The Other Black Girl

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  “It’s beautiful, Hazel!” India marveled, waving around a long satin scarf the color of the inside of a juicy pink grapefruit.

  “Whoa. That’s gorgeous,” Nella agreed. She was egregiously late for work, but Hazel didn’t seem concerned about the time. Besides, Nella felt like she had some sort of unspoken stake in this exchange. Her feet remained planted as other employees piled in, clamoring for the next elevator like passengers rushing for lifeboats on the Titanic.

  “Isn’t the pink great? I saw it and naturally thought of you, India. I know you mentioned that the pinks and the oranges sell out so quickly at the store you go to in the Bronx.”

  “It’s for me?” India fingered the fabric. Her big almond eyes were heavy with near-spilled tears.

  “Of course that scarf is for you!” She lowered her voice slyly as she gave India a single pat on the arm. “Happy birthday, girlfriend.”

  “Oh!” Nella said awkwardly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize… happy birthday, India!”

  But India’s eyes were still on Hazel. “Really?” she stammered. “I can’t… I’m sorry, it’s just… just, no one here has ever done anything like this for me before. And I’ve been here for almost ten years…” India’s tears were falling now; the woman seemed to have forgotten where she was. She put the scarf down and stepped away from her desk so she could come around and fold Hazel into a tight hug. A few feet away, a lost-looking visitor who’d come close to asking India for admission upstairs feigned sudden interest in something that had gotten stuck on her shoe.

  “Hazel, thank you! But… how did you know?”

  “I have my ways. And there are plenty of other hair goodies where this came from, too. You know I got the hookup.” Hazel winked. “Don’t you work too hard today, okay? Remember to treat yo’self. Bye, girl!”

  And she was off before India could finish mouthing another emphatic thank you. Nella scurried to keep up, cutting off a tall, unamused man who most likely worked at the software company on the floor below Wagner’s. “That really is a gorgeous scarf,” Nella repeated as she and Hazel squeezed into a crowded elevator that couldn’t possibly fit them both. It did, but it didn’t fit the software company man, and he had no qualms about expressing his frustration as the doors shut in front of his cherry-red face.

  “Isn’t it great? Normally I’d get something like that from Curl Central.”

  “Curl Central?”

  “Yeah. It’s this dope hair café in Bed-Stuy,” Hazel said in a low voice, a sudden swell of cocoa butter nipping at Nella’s nose. “A Black hair café.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah. So I was gonna find something for India at Curl Central. But then Manny told me he’d forgotten he made plans for us to meet some friends for a happy hour in Queens, so it just made more sense to go to the African fabric store.”

  “Manny?”

  “Sorry. Emmanuel. Manny. My boyfriend.”

  “Oh, right. Manny.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I do,” Nella replied. “He’s… he’s pretty great.”

  “Aw, look at you—smiling all big.”

  Nella nodded and shrugged, waiting for Hazel to ask her boyfriend’s name, or how she’d met him, and then wondering—when she didn’t ask—if she should say anything more about Owen.

  Instead, she lowered her voice and said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to wear scarves like the ones India wears. It’s just, I’m shit at YouTube tutorials. Most of them.” Nella had spent countless hours trying to learn how to French-braid her own hair, turning the speed down on the video and then rewinding it back, because she always seemed to miss a crucial part. The process made her arms ache badly enough for her to give up until her hair grew longer and she could try again. “I can’t even do flat twists. And my braids usually come out looking pretty rough.”

  As she finished speaking the doors opened, and the majority of riders got off on the fourth floor. Free to move her head around without getting a mouthful of someone else’s hair, Nella looked over at Hazel, seconds away from asking her if she had any YouTube tutorial suggestions of her own. But the girl was staring at Nella like she’d just proclaimed she’d never seen The Color Purple.

  “So… you can’t tie scarves, or do flat twists?” Hazel was visibly taken aback.

  “I…” Nella reached for the strap of her bag instead of reaching for one of her curls. Hazel hadn’t asked, How have you made it this far without knowing how to style Black hair? But she didn’t need to. Nella asked herself this often.

