The Other Black Girl(28)
“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 close 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.