The Other Black Girl: A Novel

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  But it didn’t take long for shit to hit the fan, just like Lynn had promised. The article was circulated. My boss went in on me in front of everybody. I was fired… in front of everybody. And that was it for me and Cooper’s and that story I’d worked so hard to complete.

  I texted Lynn on my way home from the office, finally ready to listen. There was no point in denying she knew something I didn’t, and I ate every crumb she fed me from her home in New York: the lists, the charts, all compiled by Lynn and the rest of the Resistance over the last five years—and the promise that she’d tell me more once I got there. A bus ticket that came with an interview at a subpar café in Manhattan where I would be… sweeping floors.

  I eased up on the handle of my broom. It had grown nearly as hot as my palms from my tight, anxious grip. If you ever cross paths with an OBG out in the wild, blend in, Lynn had told me. You’ll do a lot better knowing where she’s at if she doesn’t know where you’re at.

  Had she seen me? Did she know I worked here?

  I quickly went back to sweeping a far corner of the room, listening as she tried to convince Christopher that Maroon 5 had indeed gotten better with time. Figures. Back in Boston, she’d been willing to die on a hill for John Mayer.

  The memory of this sent me over the edge. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and snapped a photo as nonchalantly as I could. When it came out blurry, I snapped another one—then another, just in case. Taunting the bull, you could say, but I didn’t care.

  The third photo seemed to do it. Thanks to the angle at which she had suddenly flirtatiously tilted her head—she’d always been good at angles, I’ll give her that—the late-afternoon sunlight creeping in from the dirty front windows of Rise & Grind clarified her deep brown skin and high cheekbones so well that Lynn could definitely compare the photo with the one in her own files.

  Quickly, I stashed away the phone and went back to my sweeping. But it was no use. My broad, scattered strokes across the red tiled floor were doing more harm than good as I waited, anxious for the reply.

  It came minutes later, after I’d moved into the bathroom to check soap levels.

  Yep. It’s her. It’s Eva.

  8

  August 30, 2018

  Nella couldn’t get Hazel’s cold, icy look out of her brain.

  It wasn’t normal for her to feel so possessive when it came to her boss. She’d never needed to be. None of the other assistants had any reason to curry favor with Vera. “You two seem well-suited for one another,” Sophie had told her once, after showing up unannounced and reading one of their email exchanges over Nella’s shoulder. “You’re both perfectionists.”

  How someone who knew Nella so little could read her so well was beyond her. But Sophie’d had a point: For most of their time together, she and Vera had worked more like a team than any of the other editor-assistant pairings at Wagner.

  Then the Colin thing happened.

  Nella flinched. Was that what that list of assistants on the printer was about? Was the list of new hires for Vera?

  She sat with this new possibility, listening for any tidbits of conversation she could get through Vera’s closed door. She might have sat like this for the rest of the morning, but then she abruptly stood, refocused. It was obvious what Nella needed to do: talk to Richard. Sure, maybe she was sleep-deprived, and maybe she had no way of knowing if they really were potential hiring candidates—but sometime between seeing those names and being shut out of Vera’s office, a feeling of deep uneasiness had planted itself in her gut. A feeling that her boss was going to kick her out and welcome someone else in. A new and improved Black someone, so nobody could give them shit for getting rid of her.

  Nella was about as ready to give up publishing as she was to give up health insurance and paid vacations and Summer Fridays. She wasn’t going out that easily. Plus, how would she explain to Eight Bar why she suddenly wanted to quarter limes and dry pint glasses again?

  Her mind was set. She started toward Richard’s corner office, even though she’d never done so unannounced. Ever. In fact, it had been two years since she’d had any kind of one-on-one time with Richard, and that time could hardly be called spontaneous. Once a new hire signed all of the paperwork, suffered through orientation, and shadowed another assistant, each was “required” to sit down and have tea with Richard Wagner before their first official day.

