The Other Black Girl

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  The second hour of the “meeting” was filled with clumsy role play and even clumsier word association games, and naturally things got worse. When Nella offered up the acronym “BIPOC” as a term she associated with “diversity,” her coworkers ooh-yeahed… and then offered their own examples of “diversity”: “left-handedness,” “nearsightedness,” and “dyslexia.” Only when someone volunteered the word “non-millennial” did Nella realize that a return to her own concern about the treatment of Black people both inside and outside of the literary sphere would be highly unlikely. And just like that, faster than it took to utter the words, “what about ageism?” the moderator was bowing her head and lauding everyone—the one hundred or so people in the room, all white save for Nella—for being so open.

  Relieved at the prospect of watercooler debriefings, her colleagues had hustled out of the conference room faster than they’d exited any sexual harassment education seminar. And everybody had seemed far more perplexed leaving the town hall than they’d been going in.

  Nella was, too. But for different reasons. Her coworkers could publish books about Bitcoin and Middle Eastern conflicts and black holes, but most of them couldn’t understand why it was so important to have a more diverse publishing house. It didn’t surprise Nella, then, that the next non-mandatory Diversity Town Hall had half as many attendees as the first. The following, even fewer. By the time the fourth meeting rolled around, its attendees were just Nella and a blue-eyed publicity assistant whose name Nella no longer remembered, because she was no longer with the company. Even Natalie in HR had stopped attending due to “scheduling conflicts.”

  “Maybe we should offer donuts or something, to get more people to come?” the blue-eyed assistant had meekly suggested, and in an uncharacteristically public gesture of frustration, Nella had ripped up the latest think piece she’d planned to share with everybody and stormed out of the room.

  Heat still brushed Nella’s cheeks whenever she remembered this public display of weakness. Being the only Black girl in the room wasn’t so hard a gig most of the time. She’d slowly befriended every other individual at Wagner who worked as an assistant in any capacity, and the other people of color who worked at the front desk and in the mailroom knew her by name. But it wasn’t the same as having a “work wife” who really understood her. She craved the ability to walk across the hallway, vomit out all of her feelings about a racially insensitive fictional character, and return to her desk, good as new.

  Nella had grabbed one of Colin Franklin’s twenty-page contracts from the printer and was flipping through it, thinking about just how many feelings were churning around her insides, when she walked straight into her newest cube neighbor.

  “Sorry!” She held out an arm to steady Hazel, even though she was the one who needed steadying.

  Hazel raised her eyebrows in either bemusement or judgment—it wasn’t quite clear which. She placed a hand on her hip. “Dang, girl, where you rushing off to so fast?”

  Yes, Nella realized from the twitch that tugged at the left side of Hazel’s mouth, curling it up into a smirk—it was indeed judgment.

  “It’s hard not to run around here like a bat out of hell a lot of the time,” Nella said, even though such an arcane saying had never left her lips before. She looked at her watch in an effort to recover from it. “So, um, how was lunch with Maisy? You guys were gone for what—two hours?”

  “Was it really that long?” Hazel asked, staring in the direction from which she’d come. “Lunch was pretty great. Maisy’s great. We went to a Taiwanese spot.”

  “Nice. Lu Wan?”

  “Yep. On Ninth.”

  “Yeah, that’s a favorite around here.”

  “So yummy. Anyway, I was just happy she made the time,” Hazel said, stopping next to Nella’s cube. “Now that I’m back, do you think I could ask you about this one email?”

  “Oh, sure!” Nella dropped the contracts on top of the stack of Colin Franklin books Vera had asked her to wrangle from Wagner’s library in preparation for the offer. She hadn’t been asked to get the sales numbers from Josh for Three-Ring Bullet and The Terrorist Next Door yet, but Nella was quite positive that request would be coming by the end of the week. Which meant that in the next two weeks, Wagner would most likely be making a deal on Colin’s next book—baby mama Shartricia, five and a half children, six figures and all.