  Usually, her answer was her parents. They were the ones who’d raised her in a predominantly white Connecticut neighborhood and sent her to predominantly white public schools. To keep Nella grounded, they established a Black force field of sorts around her, encouraging her to be Black and proud. They gave her their own Black history assignments all year round; they bought her Black dolls and refused to buy her white ones. But like the world’s best-built force fields, there were cracks, and the adoration of fine, straight hair slipped right on through. What could her parents do? Nella saw it everywhere she went: at school, at sleepovers. On her Black Barbies. It was even in her own home. Her mother had been relaxing her hair since the mid-nineties, ever since she became a dean at a small private university in Fairfield, which could have been why when nine-year-old Nella said she wanted to start doing it, too, neither parent batted an eye. They probably saw her wish as inevitable. A rite of passage, even.

  Her mother started taking Nella along on her trips to the hair salon in New Haven shortly after she started sixth grade. Together they would sit, their scalps plastered with creamy crack, their hands holding year-old issues of Essence and Terry McMillan novels. They continued this ritual together every six weeks until Nella passed her driving test, and, thanks to her editor position on her high school newspaper, started to cultivate something of a busy social life. The secondhand Subaru Legacy her uncle gave her for her sixteenth birthday granted her the ability to come and go as she pleased.

  And it was a good thing she had somewhere to go, because life as she knew it at home was deteriorating. With each passing month, her parents seemed to care less and less about pretending to enjoy being married to one another. Dinners that had once been dotted by one or two heated back-and-forths were besmeared with all-out spiteful volleys. Nella, an only child, would play referee, but with little success. Hard as Nella tried, she couldn’t prevent her parents from divorcing, as they finally would the week after she received her high school diploma. But she could keep up the facade that despite all of it, she was Good, and if you looked at her senior photo—all white teeth and makeup and shiny black straight hair that curled up just a little bit at her shoulders—you believed it. That girl was going to an exceptional university miles away from home, where she’d make some Black friends and fall in love with a Good Black Man and get an exceptional degree in English literature. If she liked UVA enough, she’d stay and get a second degree, get a teaching job at some university, marry that Black man, travel to all the continents with him, and when they were finally ready, they’d have a couple of kids.

  Nella got that first degree. But the other things that had been planned for that girl in the photo never panned out for her. She went to a couple of Black sorority parties her freshman year and they just hadn’t been Nella’s thing. She wasn’t willing to jump through all of the burning hoops that would get her picked, didn’t feel like investing all of that time (not to mention money) in acquiring a new, not entirely organic sisterhood.

  Should she have tried harder in college? Sometimes, when Nella cared to look back on those days—usually when Malaika reflected upon her time at Emory, but especially now, as Hazel looked at her with bewilderment at her inability to do flat twists—she ventured to blame the person whom she felt was even more responsible than her parents: herself. She should have kept up with the Black Student Alliance meetings and ventured out of her comfort zone more often. She should have made her first cl
ose Black friend sooner. Then, she would have learned about the wonders of natural hair far earlier before the mainstream world embraced it. Maybe Nella would have started her own literary organization for young Black women in New Haven, or spent more time marching through the streets rather than wading her way through Black Twitter for something to share.

  The list of hypotheticals, longer than each of Nella’s brown arms and legs all put together, went on to include not just hair, but love interests. If she’d had Black friends as a child, maybe she’d have gone on more than just one date with Marlon, a Black UVA classmate who’d asked her out in baggage claim after they met on a plane one holiday season. Maybe she’d feel less self-conscious about holding Owen’s hand on various subway platforms, because then, at least she’d know—even if that Black teenager across the way who was giving her side-eye didn’t—that she’d been courted and bedded by a man with the same ancestral lineage as her own at least once.

