The Other Black Girl(64)

This information sat strangely in my stomach, threatening to come back up with the wine I’d had for lunch. Desperately, I clicked Hazel’s photo. Her dreadlocks were her most prominent feature; next in line was how socially involved she was. But her timeline said she’d been at Wagner for barely two months.

Either Richard had experienced a massive change of heart, or, more likely, he had An Angle. Why else would he give so much money and publicly post that he couldn’t wait “to support the importance of increasing diversity in publishing”? This was the same man who had invited me over for dinner my first week at Wagner so his fancy white wife could tell me, “woman to woman,” that I’d never make it in publishing if I didn’t tame my hair and talk like I was from Northampton, not Newark. The same man who told me a couple of years later that Burning Heart seemed “too niche” to find a real audience, but that Diana was pretty enough, and I was smart enough, and if Black people could be international pop stars, then we would certainly get some traction.

The same man who’d angled his way into our spotlight the moment it became a bestseller.

I considered this young woman’s dreadlocks, her hand on her hip. Was Richard sleeping with her? It was a shameful thought, but not a far-fetched one. She didn’t have that soft, easy glow he’d always gravitated toward, though. Hazel was emitting something else entirely.

He couldn’t possibly. She wouldn’t possibly. She seemed too strong for him. Too… solid.

But so had Diana.

All of a sudden, my legs went to work on their own, sweeping me into my living room and leaving me at the mahogany bookshelf I’d purchased from a tag sale shortly after moving to Catskill. I was running a finger across the worn-out spines of books I’d collected over the last fifty years when I finally realized what I’d come here for.

Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison whispered at me to pick them up, give them another spin, but I resisted the temptation and dropped to my knees for a better view of the bottom row. There was Gordon Parks’s memoir, a biography of Billie Holiday, and a collection of other books about Black creatives. I’d never understood people who alphabetized their libraries; I only believed in arranging mine by themes—and even that could be tricky. So, I read every spine, scanning the old issues of JET and Ebony until I found a spine too small to read.

There.

I reached for the thin slice of pages prudently, wary of keeping its fiftysomething-year-old spine intact. This was it: the old theater program from the performances of Amiri Baraka’s The Slave and The Toilet that my parents had taken me to see when I was fourteen years old. I held it in my hands for a few moments, recalling how many times my father reminded me during that ride to St. Mark’s Playhouse that Baraka was from Newark, too. Then I opened the program, stuck my hand in the flap, and unearthed the photo proof I hadn’t looked at in years.

There we were, Diana and me, posing for a magazine cover that never was. I was in black and she in rose, and we both had shoulder pads so sharp you could’ve cut your finger on them. The photographer had suggested we put our fists in the air, which we both thought was too corny, so we’d agreed to stand back-to-back with our arms crossed and our eyebrows raised—because for whatever reason, that had seemed like the more natural pose at the time. At the bottom of the page, written across our brown ankles, were the words “A New Era in Publishing?”

The punctuation of the title aggravated me now as much as it did then. Why present it as a question? I’d asked the editor in chief. The fact that we were going to be on the cover of a prestigious magazine had made it so. To me, at least.

But then I opened my mouth. Then, they pulled the cover. And what had become of this so-called new era?

I placed the proof and the program on the couch and returned to the kitchen. Just ten minutes ago, I’d wanted to reach inside my phone and tell this stranger that being an editor wasn’t worth it—that if she wasn’t careful, she might turn into someone like me. Or worse.

At the same time, I’d wanted to smash the phone against the wall.

I didn’t. Instead, I focused on the Jacob Lawrence print again, on the sturdy Black arms that would push a cart of library books for an eternity, maybe longer. And I called Lynn.





Part III


12


September 26, 2018

Malaika held a tuft of synthetic 4B hair that had been dyed powder blue up to her hairline. “You know she’s trying to fuck with you, right?” she asked, leaning toward one of the mirrors that bookmarked the aisle of hair dye products. “That’s all it is. She’s trying to fuck with you.”

Nella reached for yet another hair product, held it up to the light, and squinted. They’d walked through the front door of Curl Central almost ten minutes ago, but her eyes still hadn’t adjusted enough to its low lighting to read the jar labels from a reasonable distance. “?‘Good Vibes,’ this one is called. Supposedly, massaging this product in your scalp two times a day will make you feel ‘good vibes, good fun, and have an all-around good time. Perfect for the beach, the bar, or for just bingeing Netflix in your living room.’?”

Malaika snorted. “How about for the office? Because it sounds like your place needs some good vibes. Those coworkers of yours might need some, too.”

Nella imagined herself handing Sophie a jar of Good Vibes hair grease, pictured her smoothing it in between her two French braids in the ladies’ room. If such a carefree response had felt readily available to her, she might have laughed. But she didn’t. A touch of embarrassment from the marketing meeting earlier that day—and her subsequent breakdown—brushed her cheeks. She hadn’t told Malaika she’d actually called the anonymous person earlier that day, and she didn’t plan on doing so anytime soon. Malaika would judge her if she knew, and rightfully so.