The Other Black Girl: A Novel

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  Such a rule kept me from going in on Eva when I saw her with Nella at Nico’s in August, and then last night, when I listened to her preach about solidarity and diversity to everybody at Curl Central. In fact, I’d had to restrain myself to keep from jumping out of my seat, grabbing her by a loc, and asking her to run that smug shit about solidarity by me one more time.

  I was still envisioning how good it would have felt to wield a piece of Eva’s hair above my head like a captured flag when Lynn called over to me from my desk, asking me for an update.

  I swallowed my grin and brought my legs up to my chest. It was a rare occasion for me to have the couch all to myself, but I’d gotten so used to scrunching myself up to make room that it came naturally now. “So far, still good. I was sitting in the front row and Ev—sorry, Hazel, barely even looked at me. You know how it is. Paranoid people don’t see what’s standing right there in the light. They only see what’s in the shadows.”

  Lynn did know. “And Nella?”

  “Nella’s not compromised. I saw them having a pretty intense-looking exchange at the end of the night. But I’m pretty sure she’s fine.”

  She made a noise, but she didn’t look up from her notes.

  “So,” I said, trying to sound neutral, “Pam says that ever since she left those notes for her, Nella’s been staying late in the office practically every evening. Nella’s apparently been trying to get Jesse Watson to write a book for Wagner. I doubt that’ll happen, but he’s a loose cannon, so who knows what he’s willing to do…”

  Lynn motioned for me to get to the point.

  “I’m wondering if maybe next week we should finally make contact? Maybe I can pretend to be an up-and-coming writer and try to schedule a meeting with Nella? I doubt she’d take too well to being approached on the train, because she looks flighty as hell, but if we set up the publishing pretext, maybe she’ll—”

  “No,” Lynn interrupted.

  “Why not?”

  “Because ‘I’m pretty sure she’s fine’ isn’t enough. Unless you noticed any other signs that I should know about?”

  I shrugged. “Nella’s still dating the white boyfriend. Owen.”

  “That means nothing. What if she’s finished already, but he just hasn’t picked up on it yet? A lot of young white men are into OBGs,” Lynn said, making a face.

  I bit my lip and started fussing with the scraggly trim of one of the pillows nearest to me. Noticing my silence, Lynn finally peered up at me and asked, hopefully, “Did you see the white boyfriend and Hazel talking at any point last night?”

  “For a few minutes. But it looked harmless.”

  “Hm. Okay. Let’s go back to Nella and Hazel. Did you hear anything they said?”

  “No. But Nella looked like she wanted to strangle her for most of that conversation.” I’d seen it all in bits—all out of the corner of my eye, of course, so as not to be too obvious.

  I was still playing with the pillow when something else popped into my mind. “Oh!”

  “What?”

  “When I was leaving, I saw Hazel hand her something. It looked like hair products, something like that.”

  “Did you see her hand things to anyone else?”

  “I did. If I’d been close enough to her she probably would’ve handed me one, too.”

  “Those were probably just favors promoting her organization. Or the shop.” Lynn sighed as she jotted this down. “Shani, we can’t just assume Nella’s good yet. She’s still at Wagner. She even showed up to Hazel’s event. We’ve seen enough to know that we have to be extra careful, haven’t we? Remember what happened to you at that magazine? And do I need to remind you about my med school program? That OBG is still there reaping all of the benefits from research I did. All the money I wasted on not getting a degree—”

  “I know,” I said, gritting my teeth. I knew this speech by heart. “But what I’m saying is… she did that to you five years ago. And here we are. Hiding in the shadows. We still don’t know anything new, Lynn, beyond the fact that they’re wreaking havoc in Hollywood. We don’t know how Black girls are being changed. We only know that they’re selfish monsters who are getting better at putting on award-winning performances.”

  “We also know why they’re so good at changing other Black women when they want to,” Lynn added, “which is why we need to stick to keeping her at arm’s length.”

