Then there was C. J.: so dazzled by Hazel, so consumed. He would hang on to the edge of her cube and flirt with her for five, ten minutes at a time, smiling at her with those big old eyes he’d once used only on Nella, and Hazel—good-natured, affable Hazel—would smile back. Together, they made a beautiful twosome that belonged in a Black nineties rom-com instead of the thirteenth floor of a Midtown office building.
Meanwhile, Nella would sit quietly across the aisle trying to tune out their conversations. But bits of autobiographical information leaked into her cube anyway, juicy bits that C. J. had never told Nella in the two years he’d known her. She couldn’t help but wonder why this was. She’d been far friendlier with him than she’d ever been with India. Had she not asked him the right questions? Or had he simply figured Nella, raised in a middle-class suburb by two parents—parents with a dysfunctional marriage, but two parents nonetheless—would never truly “get it”?
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. What had preoccupied her more was the alien sensation she felt overhearing them reminisce about growing up in Black neighborhoods. It brought her back to her high school days, when Black kids would see her holding hands with her white boyfriend in the hallway or eating lunch with her white friends in a café and whisper to one another, not very discreetly, there go the Oreo. It wasn’t her fault that her honors classes had been overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian students—that they were all she’d really known—and so she’d just pretend she hadn’t heard. Pretend she didn’t worry at least once every day that she wasn’t “Black enough.”
Her primary source of comfort had been the belief that this feeling would go away once she went to college. But now it was back to rear its ugly head, spewing all of the insecurities she thought she’d gotten over.
Nella leaned forward so she could scrutinize the specks of jasmine that were floating around her mug. Then she checked the clock again: ten twenty-four. There was still time to fish out a few of the pieces.
She was reaching for a metal spoon from the drying rack when the sizzling of the Keurig was overpowered by the sound of footsteps behind her.
“Hey, Hazel! How’s it going?”
Nella spun around and saw Sophie, red-cheeked and now highly embarrassed.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Nella. I am so sorry. I thought you were—”
“Yeah,” said Nella, glaring at her. “I think I know exactly what you thought.” She dipped her spoon into her mug, grabbed some jasmine, and tossed it into the sink.
“It’s just that…” Sophie stopped. “Well, did you realize you two are wearing the same color today?”
“Are we?” Nella looked down at the eggplant sweater that she’d pulled over her head a few hours earlier. She hated this particular sweater; it was too small and too itchy and the tag always stood up in the back. But she’d barely had time to pick anything else. Lately, her body had been waking her up at all sorts of irregular times in the middle of the night, and when sleep did come back to her, it was usually half an hour or so before she needed to actually get out of bed.
“Hazel’s sweater is purple, too,” Sophie pointed out, even though Nella’s question had been rhetorical.
“It’s a very different purple.”
“Yeah? I remember them being pretty similar, actually.”
“No,” said Nella, a bit more forcefully. “I’m pretty sure Hazel is wearing lilac.”
She was sure of this because she’d caught herself eyeing the girl’s bell-sleeved sweater enviously earlier in the morning, when Hazel had wheeled her chair over to ask her how to set up a conference call. Nella had helped her, delivering the same spiel she gave new assistants, but it had been hard. Her spiraling sense of self-worth had started to encroach upon her sanity; her sanity, upon her sleep; and her sleep, upon her ability to be a functioning human being at work. A functioning human being who was able to forgive and forget the fact that a colleague had mistaken her for a dreadlocked girl who was four inches taller than her.
There’s this social phenomenon It’s called code-switching…
Weeks had passed since Hazel said those words to her, but a pang of fury dug into Nella’s side nonetheless. Yes, she knew all about code-switching and being flexible and easygoing and not taking anything too personally, but as Sophie continued to tap-dance around her faux pas, waxing poetic about an article she’d read about how the eye saw hues, Nella felt too tired to play along. She didn’t bother to nod or laugh at Sophie’s half jokes. She simply stood there, stone-faced, picking jasmine out of her mug piece by piece, waiting for the girl to stop speaking—or, at least, to finally stop tripping over herself long enough to realize that she wasn’t going to undo what she’d done.