  Hardly anything at Wagner was seriously required. Technically, you could wear a shirt with the words “I’m Rooting for Everybody Black” on it if you wanted to, because there was nothing about a dress code in the contract. Wagner held itself to a silently agreed upon “professional” standard, and when the occasional foolish intern broke this rule, employees showed them what time it was with the raise of an eyebrow or a chilly, withering stare.

  Attending Richard’s tea wasn’t in your contract, either. But, as Nella had been fortunate enough to learn from her predecessor, Katie, you weren’t doing your career any favors if you declined the invitation.

  Richard Wagner was something of an enigma to anyone who knew him. He had so much money that it didn’t show. He was the most “publishing” where it counted; he was on top of all the hot trends, or at least the ones that “mattered.” He threw parties so exclusive that assistants would find reasons to snoop through their bosses’ offices in the hopes of finding an invitation that had been carelessly left on a desk.

  But what set Richard most apart from many other editors was that he was almost always in the office. He very rarely observed Summer Fridays, and the last week of August was as important to him as the first week of fall.

  Some supposed this was because he was the first of the Wagners to venture into books rather than politics. Legend had it that when he decided in college that he didn’t want to be a senator, his parents pretended he didn’t exist for five years. A few years later, when he decided he wanted to open his own publishing house, a few notable literary heads agreed to help him—and by the time Wagner first opened its doors in 1972, the entire industry was scrambling to welcome him. His parents were, too.

  More than four decades later, Richard was the Publishing Man to Please. A conversation with him forever marked you in his eyes, and one-on-one conversations with him were few and far between. So, it didn’t just make sense to have tea with him—it was absolutely imperative.

  “If you really want to be an editor,” Katie had told Nella, “you have to be strategic about it.”

  Being strategic was what had led Nella to Wagner in the first place. It was no coincidence that she’d applied to the publishing house that had published her favorite book. She wanted to traipse the halls the two women she’d studied diligently in college had traipsed. She wanted to sit at the desk where Kendra Rae Phillips and Diana Gordon had sat when they talked over edits.

  The morbid side of her, though, was particularly curious about what had happened to Kendra Rae. She’d disappeared from the spotlight the year after Burning Heart set the country on fire, following some kind of media spectacle, and hadn’t been heard from since. Nella had had a hard time verifying the details of her disappearance, although Black Twitter had concocted some pretty believable theories. Except none of them held water. And that left Nella wondering: As Diana Gordon released book after book, year after year, what had happened to the Black woman who had been her editor? The Black woman who, according to Diana’s acknowledgments, had had “an invaluable hand in crafting Evie into who she is?”

  Naturally, this question nagged at her brain again as she and Owen rode a Midtown-bound R train together on her way to meet Richard for her new-hire tea two years ago. Owen had offered to take the ride up to the Wagner office with her, bless his sweet heart, since he’d figured he could run errands in the city while she sipped and supped with one of the most influential men in the publishing industry (according to GQ).

  “So, I know we went over this, but… why don’t you want to ask Richard if he knows what Kendra Rae is up to these days?” Owen a
sked Nella, their knees bumping one another as their train stopped at Prince, then 8th Street. “He might even still be in touch with her, and then he could put you guys in touch.”

  Nella shook her head. “That would just be poor manners. I can’t go in there, guns blazing, asking him if he knows what happened to Kendra Rae Phillips. Then he’d think that I’m some kind of amateur stalker.”

  “But aren’t you?” he asked. “I thought you wanted to be the next Kendra Rae. That’s why you only wanted Wagner.”

  She bristled; he saw it. They rode without saying anything for a moment, until he spoke up again. “Can I ask another question now?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Nella asked, trying to sound like she was kidding.

  “No. Why are you meeting some old white publishing dude to drink tea in his empty office on a Sunday?”

  Nella shrugged. “It’s just… what you do.”

  Owen gave her a look.

  “Baby, you just have to understand… it’s tradition.”