  Nella shuddered at this last very painful straw. She felt her soul, which often sounded a lot like Angela Davis, cry out a little bit—but she put on her best smile anyway. Then, she walked over to Hazel’s cube to take a look at the email that filled her screen. Seeing that the text was in red Papyrus font was enough for Nella to say, without even reading it, “It’s Dee over in production. Yikes.”

  “Honestly… I’m not sure what any of this means.”

  Nella couldn’t blame her—the email subject line read Simpson? and the email read, simply, WHERE IS THIS?

  “Just a second. I think Erin left me a note about this before she left…” Nella flipped through the master packet that she hadn’t touched since Erin, Maisy’s last assistant, had gone back to working at her father’s law firm in the Upper West Side four weeks earlier. “They pay us shit here,” the girl had said, packing up her third box of books. “How you can afford to live in this city on this salary, I have no clue.”

  The irony of this comment coming from a girl with such a convenient exit strategy was not lost upon Nella. But, like all of the other people under the age of thirty-five who eventually left Wagner for similar reasons, Erin had a point. The pay was shit, and it would be shit for the next five years at least, depending on how close you could get to the Richard Wagner in that time. If you were able to snag his attention, you were set for the rest of your publishing career, but if you couldn’t—if you weren’t a legacy hire, like Bridget, or if you worked for someone he wasn’t particularly keen on—you were pretty much screwed. You could work at Wagner as long as you wanted, but you were still going to make twentysomething an hour.

  Nella traced a finger down the second page of Maisy’s assistant packet, careful to avoid the large grease stain in the top right corner. She wondered which of Maisy’s assistants had left that mark—definitely not Yang, who never ate anything at her desk except green grapes and red pears, and not Emily, whom Nella had never seen eat anything at all. Heather, the one who’d just graduated from King’s College London and was always quick to drop a “bloody” here and a “loo” there, had hardly been at Wagner long enough to get her name on her cube. Nella supposed the perpetrator had been Erin herself. All those bags of Lay’s. All that noisy crunching.

  “It says here in Maisy’s master packet that Simpson usually takes at least a week longer than he’s given to get his edits back,” Nella read, “and it looks like he’s three weeks late. Do you see anything in your inbox from him?”

  Hazel scrolled through her emails, tapping her long, French-manicured thumbnail on the mouse as she went along. “Nope, nothing.”

  “Alright. Well, what you’re going to do is tell Dee that Maisy will have a chat with Simpson. And then you’re going to write to Simpson yourself. Introduce yourself, gush about his last book on cumulus clouds, and then in the last line mention that you think—never say anything like it’s fact—that he might be…” Nella scanned the packet once more. “A week or so late.”

  “He’s three weeks late, though.”

  “Right. But it’ll be better if you pretend he isn’t. Good to tread lightly when you first start working here; then, over time, you can ramp it up. Once he likes you.”

  “But wouldn’t it make more sense to just… I don’t know… start out by telling Simpson how late he actually is? Hold him accountable? He’s a grown man.”

  That’s debatable, Nella thought. “Maybe it would. But this is just how it’s always been done.”

  “Alright,” said Hazel, although she still sounded doubtful. She craned her neck to get her own look at the master packet. “And
all of that is in there?”

  The gracious smile Nella had plastered on her face for this how-to demonstration was starting to feel like work. She hadn’t asked this many questions when she took over for Katie, had she? “No, it’s not all in there. Well, just the bit about his cloud series, and about using kid gloves on him. A few years back, someone got sick of figuring out which types Maisy’s authors were, so whoever that was compiled an entire spreadsheet of quirks, which are in the back. Here.” Nella handed over the packet.

  Hazel accepted it uncertainly, her perfectly arched eyebrow raised at a perfectly alarmed angle. “This looks like it should really be laminated. And alphabetized.”

  Nella sucked some air through her teeth on her way back to her desk. “Yeah, well. You’re not wrong about that.”