  “Look.” I put the pillows aside and sat up some. “Being part of this whole spy thing with you guys has been… an experience. I loved sneaking those notes to Pam—she’s the sweetest woman ever. And I respect what you all are trying to do. I just want to know why I came all the way to New York if we aren’t gonna make any moves on this whole Nella-Hazel situation. I might as well focus on something else. Someone else. Like me. Not Nella, and definitely not Hazel. I don’t even want to be in the same room with her anymore after what she did to me.”

  I didn’t mean to make it sound like Lynn and the Resistance hadn’t been doing enough to stop the OBGs. But it must’ve sounded like that, because Lynn said, in a low, cold voice, “I respect that. But there’s more to this Nella situation than you could possibly understand.” Then, she closed her notebook and put it back in the bookcase.

  The next day, she asked me to come by Joe’s Barbershop as soon as I got off work. “We need to talk.” Nothing more, nothing less. I agreed.

  By the time I’d clocked out of Rise & Grind, waved hello to Joe and his customers, and flown up the creaky back stairs, I’d already gotten it into my head that Lynn was going to tell me that my time in the Resistance was over.

  But when I opened the door, I didn’t see Lynn. I saw a woman who, judging by the halo of silvery curls that cascaded down her shoulders, looked much older than the usual demographic that rolled through Joe’s. She was standing in front of the bookshelf with her back to me, looking up at one of the room’s crowded purple-gray walls.

  I lingered by the door for a moment, hesitant to interrupt. I’d been captivated by the walls, too, when I first saw them. Each was filled nearly to capacity with photo upon photo of various Black activists—some familiar to me, some unfamiliar. Of the ones I knew, Malcolm X stood out the most; at least 30 percent of the photos plastered all over the walls were of him. Many were black-and-white images that I’d grown up seeing in history books and newspapers, but a few were contemporary renderings of Malcolm X that I couldn’t remember ever seeing before: Malcolm through a pop-art lens, in neon shades of blue and orange; Malcolm through a comic-book superhero lens.

  The most eye-catching piece of all depicted Malcolm with his hand placed pensively on his temple, painted in shades of red, white, and blue. In case one didn’t know to what it was paying homage, a small, postcard-sized rendering of the Obama HOPE posters that were big during his first presidential campaign was tacked right next to it, a period next to a very long, very powerful sentence.

  “You know, he’s still one of my heroes. I miss him. I still remember that day…”

  The words came soft and low, but perfectly enunciated. It took me a second to realize that it was the silver-haired woman speaking, and that she was speaking to me. Really, I didn’t truly realize it until she turned around to face me.

  My first thought was how she reminded me of someone—a family member, maybe. The kind of family you see only once every three years or so, at family reunions. My second was how good she looked. Her skin was almost completely wrinkle-free, and her build looked slim—fit, even—in a pair of black skinny jeans layered beneath a black sleeveless tunic.

  “Obama?” I managed, when I realized I had waited far too long to respond. “Yeah. I miss him, too.”

  “No.” She cut me off as she walked over to the couch nearest to her and had a seat. “Malcolm.”

  I could only nod.

  “Oh, Shani—great. You guys finally met.”

  Lynn had entered the room. There was something resembling a smile on her face, but she didn’t look particularly happy—an e
xpression, I noticed, that the silver-haired woman had also been wearing when she first turned and looked at me.

  “We actually haven’t,” she admitted.

  I moved to remedy the situation, reaching my hand out for hers. “Shani Edmonds.”

  The woman reached out, too. “Kendra Rae. Kendra Rae Phillips.”

  She watched as recognition lit up my eyes, filling the rest of my face with a blaze of embarrassment. “Oh my god,” I said, shaking her hand slowly. “Ms.… Phillips. Hi. I didn’t know you were… in the city?”

  Or anywhere, for that matter, I thought.

  “No one does,” Kendra Rae said, as firmly as her fingers were clasping mine, “and we intend to keep it that way. Don’t we?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  “So, um…” I gestured around the room. “How long are you… have you…?”

