The Other Black Girl(117)
No. It was none of these times.
As Nella regarded herself in the mirror one last time, she realized—with great despair—that the answer was never.
Epilogue
January 2019
Scope Magazine
Portland, Oregon
What does this mean for the rest of us? For those of us who are fighting fair, showing up first, and clocking out last? For those of us who are doing the heavy lifting, providing domestic and/or emotional labor, armed with nothing but our dignity?
It means, my sisters, we must stay focused. We must come together. And we must continue to resist.
I hit Save and leaned back in my chair. It looked good—not just the last paragraph, but all of it. I’d scraped out my soul and grafted it to every sentence of this article over the last few days. Finally, it felt ready for fresh eyes.
I opened a new email, eyeing first the clock, then the dark patch of glass above Gwen’s door. I still had time to send this OBG piece to her and take a short reading break before researching my next article. Or, I imagined, my fingers flying across the keyboard, Gwen will prioritize this piece and reassign that basic coffee bean article to some other newbie. As long as Gwen came in during the next hour, I’d have edits by four, we’d do another round or two of revisions by six, Ralph in legal would review my evidence, and once we got the okay, it’d be online by five a.m. the next morning—just in time for East Coast commuters in need of reading material to gobble it down on their way to work.
I grinned as I attached the file to the email in a couple of smooth clicks. Black Twitter would go crazy when this got out. The NAACP would probably hold a press conference; CNN, a primetime special. Jesse Watson would have a field day; this was probably enough to pull him out of his hiatus. And every workplace in America would go into crisis mode. For a while, maybe years, Black people wouldn’t know which Black people to trust. It would be hard. But things would right themselves out in time. And in the meantime, maybe my career would really right itself. No more newbie shit, no more having to prove myself. After this article went viral, I’d be a household name, go on all sorts of television shows and podcasts, and—
A household name. Shit.
My cursor lingered over the Send button, a slow, steady sense of impending world annihilation rolling into my wrist. Once I hit Send, there would be no turning back. It would all be out there, whether Gwen decided to publish it or not: Screenshots of conversations; a log of Nella sightings. Photos, even—a selfie I’d posted to my Instagram story just seconds before Eva hugged me goodbye at Pepper’s, cropped to fit next to the photo I’d taken of her at Rise & Grind. A point-by-point account of how I’d been able to slip away from the entire OBG mess without either side, Lynn or Hazel, knowing where I’d gone. The piece was thoroughly seasoned with undeniable evidence that was supposed to stay hidden because, as Lynn often reminded us, “Premature sharing is risky. We need to have absolute, definite proof. Otherwise they’ll think we’re delusional.”
Lynn had had a point. But she wasn’t why I didn’t immediately hit Send. Kendra Rae was. She was the one who’d talked one of them into letting me go. If you let us be, then we let you be, she’d promised. Everything stays quiet. I owed it to her to keep my mouth shut and wait for further instruction.
But that had been three months ago. Where was she?
I closed my eyes. A lot could happen in three months. For Kendra Rae, a lot had happened in less time than that. When I last saw her, she seemed ready to pull away from Lynn’s mission. “It’s too late to stop Diana,” she’d said, after our Uber driver had asked me which airline he should be looking for. “She’s been compromised for far too long, and I just don’t see the Resistance getting ahead of this anymore. Pandora’s box done been busted wide open.”
“We’ll show the world what’s flown out of it, then,” I said. “You were lying to the OBGs about keeping quiet. Weren’t you?”
“No,” Kendra Rae had said. “Well… not really. We do need to keep quiet for a little while. Let this unfold. We’ll keep an eye on the Hazels of the country, watch them rise to the top of their fields. Once that’s happened… we’ll cut these OBGs off from their supply.”
It sounded too obvious. Too easy. “Really? What does Lynn think?”
“Lynn isn’t a part of this plan,” Kendra Rae said firmly. “She could have done more sooner to prevent Nella from going under, but she didn’t.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with that. I’d shifted uncomfortably in my seat as we entered the exit that would take us to Departures, an ascending plane visible through the dirty glass window. “Cut them off how, if Diana’s compromised? And there’s no way Richard Wagner is going to—”
“I know someone else. Just trust me.”
“But Lynn…”
Lynn was going to leave you there, she’d said, and speaking candidly, I wouldn’t have blamed her. What you did was stupid.
My eyes popped open and found the email. I tapped my finger lightly on the mouse. Clicking Send could blow it all open. It could get us some real detectives so that we wouldn’t have to keep playing Carmen Sandiego. This could close the book on everything.
Or it could open a new chapter—one involving me. This article could spoil not just whatever Kendra Rae was supposedly planning, but my fresh start, too. Was I really going to jeopardize my new job, my new life, for something that wasn’t 100 percent guaranteed to work? Was I really going to take orders from someone who didn’t have my best interests at heart, again?