The Other Black Girl(26)
My eyes caught her lipstick, newly reapplied. “Where’s Elroy?” I asked pointedly. “Is he here yet?”
But Diana pretended not to hear. “So, he’s a yuppie who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Okay, fine. So, he took some convincing. But he is not representative of every single white man you’ve ever met. I mean, come on. Have you ever seen another white man do all of this for a couple of Black women nobody has ever heard of?
“Plus, remember what I’ve always said,” Diana added, trying unsuccessfully to whisper in my ear. “We use them until we don’t need to use them no longer. Plain and simple.”
Plain and simple. Of course she’d say that. How many white men, really, had Diana been forced to stomach in her everyday life? She’d gotten her bachelor’s at Howard, her PhD at Howard, and she had stayed there to teach. The white gatekeepers hadn’t been shoved in her face nearly as much as they’d been shoved in mine. At a historically Black college, Diana had been granted the blessed gift of tunnel vision. She’d been blessed with the ability to forget white people existed, if only for a little while.
I had been blessed with being smothered by them.
Diana never understood that, though, and there was no way I could ever tell her this. Not point-blank. Because it would mean telling her she’d been right when we were sitting on my stoop in ’68, holding all of our acceptance letters in our hands. That attending any place that wasn’t Howard or Hampton was a mistake. That I hadn’t been as strong as I’d thought I would be.
No, Diana would never stop trying to convince me to lay off on trying to sabotage this night. So I put on a happy face and backed away toward the bar. “I’ll have two more drinks,” I said, “and I’ll meet you guys in ten.”
“With a smile?”
I held up my empty glass. “With a big fucking smile.”
6
August 29, 2018
It was no surprise Nella’s day ended on a bad note. After all, it started off on one.
To be fair, that was Nella’s fault. Anybody with half the will to be employed knew that stepping on the toes and fingers of one of Wagner’s bestselling authors, then showing up to work forty-five minutes late the following day, was downright reckless.
Nevertheless—out of fear, mostly—Nella spent too much of the morning trying to convince herself to get out of bed, and even more of the morning allowing Owen to convince her that no, her decision to be upfront with Vera and Colin had not been a bad one.
In fact, he found the whole situation hilarious.
“The image of him dabbing his eyes with that soggy, expensive-ass hat… it’s just… it’s just too good,” he said, laughing.
Nella finally slid out of bed and started rifling through her drawers for something to wear. “But you should have seen their faces, baby.”
“I didn’t need to. I’ve seen white guilt enough to know what it looks like.”
Nella couldn’t help herself. “In the bathroom mirror, you mean?”
“After we watched Twelve Years a Slave, I mean,” said Owen, without missing a beat. “It only lasted a few seconds, though, and then it went down the drain with the hand soap.”
Nella jumped up and down in order to get her freshly lotioned leg into her favorite pair of jeans. “That was fast! Remind me to make you watch the entire Roots miniseries next February,” she teased, nearly teetering headfirst into her dresser.
Owen had groaned and rolled over on his side, even though they both knew he had no qualms about watching Roots—or reading it, for that matter, if that proposition had also been on the table. He was more than happy to be inundated with “Black Thangs,” as Nella called them, either through the Black literature and film canons, or straight from Nella herself as she recapped her day-to-day feelings—which was the case on the morning after the Colin Incident. Owen was always ready to discuss the latest hot-button issue circulating on Twitter: blackface, underrepresentation, police shootings of unarmed Black men and women. But it was because he was never too eager—he didn’t feel the need to call all of the things racist all of the time, like a few of the white men she’d dated and known before him—that made Nella trust him the most. He had nothing to prove; he was perfectly content that his worldview, established thirty years earlier by a lesbian couple in Denver and glued in place by a daily viewing of Democracy Now!, had set him on the right course.
Such bedrock had also enabled Owen to blaze a path of his own—one that allowed him to be his own boss at a startup company called App-terschool Learning. Nella knew little about this startup, besides that it had to do with mentorship and connecting underprivileged teens. She also knew that it permitted Owen to leave their Bay Ridge apartment whenever he felt like it and work from home when he didn’t—a luxury she wished she had more often than not.
“But seriously, Nell,” Owen said, still lying on his side, his voice muffled by the bedding. “You’re going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine. This will all blow over in, like, five days.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” Nella paused, her stick of deodorant poised mid-application, and waited for Owen to flip over and look back at her. She hadn’t intended for her words to come out as loaded as they did, but they had, and now it was too late to deny what was weighing them down: the fact that Owen was a white cis male who would never have many of the conversations she did, unless they ended up having children one day. What she’d really been trying to say, simply, was that he would never be able to understand the bizarre world of publishing the way she did. The gang of characters at Wagner was incredibly peculiar, but on the whole, their actions and subtle microaggressions seemed harmless to an outsider. Shucks, I’ve seen worse behavior in other office environments, Owen would more or less say, then cite a disgruntled employee of his own who’d peed in several Disney character thermoses and left them in an old boss’s office overnight.