  It wasn’t until she started a new life in New York City—after so many Black people had been wrongfully killed by the police; after wrapping herself up in the writings of Huey Newton and Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon for hours on end; after seeing how extensive a Brooklyn Target’s natural Black hair-care aisle could be—that she decided to chop all her relaxed hair off and see what happened. Turned out, she liked what was underneath. What she didn’t like was how long it took her to learn this about herself.

  Nella searched for a way to tell Hazel all of this before they got to the thirteenth floor. “I know, it’s weird. Hair’s never been something I’ve been good at. It’s—”

  “It’s something you get better at as your hair gets longer,” Hazel advised with a half smile. “And I can show you some tricks. I resisted braids for a while. Scarves, too. But once I started locking my hair, they just made sense. Especially when it gets so hot…”

  Whatever judgment Nella thought she’d seen in Hazel was gone, and those painful memories of burning her scalp for beauty wafted out of the shaft. She relaxed as a few more people exited the elevator. “How long have you been locking your hair for?”

  “God, it must be like… eight years now. Best decision I’ve ever made.”

  “Really?”

  “Hell, yeah. Very low-maintenance.”

  “I bet. Yeah, sometimes I’m just too tired to twist my hair up every night, you know? But this 4C hair… you can’t just go to sleep on it all loose without expecting the next morning to be a struggle.”

  “Oh, I remember that struggle. Trust,” said Hazel. “I’m type 4B mostly, but my kitchen is 4C.”

  Nella smiled. What a thrill it was to be having this conversation in broad daylight in a Midtown building. Only one woman remained with them in the elevator, still squeezed into the far back corner even though there was no need for that anymore. A Wagner tote bag hung on her shoulder, too, although her model was from 2012. She was on the digital marketing team—Elena, Nella believed her name was, although she might’ve been confusing her with another brown-haired woman in marketing.

  Nella watched maybe-Elena thumb through her phone, seemingly deep in concentration. There were no headphones in her ears, so she’d probably heard their entire conversation, Nella realized. She closely eyed maybe-Elena’s plain, light brown bob and wondered how much Black hair talk she had ever been exposed to. Was she Googling “twisting” and “4B” and “kitchen”? Or was she altogether unmoved? Did she know this conversation had nothing to give her, and was therefore too apathetic to engage?

  The elevator doors opened on the thirteenth floor. Maybe-Elena took a left, still lost in her phone. But instead of following her, Hazel pointed right. “Okay if we stop by the kitchen first? I wanna throw my lunch in the fridge.”

  “Oh. Um…” Lord, she was so late. But being forty-five minutes late rather than forty-four couldn’t make that big of a difference, could it?

  No, it couldn’t. Nella decided to follow.

  “Anyway, next time you find yourself in Clinton Hill, let me know,” said Hazel, her gait a little too leisurely for Nella’s liking. “You live in Brooklyn, too, right?”

  “Yep. Bay Ridge.”

  “Bay Ridge, huh? Must be weird to live out there, no? It’s pretty…” The rest of her sentence went limp as a senior production editor clicked by with a stack of pages in her arms, seemingly ready to give somebody—a careless editorial assistant, perhaps—a proper talking-to.

  “Pretty white, right?” Nella finished once it was just the two of them again. “Kinda, yeah—it’s not my favorite. But it’s pretty much all we can afford right now.”

  “Ooh. ‘We’?” Hazel raised her eyebrows as they entered the kitchen. “Let me see… just judging from your tone, I gather that this is a… special roommate?”

  “Ha! Well, yeah. I guess you could call him that. He’s my—”

  “Aw, you live with your boo, don’t you? Cute! So, I’m guessing Bay Ridge was his idea, then? ’Cause, like, there are plenty of other places in Brooklyn that aren’t crazy expensive. Or crazy white. And there’s Queens…”

  “He’s pretty obsessed with Bay Ridge,” Nella said. “He has this weird nostalgic love for Saturday Night Fever, even though it came out way before he was born.”

  Hazel, who’d been poking around the refrigerator, stuck her head out from behind the door long enough to say, “Ah, so he must be Italian,” then disappeared again.