  “Mm-hmm.” They sat in silence for a moment as Hazel took in the pages. “Hey, girl—thanks for this.”

  “No problem. I’m here if anything else comes up.” A sudden email on Nella’s screen distracted her from saying anything else. Can you print the very best reviews for Colin’s last three books? Vera asked. I’ve got a phone call with his agent in thirty.

  “That’s really great of you,” said Hazel, who had turned her chair to face Nella. “I’m so glad I have you here.”

  “Hey, it’s nothing.” Nella tried to put on her best smile again, but the thought of spending the rest of the afternoon compiling praise for Colin Franklin made it difficult.

  “You’ll let me know if I’m too extra with my questions—right?”

  “Please, don’t worry about it. Another assistant trained me. It’s the Circle of Life. That’s how assistants operate. On goodwill.”

  Hazel flipped through the packet, humming at different pointers, shaking her head at others. “You’ve helped a lot of Maisy’s assistants, I’m guessing.”

  “At least four since I started here two years ago. Maybe more.”

  “Wow.” Hazel lowered the packet at the same time she lowered her voice so she had a clear view of Nella’s face. “That’s a lot of turnover. Is there anything I should know about Maisy? Or anything about Wagner in general?”

  Nella considered this. Assistants were supposed to pass on the gossip to a new assistant, but the general consensus was to let her believe, at least for the first few weeks, that her boss was a fairly normal human being. Wagner was the hardest publishing house to get into. Every interviewee—Nella included—underwent four back-to-back interviews with various higher-ups, the last one culminating in a high-intensity tea with the editor in chief and founder of Wagner Books himself. The last thing any new hire wanted to hear after finally climbing over these esteemed walls was that an insane boss had been waiting on the other side.

  But this felt different. Who was Nella not to tell Hazel the truth?

  She looked up at her cubicle wall and cast a bit of side-eye to the empty space where that Diversity Town Hall email had once hung, a story her father had told her about his very first job floating back to her. He’d walked into a Burger King and seen a brother sweeping the floor, and a brother at the register, too. Behind the register, there was a brother preparing the orders.

  “No white people in charge? Looks like a pretty good gig you guys have going on here,” Bill Rogers had said to the Black guy behind the register, who turned out to be the brother—the actual brother—of her father’s classmate, Gerald Hubbard.

  Gerald’s brother had smiled and handed her father a job application. “We practically make our own hours,” he said, “and you know what—you’ve come just in time. There’s going to be an opening.”

  Five days later, he found himself on the register. He made it an entire two shifts without screwing anything up. It wasn’t until his third shift that a white man in a sharp suit and tie walked in and introduced himself as the owner. On its own, this would have been fine—Bill hadn’t forgotten that the owner was white, and he could handle white people as well as any Black person in those days. But the owner had ended up being a modern-day Simon Legree. And as it turned out, Gerald’s brother had been finishing his very last shift at Burger King when he told Bill a position was opening up.

  Nella’s father continued to work there for three weeks, which was how long it took him to decide that if a boss had to call him “boy,” he might as well be making more money for it. A few weeks later he started working as an attendant at a fancy hotel on the other side of town.

  Years later, at a neighborhood picnic, her father asked Gerald’s brother why he hadn’t warned him. “I don’t know,” he’d said, nibbling on the gristle of a rib somebody’s mama had spent all morning cooking. “Same thing happened to me when I applied.”

  Nella had heard this story several times, and she always felt the same way when her father reached the end. She always swore that if she ever found herself in a similar situation, she wouldn’t behave as selfishly as Gerald Hubbard’s brother had. And now, here she was, finally in a position where she could be transparent with someone other than Malaika about what it was like to be a Black person working in an all-white office.

  As though she sensed Nella was about to break, Hazel sucked her teeth. She was still staring at Nella, except now her eyes were cool, serene. “C’mon, sis,” she said quietly. “You can be real with me.”