At last, Sophie stopped to take a breath. She looked to her left, appearing to notice that the Keurig had been making strange noises beneath her own strange noises over the last couple of minutes.
“Is the Keurig broken again?” asked Sophie, clearly still uncomfortable. “Damn thing. I have a friend over at J. F. Publishing and she told me their Nespresso machine never craps out, not like this one. Maybe we can petition to get Richard to make the switch.”
Nella grunted. Then she dropped the spoon in the sink and made a break for it down the hallway.
“Nella, hey—I’m so sorry, again, for the mix-up,” Sophie called out from behind her.
Nella didn’t turn around and she didn’t miss a beat. “All good, Gina,” she replied curtly, and after delivering this final blow, she moved faster, indifferent to the drops of hot tea that splashed on her hand with each step.
* * *
When she walked into the cover meeting a few minutes later, she wasn’t at all surprised to find Hazel sitting in what was supposed to be her seat, swiping through Vera’s phone.
“That paintbrush! Vera, he’s so cute. And how old did you say little Brenner is turning tomorrow?”
“Five.” Vera leaned over so that she could see which photo Hazel was looking at, as though she hadn’t been the one who’d taken it in the first place, and grinned.
“He’s such a precious size! And how long have you had him for?”
Vera beamed. “Three years. And every new day is a new adventure with him, even still.”
Nella assessed the lousy seating situation. She hadn’t arrived early enough. Amy, Josh, and Richard had already taken their usual places at or near the head of the table; to the left of Amy sat Vera; on the other side of Vera, Hazel. The only empty seat close enough to the action was on the other side of the table—across from Hazel, and beside Grumpy Leonard.
Nella reached for the chair while Leonard remained hunched over his notepad, one hand covering half of his face, the other squeezing a golf pencil. He didn’t seem like he wanted to be bothered; he might have even been asleep. Even still, Nella softballed a How’s it going, Len as she slid into the chair beside him. She was desperate for some kind of normal human contact, and damn it, she was going to get it.
Leonard glared up at her. She swallowed, taking in his bloodshot eyes, the furious black scribble on the paper in front of him. “How do you think it’s going?” he snapped. “This place has been running me into the ground as usual. That’s how it’s going.”
Nella nodded in commiseration.
Vera looked up. “Oh, Nella! Hi!”
“Hey, Vera,” Nella said as cheerfully as she could, studying her boss. Today’s outfit was a long, baggy burlap sleeveless dress layered over an eggshell-white sweater. Her dress was super cute—very cozy-looking, very 1993, very something Nella would buy if she thought she could afford it, though she was almost certain she couldn’t. But Nella was quite positive that, just like the freshly cut blunt bangs that stopped halfway down her forehead, it was yet another Hazel influence. The last time Vera had worn something that didn’t perfectly fit her tiny waist, she’d had pneumonia.
Vera herself had seemed aware of this fact, too; she kept running her hands up and down the burlap straps as though checkin
g to make sure the fabric was still there. “I’m so glad you could make it. You weren’t at your desk a couple of minutes ago, so I decided to be a little selfish and ask Hazel if I could steal some of her time for this meeting.”
Nella had heard this particular song before. She and Vera had been passing ships in the night for weeks, communicating mostly via email and telephone, always just barely missing each other in person. Whenever Nella did happen upon Vera sans closed door, she was either asking Nella to do something, talking to Hazel, or talking about Hazel to another colleague. Compliments on her new wardrobe, which had gradually shifted from black and navy to include a few earthy tones and even some patterns that bordered on “whimsical,” were due to Hazel. Those deep burgundy highlights in her hair, visible only in very particular types of lighting, but still visible? Hazel’s doing, too.
Never before had Nella seen her boss open up to any lower-level employee at Wagner.