  The words had been foreign to her tongue then, a mere mantra she’d already managed to pick up from three hours or so of shadowing Katie. They were especially foreign to Owen, who clearly didn’t find this response particularly satisfying. But instead of pulling at a promising loose thread, he said, “So, are you excited to see the place where Burning Heart was created?”

  Nella could’ve kissed him for changing the subject. “Hell, yeah. To know I’m going to be breathing the same air, it’s insane.”

  “Maybe they’ll even have a printer named after the two of them. Or a conference room.”

  “Maybe even Richard’s office itself. Now, that’d be pretty sick.”

  Owen shifted uneasily.

  “Now what’s the matter?”

  “I just—the idea of you being in this man’s office alone, who you don’t really know anything about. I’m sorry, Nell, I don’t trust it. Maybe all that This is just the way the industry is talk would have worked ten years ago,” he added, holding up a finger before Nella could interrupt him, “but in today’s world, I’d be That Dumb Fool who has to tell people why I let you go to this thing with this old guy without asking any of the hard questions. And I’m not living the rest of my life like that.”

  Nella smiled. The “That Dumb Fool” label came from watching far too many true crime TV shows. The “dumb fool” in question was usually the interviewee who said things like No, I never questioned why he had three different driver’s licenses.

  Nella had watched too much television to get snuffed out in such an easy way, so she grabbed Owen’s hand and told him it was all going to be fine.

  But twenty minutes later, when it came time for him to let go of her hand so she could reach for the front door of the office building, he squeezed it once—a little harder than he normally did when he was merely trying to be cute.

  “You sure about this, Nell?”

  “Owen.” She pulled her hand away from his as gingerly as she could, placing it on his cheek. He hadn’t shaved in nearly four days, so his reddish-brown stubble scratched at the meat of her palm in that bristly way that she always liked. “He’s pretty old. I’m not saying that pretty old men aren’t capable of terrible things, but I am saying that I have some pepper spray in my purse. And you know I was raised by the streets.” She beat her chest in mock emphasis.

  “You were raised in the suburbs of Connecticut,” Owen said drily.

  “By a father from Chicago who did not fuck around.”

  “I thought he was from a suburb, too.”

  “Plus, remember, I’ve got—”

  “A black belt,” finished Owen, full-out grinning now. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You always say that, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “See, I already told you—it got lost during the divorce.” Nella kissed him on the lips, preventing any more words of protest. “I’ll text you in an hour.”

  He pulled her toward him when she moved away. “If I don’t hear from you after sixty-one minutes, I’m breaking down this door and finding you myself.”

  “There’s no need to break anything down.” She let him hold her for a moment before reaching for the door again. “See? This door opens. It’s the doors inside, past security, that you’d have to—”

  “Nella Rogers?”

  Nella turned her head. Standing behind Owen was Richard Wagner himself: a tall, lanky man with a shock of white hair, wearing a beige jacket and navy-blue-and-kelly-green striped pants. It was an ensemble that wouldn’t make sense for almost anyone else, but his tortoiseshell glasses and khaki-colored leather briefcase gave the impression that he was a smart man in media whose many accomplishments rendered any conflicting opinion of him irrelevant.

  Both Owen and Nella moved out of his way instinctively. “That’s me!” Nella said. “Mr. Wagner?”

  “Please, call me Richard. I insist.” He strode up to them and shook Nella’s hand. Then he walked to the front door and went through it. “I’ll see you in a few moments, I’m presuming?” he called over his shoulder. He didn’t wait for an answer.

  Nella had spun around to look at Owen, expecting to see that familiar look he always wore when he had something to say and knew better than to say it, but he was already backing his way down the sidewalk. She felt a twinge of disappointment—she wanted to ask Owen if she should get him a pair of Richard’s striped pants in his size—but she waved and turned to enter her new place of employment, head held high.

  * * *

  “So,” Richard said, once they’d gotten past introductory niceties and she’d accepted his offer to collapse into a leather chair that made the setting feel more like therapy than book publishing, “I suppose you’re wondering how I knew who you were.”