  I stopped, then started again as Kendra Rae continued to stare at me intently. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, but she was still gorgeous—ageless, even—with eyes as rich and deep brown as Karo corn syrup.

  “What are you doing… here?” I finally managed.

  At that, Kendra Rae’s impassive demeanor collapsed into a small, dazzling grin. I grinned right back, relieved. I’d barely been able to keep my eyes from bugging out of my head, but this woman didn’t seem put off by it. She seemed to be thriving off it, like a daisy turned toward the sun for the first time in who knew how long.

  Kendra Rae extracted a newspaper article and a notebook from a small patchwork bag I hadn’t noticed she’d been carrying. “Lynn reached out to me not long ago with some very interesting information,” she explained, flattening the article across her lap. “So, I’m here to tell you both a little bit about my time at Wagner Books. But first… Shani?”

  She paused and looked me in the eye.

  “Yes?”

  “You need to tell me what you saw Hazel give to Nella at Curl Central.”

  13

  October 17, 2018

  Hey, Nellie!

  First things first—my deepest, sincerest apologies for such a late reply! Promise to let you know some upcoming dates for our drinks as soon as I have them.

  In the meantime, would you mind sending me Hazel-May McCall’s contact info? (Do you know her? She works with Maisy, right???) Just saw that wonderful article about her mentoring program in BookCenter and thought I’d give her a little shout. I’d be forever grateful!

  Thanks so much! xx Lena

  Nella looked over her shoulder one more time before taking another violent whack at the Keurig with her fist, but the damn thing didn’t babble or sputter the way it was supposed to. It just kept hissing.

  Crossing her arms, she stared at it for a moment, contemplating other ways to beat the Keurig into submission. It certainly wasn’t how Jocelyn would have done it, but since Jocelyn wouldn’t be returning to Wagner—rumor had it, Germany had taken her back—Nella saw any method of fixing the Keurig as fair game.

  She’d already used her fist on the machine, but she wondered what would happen if she used her head. This method sounded particularly appealing, given how well she’d memorized Lena Jordan’s rather irritating email. Sincerest apologies, Lena had said. Thought I’d give Hazel a little shout.

  And, perhaps the worst part of it all: Hey, Nellie!

  Nella had made the mistake of reading and then rereading Lena’s note before she had a chance to do anything reasonable that morning, like grab a coffee or get a bagel from the café. Lena’s words had been running through her mind on loop like a bright bodega marquee sign, punctuated every now and then by two meaningless X’s.

  Had it really been that difficult for Lena to give her one or two dates she was available? And was Nella’s name really that hard?

  Nella glanced over at the microwave clock to assess the damage. It was a quarter after ten, which meant she had no time to run downstairs and buy a coffee across the street. Defeated, she filled her mug with hot water and reached for a box of green tea. She would simply have to sit through the ten thirty cover meeting with Vera, Leonard, and Amy undercaffeinated. It would suck, but it would suck less than walking into the room five minutes late.

  Nella tried to keep her hands steady as she poured a slow stream of honey into her steaming mug. Cover meetings had been the highlight of her week when she’d first started working at Wagner. She usually arrived a few minutes early so she could snag that one corner seat by the window with the best view of Leonard’s cover mock-ups for Amy, Richard, and the editors. Back then, those meetings had seemed like the most magical part of publishing. She got tipsy comparing the designer’s artistic renderings of a book with the hypotheses she’d come up with during her own read, and high off the anticipation leading up to the big cover reveal.

  She would even sit in on discussions of covers of books she wasn’t working on, listening closely to Amy and the designers discuss color and balance and font size and kerning. And she took copious notes—notes she planned to internalize for that day when she was the one sitting in The Editor’s Seat. Sure, there was an author here and there who quashed a tiny bit of the magic, but this never precluded how humbling it was to be just a few feet away from the inception of an image that would adorn thousands of copies of books and be distributed all over the world. Being able to provide her opinion on covers made her feel powerful, even if—at the end of the day—Vera had the final say.