  “A whopping twenty-five percent,” Nella said slyly, “although that’s not really—”

  “He knows where twenty-five percent of him comes from? Lucky him,” Hazel remarked once she’d finally found a home for her salad. They started walking toward their desks. “White boyfriends are always such a trip.”

  Nella perked up. Was Hazel speaking from firsthand experience, or just assuming? “If you don’t mind me asking,” she started, “is Manny w—?”

  “Ah! There you are, Nella. Finally.”

  Vera was standing above Nella’s desk with a manic gleam in her eye, cheeks flushed, hands planted firmly on her hips. Her terse smile suggested that she was trying not to lose it, and had been trying for quite some time. “Hi, Hazel.”

  Hazel slipped into her desk chair and murmured a soft hello.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Nella said, searching for an excuse that she couldn’t find.

  “Yes. Next time, please send me an email, a text, a smoke signal… something. Just so I know. Okay? Thanks. I mean, the morning has been insane.”

  Nella was speechless. Yes, she could have sent her an email. But she had been late to the office a handful of times in the two years she’d worked at Wagner—both reasonably and unreasonably—and none of these prior infractions had ever warranted such a showy confrontation. Sure, Nella had realized she was going to be about twenty minutes late when she got on the train, and when she got off the train, and when she stopped in the lobby to chat with Hazel and India. She’d again noticed it in the elevator, somewhere between the second and third floor. But Vera usually spent the early part of the morning inside of her office with her door closed, taking advantage of that time to accomplish the things she never could once everyone began to float in and out of her office for all sorts of reasons—to ask for editorial advice or opinions on a new cover design; to introduce new hires; to shoot the shit.

  That morning, however—for Colin-related reasons, Nella suspected—Vera’s door was wide open. And as far as she was concerned, the opinions she had aired out during the Shartricia conversation were still very much alive and dancing in the air between them like little hell-bent demons.

  Perhaps sensing the demons, too, Hazel—in that same respectful whisper she’d used for her hello—volunteered a complaint about New York City’s muddled subway system. “We were just talking about how we both had problems this morning—someone threw themselves on the tracks, I think. My train was stuck underground for twenty minutes, easily.”

  Nella stole a quick glance at Maisy’s darkened office. The only person who would call
Hazel out for being so late wasn’t even in the office yet, but Hazel had helped Nella out anyway. She made a note to thank her later and added, “Mine took twenty-five. In the tunnel.”

  “In the tunnel,” Vera repeated.

  “Y-yes. In the tunnel.” Nella’s temperature rose a few degrees, a by-product of either the lie she’d just told or Vera’s I don’t believe you stare. She suddenly remembered that her sweater was still on, so she slipped it off and dropped her stuff on top of her chair.

  Vera bit her lip before breaking the silence. “All good.” All was not good, but she moved on to briskly ask Nella if she’d print out two copies of Needles and Pins. Then she disappeared into her office and closed the door.

  Nella looked over at Hazel’s desk. Hazel looked back at her.

  “Oof. What was that about?”

  So, she hadn’t heard. Fine. Nella cast a glance at Vera’s closed door to make sure it was completely shut. Then she rolled over to Hazel’s desk.

  “Colin flipped,” she whispered. “He went batshit.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I was real with him about Shartricia. I decided to be honest, like we talked about at Nico’s. He said I called him a racist. Just like I thought he would.”

  “Well, did you?”

  “Of fucking course I didn’t call him a racist,” Nella said, offended Hazel could think she’d make such a heinous mistake. “But he got the impression that I did, and I can’t undo that. It wasn’t my finest moment, but I apologized when he finally came back from the bathroom.”

  Colin had returned to Vera’s office about twenty minutes later, his cap restored, his jaw squared, and his eyes more than a little bit red. I’m sorry that you thought I was calling you a racist, Nella had conceded, trying her best to move her mouth without vomiting. The words had felt flat on her tongue, like she was apologizing to a man for pulling out her pepper spray on him after he’d followed too closely behind her on an empty street. But she’d said it. Because at the end of the day, she was sorry—just for slightly different reasons.