  The diminutive washed over Nella like balm on a tight knot in her neck. Nella felt her joints loosen as she released a tiny whoosh of air from her lips. “Honestly… your boss is so good at what she does. Everyone who knows her respects her, especially since she’s willing to edit all the science books nobody else wants to touch. But.” She lowered her whisper to lip-read-only level. “She’s a little high-strung. Like, for real.”

  Hazel didn’t flinch. She just nodded. “I kind of had a feeling,” she said after a moment. “And tell me: How do they feel about Black people in these parts?”

  Nella looked around to make sure no one happened to be lingering nearby. “I’ll just put it this way,” she said, widening her eyes dramatically. “They don’t ‘see’ color here at Wagner.”

  Hazel didn’t respond. For a moment, it was unclear she’d caught the playfulness in Nella’s voice. Maybe she hadn’t even heard her at all.

  But then that coolness in her eyes turned up, and a knowing grin overtook Hazel’s face. “Yeah, that’s the vibe I got. It’s always good to know what you’re working with, right?” She smiled a little, all lip but no teeth, before turning back to her desk and starting to type.

  Nella turned her chair back to face her monitor and grinned to herself. Sis, indeed.

  * * *

  Hours later, Nella dabbed at the layer of condensation that had gathered at the bottom of her glass with her pinky nail, then deposited the water onto her already-saturated napkin. “Did I tell you she lived in Boston for a few years? Boston.”

  Malaika shook her head. “No shit!” she shouted as the opening notes of “Juicy” started to flow through the speakers above their heads. Tonight’s spot was 2Big, a Bed-Stuy bar that exclusively played songs by Tupac and Biggie in a rather belated attempt to, as their website stated, Bring Two Coasts Together.

  “And Maisy and Vera just kept going on and on about Boston like they always do whenever they get on a roll. Building it up like it was this magical kind of city, or whatever.”

  Malaika shrugged and took a sip of her rum and Coke. “Magical for some folks, maybe. What is it Jesse Watson calls it? ‘The White Man’s Mecca’?”

  Nella assented, remembering the segment Jesse had done on the city just a few months earlier, after attending his first—and last—Celtics game.

  “God, I’m gonna miss that man. With Jesse on his weird hiatus, how will I be able to tell the difference between a microaggression and a sheet with holes in it?” Malaika joked wistfully. “By the way, is Vera resting easy now that he’s gone forever?”

  Last year, Nella had suggested they invite Jesse to contribute to Wagner’s Forty Under Forty anthology, but Vera had tutted at the thought. L
iterally, and quite loudly, at that. “Between you and me,” she had whispered, “some people see him as an emotional terrorist—and I can’t say I don’t agree with them.”

  Nella winced now as she’d winced then. “Not sure how tuned in she is to Black Twitter,” she said, “but that doesn’t matter, anyway. There’s no way Jesse’s actually ‘gone forever.’ He likes the spotlight too much.”

  “True.”

  “Besides, I bet he made that announcement about going offline so that when he returns with his big Beyoncé-sized creative drop, it’ll be that much bigger. People like him do that all the time.” Nella stated this like she didn’t care one way or the other, although Jesse’s announcement about taking a break from social media—especially his reason of wanting “to work on some things”—had fascinated her, too. Vera might have said no to Nella’s Forty Under Forty suggestion, but she hadn’t said no to a book written by Jesse and Jesse alone. If Nella found a way to contact him, maybe she could get him to write an outline so irresistible Richard and Vera would have no choice but to sign him on the spot.

  She had meant to fly this idea by Malaika earlier, maybe even spitball what kind of projects he’d come back from hiatus with—A memoir? A doc? A gospel album? But the Jesse news had gotten lost in the Hazel shuffle.

  “Anyway, going back to this new Black girl,” said Malaika, reading her mind. “White Man’s Mecca or not, the important question I have for you is: Do you think you’ll be friends with her?”