  But this cover meeting coming up in nine minutes was different. This meeting was for Needles and Pins.

  Nella swiped at the steam on her face with the back of her hand, getting a nostrilful of cocoa butter in the process. She winced, unprepared for it. She hadn’t planned to use the hair grease Hazel had given her until she ran out of all of the other products she had at home, but on the elevator ride up to the office that morning, it had dawned on her that she hadn’t put any kind of moisturizer on her scalp in more than a week. When she happened to reach deep into her bag and find, to her delight, that the small jar of grease was still there, she went ahead and massaged a pea-sized portion through her hair.

  It’s so pungent, though, she’d murmured to her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and now again in the kitchen as she took three slow, deep breaths—a habit she’d developed in the weeks that had passed since Hazel had sung Colin’s praises at the marketing meeting. Thanks partially to her, Needles and Pins was swimming in a sea of buzz so deep that the title was now known around the company as a “surefire bestseller” that Oprah might even tweet about “if we get the packaging just right.”

  Nella poked at the tea bag with the thin wooden stirrer, her fourth poke so hard that a part of it split open. She watched, annoyed, as tiny flecks of jasmine broke free and swam out into her cup. The Keurig hissed on behind her, a sweet, mocking reminder of how little control she had over anything these days.

  Nella had received this message in other ways—for starters, in the absence of invitations to have lunch with Gina and Sophie. They’d stopped asking Nella to eat with them after she declined five lunch offers in the span of two weeks—she simply had too much work to do—and they’d opted to try Hazel instead. Something magical had to have happened during their first lunch together; after that, they started hanging around her cube, gushing about her boyfriend’s latest art project or her favorite thing she was reading that week. Even Gina—dubious, uninterested, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” Gina—had walked away from one of their chat sessions on a particularly cool day saying that she wanted a pair of platform Timberlands like Hazel’s. All the while, Hazel had gobbled up the attention like a pro. Of course.

  Nella didn’t know what to make of any of it. The kind of celebrity status that Hazel had achieved in such a short span of time rubbed her in a way that bothered her, and it bothered her that she was bothered at all—especially since she and Hazel were supposed to be on the same team. She hated how disappointed she felt when editors suddenly started asking Hazel for sensitivity reads, but not her.
Nella had never been given even just an iota of the attention everyone had paid Hazel. If she were being honest, she would say that she hadn’t thought she’d ever receive it. And if she were lying, she would say that she’d never wanted it in the first place.

  But the validation was important to Nella, and watching Hazel move through Wagner like a knife through whipped cream made her begin to question her own presence there. Maybe I should have listened to those anonymous notes I received last month, she sometimes thought, and once, in a bout of desperation, she’d even tried calling that phone number again. But to her relief—and her chagrin—it had been disconnected.

  In a way, she felt like she was already gone, anyway. Her coworkers were certainly treating her like she was. They were floating by Hazel’s desk to chat more and more frequently, and Nella was beginning to understand exactly what Hazel had meant when she’d brought up code-switching. She’d known what the phrase meant, obviously; how else was she able to read about the latest incident of police brutality on the news, then clock into work at nine a.m. with a smile on her face?

  But, Hazel… something was off with her. A vibe. Nella didn’t completely trust the way she took code-switching to an entirely new level, or the way she constantly asked Vera about the books she was editing and always charming the plaid-patterned slacks off Josh. Once, while Nella was microwaving some leftover dinner in the kitchen, she’d even caught Hazel talking to Amy about her grandparents. “They met at a march? And he died at a march? My, my,” Amy had crooned, taking a rare moment to remove her crimson-tinted glasses and dab at her eyes. “Talk about a character arc.”

  Nella, who’d feigned deep involvement with something on her cell phone, had found this pretty distasteful. But to Nella’s surprise, Hazel had agreed. “I’ve actually been thinking of commissioning a writer to take their diaries and their correspondence and write a love story around their lives dedicated to activism.”