coworker had looked like when she left the office, trying to sift the day’s events from all the others that had come before it, but all she could see were the many shades of agitated Vera: Vera tapping her black sensible shoe; Vera hovering at her desk; Vera frowning—always frowning. Hazel had to have slipped out without Nella noticing.

  “Maybe…” Malaika’s eyes widened. She was not so secretly loving this, Nella knew.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe… it was Hazel who left it.”

  “What? That’s crazy. She sent me a Family Matters GIF today. Why would you think that?”

  Malaika considered this. “Nah,” she finally said, “you’re right. Homegirl wouldn’t have been that subtle about wanting you to get gone. Plus, you did all the hard work. You broke in all those white people at Wagner. You’ve been preparing them not to say dumb shit in meetings for two whole years. She would never…”

  Nella swatted away the thought. “She could never.”

  But the notion of Hazel planting the letter dug its claws into Nella’s neck, sinking deeper as she finished her first drink and even deeper as she finished her second. On her third, when Malaika asked Nella if she’d Facebooked her new coworker, she’d practically flung her cell phone out of her purse, ecstatic at the thought of revisiting this topic once more. The fruitful topic they’d switched to previously—whether or not Boyz n the Hood could be turned into a stage musical—had been squeezed dry.

  “Her name is Hazel McCall,” Nella said, typing her name into the white search bar.

  “I can’t believe we haven’t done this yet. How have we not done this yet?”

  “I don’t know. I was looking at her boyfriend’s sister’s hair café website earlier today, but I never got around to her because Vera was working me like a dog.”

  “Hair café?”

  “I’ll show it to you later, but we should definitely check it out.” Nella pulled the screen down, frustrated. “Whoa, who knew there were so many Hazel McCalls!”

  “Really? I find that surprising. Tabling this ‘hair café’ thing for the very near future, by the way.”

  “You know what?” Nella sucked down the rest of her drink, then tapped the screen a few times. “Her full name is something hyphenated. Something like Hazel-Anne, or Hazel-Sue… Hazel-May! That’s what it was.” She typed it in as Malaika grumbled something about how country Hazel’s name sounded.

  Only one person in the Brooklyn area popped up that time. Nella recognized her colleague immediately, even though her profile photo showed her decked out in an elegant jade-green gown, wearing a face model’s amount of makeup.

  “That dress!” Malaika cried. “And, that man! Hello. Who is this fella?”

  Nella had hardly glanced at the sexy man in the forest-green tuxedo before the phone was taken away from her, but she knew Malaika was ogling Manny. Nella understood why. Normally, she thought that a tux in any color besides black or navy blue was tacky, but this green one complemented his terra-cotta complexion so strikingly that Nella couldn’t deny how smart of a fashion choice it had been. His long, dark, wavy hair framed his face perfectly, and his smile was even more dazzling than Hazel’s.

  How good—no, how bold they both looked together, this young, beautiful couple donning nontraditional hues. Nella wondered what it would take to get Owen into a tux that sharp. Probably a lot. Probably too much.

  “That’s Manny. Her boyfriend. He’s Dominican,” Nella added, as though she’d actually met him, as though Malaika had asked. Malaika oohed in reply, like she’d just been granted a secret to the universe.

  Nella continued to take a look around Hazel’s Facebook, scanning her latest posts, peeking through photos that she’d recently been tagged in. Posted just three days earlier was a photo of Hazel surrounded by four Black girls. They were all wearing the same purple shirt, with a logo that was just too small for Nella to make out. Each looked to be maybe sixteen or seventeen and had their arms around Hazel, who stood dead center, smiling so hard that her pupils weren’t visible.

  Nella ignored the comments—she often got pulled into the most mundane of comment trails—and scrolled down to the next photo. This one was of Hazel staring straight at the camera, holding a large sign in her hands that said RESPECT BLACK WOMEN.

  The last one she looked at was of Hazel bathed in soft pink lighting on a stage, a microphone in her hand, her locs piled high on her head. Nella vaguely remembered Hazel telling her she had gone to DC for a Black women’s poetry retreat not long ago.

  “Mentors young Black women… goes on poetry retreats… makes signs with all-caps letters… definitely suspicious,” Malaika joked. “Hey, wait a second.” She held up a hand. “You said her boyfriend’s name is Manny?”

  “Yeah.” Nella was still looking at the picture of Hazel, comparing the all-caps letters in her sign with the all-caps letters on the mysterious envelope she’d received. “Why?”

  Malaika reached for her phone again, nearly falling off her chair. “You are so freakin’ familiar,” she said, rapping on Manny’s face with her thumb.

  “He is? Rafael, when you have a second, could you please—” Nella gestured to their empty water glasses. Malaika’s near-tumble reminded her that such drinking required hydration, especially on a weeknight.

  “I got you two.”

  “You’re my first, my last, my everything, bless you,” Malaika called after him, not looking up from
the photo. “I know I’ve seen this guy before, somewhere. Do you know what he does?”

  “I think he’s an artist or something? He painted this beautiful photo of Zora Neale Hurston and put it on a mug for Hazel for their anniversary.”

  Malaika banged the table with her palm. “I knew it! I saw him in Melanin Monthly last year, I think, on one of those ‘artists to watch out for’ lists. He’s, like, the Andy Warhol of our generation. Warhol meets Basquiat. Their words, not mine, I promise.” Malaika unlocked her phone and went into Instagram. Within five seconds she’d pulled up the mosaic of tiny square images that made up Manny’s page. Art + BK, it read—a sparse and cool description, Nella noted, for a profile that had nearly one hundred thousand followers and more than three thousand postings.

  She scrolled through the main page. Even as thumbnails, Nella could see that nearly every piece of artwork Manny had posted had been rendered in an understated, refreshing style similar to that of the Zora Neale Hurston artwork she’d seen, placed not only on mugs but on T-shirts and tote bags and pins and magnets.

  There wasn’t a single piece that Nella couldn’t see herself buying either for herself or as a gift for someone else—each item was that special. Hazel might have been playing up the fact that she had a boyfriend, Nella observed, zooming in on an incredible impressionistic painting of a purple Althea Gibson, but she had definitely been playing down how impressive said boyfriend actually was.

  What else was she hiding?

  Nella scrolled through two or three more rows of posts, hoping to find more details about Hazel, then slid the phone back to her friend when she didn’t. “Manny seems pretty cool.”

  Malaika left the phone where it was. “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Do you still think Hazel left that note?”

  Nella sighed. She didn’t know what to say. She just knew what she felt: that it was unfair to point fingers at the only Black girl she worked with. The words “bad karma” entered her brain, followed by “crabs in a barrel,” said not by Angela Davis but—this time—by her mother. It was a saying that her father despised, but her mother always held it close, the words as calming as a meditation chant and as practical as a house key. Typically, Nella sided with her father, erring somewhere between nonconfrontational and carefree.