The Other Black Girl(7)
“No,” Nella had admitted, “I guess pretty much every editor has been stingy about upward mobility—even for the white assistants.”
“Well, there you go.”
“So… we don’t think it’s a race thing?” Nella still wasn’t convinced.
“Hell, yeah. That’s a factor, too. She’s protecting what’s hers for as long as she can… you know, the way some white people insist on only reproducing with other white people because they want to preclude the population of mixed-race babies that’s obviously gonna rule the country by 2045. But here’s what I say to myself whenever Igor gives me shit at work about little things that don’t really matter, like his Twitter bio. Girl—I’m saying this to you now, Nell, not me—you are a double threat. You understand me? You’re not just Black, you’re Black and you’re young. And if she’s smart—and she must be, since she’s been doing this for what, thirty years?” Malaika paused, continuing only after Nella confirmed this with a nod. “If she’s smart, she knows that girls like you…” She smiled a small, silly smile. “And me… are the future.”
Nella had appreciated this sentiment enough to laugh and clink her glass with Malaika’s as she had many times before. There in that indistinguishable restaurant, tucked away beneath the less-trafficked folds of the Lower East Side, the talk had felt like a warm, fuzzy Snuggie. But now, in the bright light of Vera’s large office, one window glaring out onto Central Park—hours after Nella had struggled to read a white man’s bizarre depiction of a pregnant Black opioid addict—she was beginning to feel a chill. And the source of it seemed to be her boss.
“Did anything land the way it shouldn’t have?” Nella repeated. “Well, um, the characters were pretty solid. But there were one or two that didn’t quite work for me.”
“Okay. Say more,” Vera pressed, knitting her eyebrows more tightly together.
Nella didn’t want to say more, but if there was one thing Vera didn’t like, it was people who were afraid to say more. Especially women. It was partly why she’d hired Nella, Vera once told her at a holiday party, after partaking in a little too much nog. She had found Nella’s literary tastes “raw and bold and unique” when they’d first met. Which was pretty funny, since after meeting Vera for the first time, Nella had been sure she’d blown the interview entirely.
Nerves… Nella had had many of them. They’d hovered around logistics, like potential MTA mishaps and navigational failures and the worry that the inch-long run in the crotch of her stockings wouldn’t make it through another wear. But she’d also worried that she and Vera would have zero chemistry. She’d never really worked a proper Manhattan office job. She didn’t know what to expect, save for what she’d seen in television shows and movies, and a part of her deeply worried that all of the things she’d seen—severe hierarchy, homogeneity, and rigidity—were true. Nella had grown accustomed to working behind bars and coffee counters, which spoiled her with exposure to all kinds of people with all kinds of occupations. Such jobs had also allowed her to wear whatever she wanted, whereas she didn’t think she could have shown up to her interview with Vera wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt.
So, the morning of her interview, Nella erred on the side of caution: Twenty-dollar no-frills flats from Payless that, if necessary, would enable her to chase after a stray train. On her deep-brown legs she’d worn her favorite pair of old black stockings underneath her most conservative blue dress; on her shoulder, a tote bag she’d snagged from the Nation’s booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival the year before—just for a little touch of personality.
Thankfully, the MTA gods were good to her. Her train arrived exactly when the sign said it would, and as it whisked her out of Bay Ridge into Manhattan, she felt comfortable enough to lose herself in an editorial assistant blog she’d been following for years. Forty minutes later, she found herself on the street, just one block away from Wagner. She was waiting for a light to change, mentally patting herself on the back for being almost fifteen minutes early and just all-around interview-ready, when she looked down and nearly screamed. The run in the crotch of her stockings had traversed the length of her leg, all the way down to her ankle.
That had done it. Any confidence she’d felt from the sunshine and the perfectly timed train dispersed. You gotta be twice as good, remember? she’d chided herself. She couldn’t remember who’d said it to her first, or if it had ever been said directly to her at all, but that didn’t stop her from telling herself over and over again that her brown skin meant she needed to be twice as good as the girl with white skin, and that this giant run would do her in.
The twice as good mantra did not go away—not when she reached the front desk and completely blanked on Vera’s last name; not when she went for a hug and Vera went for a handshake at the door; and certainly not when she used the word “literally” three times in two sentences. Therefore, when Vera called a week later to say that she believed Nella would be the perfect addition to Wagner’s editorial team, she’d been stunned. There had to have been another candidate with wholly intact stockings and a firm grasp of the word “literally.” Or, surely, a white Ivy League grad who seemed like he or she had potential to do great things.