The Other Black Girl(11)
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.”