“Selfish?” Hazel asked Vera, her eyes still trained on a photo of Brenner. “Not selfish at all. I’m absolutely thrilled to be sitting in on this.”
“Me too,” Nella said, through gritted teeth.
Vera smacked the table with her palm. “That’s the spirit! I remember when I was first starting out here, I always sat in on every cover meeting I could.”
“That’s true. Every single one,” Amy chimed in from the head of the table. “She started a couple of years after me, and I remember how she always used to steal my chair. Frankly, I wanted to kill her.”
Richard snickered, tossing back his head. “That’s true, too,” he said, less to Hazel and Nella and more to Amy and Vera. “I still remember when Amy marched right into my office and asked, ‘Where did you find that Velma chick? Wherever you found her, you can send her right back.’ ”
“Agh, yes,” Amy said, coloring a little bit. “Not my finest moment. But now look at us! We’re the best of friends.”
“The best of friends,” Vera agreed coolly.
“Mmm.” Hazel set Vera’s phone down on the table. “Seems like a little bit of competition can be a good thing, huh?”
“You’re right,” said Amy.
Josh finally stopped checking his teeth for stray flecks of granola in his front-facing phone camera. “Probably wouldn’t be here without it.”
Nella glanced up at the clock as Amy clapped her hands, then slid off her tinted glasses. “Okay everybody, ready to get started? This is going to be a quickie—Len, you got Alexander’s note about having to reschedule his cover meeting today, right?”
Leonard ventured to catch Amy’s eye and bow his head, but he said nothing. A member of the old guard of senior-level employees at Wagner, Leonard had headed the design department for nearly four decades, even won numerous awards for his innovative work on covers for books that would become classics. But he seemed truly, deeply unhappy, carried a limited number of smiles around in his pocket—at least when he was at the office—and only whipped them out at very particular occasions. Nella was quite positive he kept the majority of his smiles to himself, when he was alone in his office, door closed, creative gears turning.
Nella studied Leonard for a bit longer, taking in his unassuming checkered shirt, the golf pencil behind his ear, the gray hair that would have grown in patches on his scalp if he didn’t shave it regularly. His head, which almost always hung low. She was quite certain that he made three times what she made, probably more than that. She was also pretty sure that he didn’t have any children. Why didn’t he just retire? Was he simply holding on until he could physically hold on no longer? How could someone be so settled, but so clearly miserable?
Amy broke the awkward silence that had befallen the meeting since she posed her question. “Great. Vera, we’ve got some really awesome cover proposals for you this morning! You’re going to love them all, I promise. Len, hon, want to show us what you came up with for Needles and Pins?”
“Yes! Show me what ya got, Leonard!” Vera gave him a forceful wink, a peace offering after all the Sam Lewis drama she’d thrown his way. Nella found it unnatural, but there was an ever-so-slight decrease in Leonard’s hunch.
“Sure.” He unearthed a manila folder that had been sitting in his lap and showily pulled out three glossy pieces of paper. He stood and placed each page on the table, spinning them around so that they were facing Vera, with a slight tilt toward Richard.
“So, I’ve done up a few different approaches here,” Leonard said, swaying just a tiny bit left and a tiny bit right. “These first two are along a similar vein of his last few books: minimalistic, striking color dichotomies, sans serif. If we want to keep with the branding we started doing for him in 2011, we may want to go this route. I think readers who are used to his books looking a certain way—and readers who like having books that look like they belong together—will flock to something simple like this: melon-red words against a black backdrop.”
Should’ve made the words chartreuse, thought Nella sourly.
“Nice,” said Vera.
“The black background definitely works well with this topic. It’s desolate. It’s despair. It’s the opioid crisis,” added Josh.
Nella rolled her eyes at her lap.
“And then we have one other option, in case he decides he wants to completely dismantle the format that worked for his last few books. Here. This one isn’t even a little bit close to the route we’ve traditionally taken with Colin’s books, but I think it might be worth exploring.”
