The Other Black Girl(29)
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—”