  He blinked exactly twice before staring at her, rigidly, as he waited for an answer. She hadn’t been wondering—that was the least of her wonders as she rode the elevator up to the thirteenth floor, her heart thrumming in her ears. But she managed to say, with a small smile, “Well, I have been told I look like a Nella.”

  Richard threw his head back and chuckled. It felt hollow, but it still shook the room—a fairly impressive feat, given the size of his office. Far bigger than Vera’s, Nella noticed, the office ate up a decent chunk of one of the floor’s corners, and its two large windows—one on each wall—provided more light than her and Owen’s small studio apartment had ever seen at one time. Like the therapist patient chair she was sitting on, its décor was exactly what she had expected from an editor in chief, complete with a big wooden desk that looked like it had been made by an actual carpenter and not purchased at IKEA, and a grand bookshelf so substantial that she could probably free-climb her way up with little difficulty.

  “So, tell me, Nella,” Richard said, “what made you decide to get into publishing?”

  Nella considered the rehearsed speech she’d given Vera a few days earlier about her love of reading and writing and how books could make the biggest difference in a young person’s world. Go with that speech You know that one so well.

  “Honestly… I’m kind of obsessed with Kendra Rae Phillips and Burning Heart.”

  Her quick words slipped out unexpectedly. Surprise washed across Richard’s face, followed by amusement. He took a sip of tea before staring wordlessly at her once more.

  Nella cowered, immediately hating herself for doing so. His eyes were just too damn bright, that piercing, artificial kind of bright that belonged in science fiction movies, and she longed for some sort of distraction.

  “You’ve heard of her?” he finally asked.

  Nella nodded excitedly. “Burning Heart made me fall in love with reading.”

  “Mmm. Well, I actually turned down the opportunity to edit that book,” Richard confessed. “I loved the early draft I read—I knew it was going to be huge!—but the moment I heard Kendra Rae had the slightest bit of interest in working on it herself, I stepped out. I knew Kendra Rae would be the better editor for Diana.”

  “Really?
Wow. I always thought Kendra Rae discovered her.” Nella assessed the skin on his forehead and in between his eyebrows. She’d pegged him as fiftysomething, but Burning Heart had been published in 1983, putting him into his mid-seventies at least. “That’s pretty cool of you, stepping aside.”

  “Yes. I knew Kendra Rae really was something then.”

  He rested his gaze on a small rubber plant that was on the corner of his desk, an impression of some kind of memory splashed across his face. Her cup of tea was burning her fingers, but now that his eyes had found something else to occupy them, she felt bold enough to say, “You must really miss her.”

  Richard’s head snapped up. He cleared his throat. Confusion looked strange on someone of his stature, but Nella was certain that yes, it was in the look he was giving her. “Yes. I mean, she’s not—she’s still—”

  “I didn’t mean—sorry, I—” Nella closed her mouth, opening it only when she knew it was useless trying to convince him she hadn’t meant to imply that she believed Kendra Rae Phillips was dead. “Just the fact that she’s been keeping to herself for so long…”

  Richard lifted his tea to his lips and blew a small puff of air across the top. “Maybe for the best. The spotlight, you know. Some people can’t handle it, and she… it was clear she was starting to snap. Even Diana, her longtime friend, vouched for that.”

  Nella didn’t know what else to do but agree, although what Richard meant by “snap,” she wasn’t entirely sure. She remembered reading something about Diana saying Kendra Rae had had some kind of “break,” but hadn’t been able to verify it.

  “Now, enough of that. We’re here to talk about you. Tell me about you.”

  Nella smiled. “I’m not sure there’s too much to say,” she said. “I’m from Connecticut, and I lived there for about eighteen years, until…”

  She petered off, fully aware that Richard had grimaced when she’d said “Connecticut.” The state often evoked strong reactions from people, but his weird, just-bit-down-on-a-lemon-seed look seemed a bit too dramatic—even for a man in navy-blue-and-kelly-green striped pants. “Is everything okay?” Nella asked.