Nella looked at the piece of paper that Leonard was pointing at. Its background was a watercolor rendering of the American flag, with illustrations of various faces weaved among the red and white stripes so that only pieces of faces were visible.
Immediately, Nella was drawn to the third one—how fragmented, how disjointed it looked. She leaned forward to examine the faces more closely, a decent indicator, she recognized, that someone might be inclined to do this in a bookstore. But suddenly she felt herself recoil, moving backward in her seat as quickly as she’d moved forward.
That was when she really saw it: The dark brown face. The wide nose. The thick lips. The wide-open, almost frightened eyes. The wild tufts of black hair pulled into Bantu knots. All presented in pieces, scattered among the stripes, but placed front and center.
Shartricia.
Hesitant, Nella peered over at the cover again to confirm that her gut had been right. No other character in the novel had been featured quite as prominently as the Black one. Shartricia was the most realized, the loudest on the page.
Nella glanced up across the table at Hazel, who raised her pierced eyebrow in reply.
“We’re thinking it could be smart to go for a new approach here,” Amy explained as Vera took in the two nontraditional covers with some hesitation. “This opioid crisis has been so debilitating to this country. It has painted so many Americans as being less than human. We thought that if consumers picked up this book and saw the array of people Colin writes about on the cover itself, they’d be inclined to spend more time with it.”
“I see.” Vera nodded, although she still didn’t seem too convinced. Her eyes were still trained on the cover. “Well, I will say, it really is a… different approach. Much more artistic than the others.”
“And with artsy covers, it can sometimes be a risk,” Josh said. “But I really dig this—from a marketing perspective at least. Did anyone see that recent article in BookCenter about how few books have characters of color on the cover?” Nella held her hand up directly in Josh’s line of vision, but he ignored it. “This is going to stand out from the pack. It’ll definitely be a draw for broader audiences of today—sort of like we discussed at our marketing meeting. But it also looks back unflinchingly on the past, forcing us to reckon with our country’s racist roots.”
You think so? Nella thought, scratching at an itch that had been set off by Josh’s showboating speech. She glanced across the table at Hazel again. But this time, Hazel was looking at Amy.
“Actu
ally, if I may?”
Everyone’s eyes shifted to Hazel. Yes, Nella thought. Please, just do it Expose this pickaninny for what it is.
“I think this is kind of brilliant,” Hazel said.
“Really?” Vera seemed as surprised as Nella did by this declaration.
“Yup. I think you hit the nail on the head, Leonard.”
“So, you would pick this book up if you saw it on a table out in the wild?”
It was Richard speaking now, his piqued interest rendering his blue eyes that much sharper.
“Definitely. It’s striking. Leonard, I think you did a phenomenal job, as Amy said.”
Richard nodded. Vera noticeably brightened. Even Leonard, ever the Eeyore, looked like Hazel’s claim had set him free of his self-made prison.
Nella shuddered as she stared down at the cover, searching for some subversive element that she might have missed, like a conversation starter that might get people talking about race and colorism and class. But all that was there was Colin’s caricature. Live and in living color. You can’t just do this, she thought, fuming. You can’t just put an image like this on a book cover without providing any context. She saw little Black and brown and white children walking up to the New Releases table at Barnes & Noble and picking it up, attracted by the bright colors. Saw the little gears turning in these kids’ heads for two seconds, or however long it took for images to imprint upon their young, impressionable brains. And she saw these same kids running back to their families, forever touched by the troubling racist image of Shartricia without even being aware of it.
The Bantu knots. Those eyes. Those lips.
These people.
“Any other thoughts?” Amy asked.
“You people are un-fucking-believable.”
Nella didn’t realize she’d been thinking this, let alone that she’d said it. But she had, judging from the current of attention that had suddenly surged in her direction.
“Did you say something, Nella?”
Amy’s top lip was quivering. Leonard looked appalled. Vera loosely clasped her hands around the back of her neck as embarrassment colored her cheeks. Even the never-fazed Hazel seemed caught off guard.
The Other Black Girl: A Novel Page 25