The Other Black Girl(76)
Nella shrugged and said the only thing she could think to say: “There was no mention of the n-word.”
“But… still.”
In that moment, Nella remembered Hazel’s grandfather, the one who’d died in the protest in ’61. But still, indeed.
“And you haven’t gotten any notes like that, right?”
“Nope. But you know what? Now that I think about it, I did recently overhear some people in the ladies’ room talking about your whole thing with Colin. They sounded pretty upset by it.”
“News travels pretty fast at Wagner.”
“Yeah. I get the feeling, though, that if you maybe just apologized to Colin, it would all fizzle out. Just think of it as an exercise in code-switching.”
Nella prickled. “I’m thinking about it.”
“Good. You know what? Forget HR. You should just go straight to Richard about the notes. Just so he knows what’s going on. Maybe,” Hazel said, her voice growing with excitement, “he could even incorporate what you’re going through into some sort of diversity discussion among all of Wagner’s employees. Turn it into a teaching moment, kind of. The Colin thing, too.”
Nella was going to shake her head and say that no, that sounded like an absolutely terrible idea, but she now had no clue what was and wasn’t a terrible idea anymore.
“Alright… well, I know it’s getting late, so have a good night.” Hazel looked over her shoulder to track Richard down again. Once she found him, though, she didn’t budge.
Nella didn’t, either. She was too busy taking stock of Hazel’s movements. Something hadn’t felt quite right about this exchange—the whole night, really. But then she heard her name called behind her, followed by the sucking of teeth.
“See you tomorrow,” Nella said, turning to join her friends. “And thanks for the grease.”
Shani
September 27, 2018
Joe’s Barbershop
Rules. The Resistance had so many rules. But none were drilled as deeply into us as the two most important ones: Stay off the grid, and Don’t tell anybody anything.
Right after I told Lynn I’d come to New York, she spent the better part of an hour telling me why I had to promise her I’d adhere to these two fundamental rules. Maybe longer. However long it was, by the time she finally finished, I’d started to wonder if I really did want to fuck with the Resistance, if they were gonna be so uptight about everything.
But then she sent me the list of Eva’s ever-changing identities, the map documenting her wild trajectory, and the destruction she always somehow managed to leave in her wake. That was enough for me. I deleted Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. I cut off years’ worth of hair. Years. And I told Ma my reason for leaving Boston as quickly as I did was because I’d experienced something “unspeakably racist” at work. I want to start over, I told her, and what better place to start over than New York?
Ma was surprisingly chill when I gave her the news. I figured she would be—she had “started over” her own share of times, one of them being when she moved to Detroit shortly after getting pregnant with me. She always said when I was a kid that New York had been her number one option. “We would’ve ended up in Queens with your aunt Whitney, tried to make a life out there,” she’d said. “But I couldn’t do it.”
Ma didn’t ask me too many questions when I told her not just that I could do it, but that I was going to. I already had a ticket. And when it came time for my aunt Whitney to pick me up from Penn Station, her eyes flickering from mine to my shaved head then back to my eyes without a word, she didn’t ask me any questions, either.
I was glad for that. I didn’t know how long I could stay quiet if Aunt Whit had asked me why my long, beautiful hair could no longer be woven into a braid that went down to my butt. Or—if our Skype connection had been less fuzzy—if Ma had caught on to the remnants of something awful in my eyes. Just one little “what’s wrong” would have ended me then, because my exit from Cooper’s was still hot and fresh in my mind. The betrayal. The shame. The underhandedness of Eva sneakily emailing that article to everyone at Cooper’s right when I was on the most important phone call of my career… which explained why I didn’t see it, which explained why when Anna yanked me into her office, I had no clue what she was so mad about.
God. What an idiot I must’ve seemed like, sitting in her expansive glass office with a goofy, uneasy smile on my face after she’d told me to pack my things. “But I just now got someone from the Boston Housing Authority on the phone,” I’d told Anna. “Four different people living in public housing signed on to talk to me. What’s going to happen to that piece? We were going to position it as being the Feature of February.”
But you need me, I was saying in no uncertain terms, because who else will write the Black Stories? Who else will bring in Boston’s Black Voices for you?
“We’ll find someone else for that article,” Anna had said. “Besides, I can’t imagine you’d be happy here one more day, working for a bunch of—what was it you called us? ‘Vampiric, self-important white saviors whose definition of diversity is writing about Black and brown people who do nothing but hurt and heal?’?”
She’d thrown this last sentence at me so fast that I could feel it in the back of my throat, obstructing my windpipe. It was a direct quote, one I’d said just the evening before. At Pepper’s. To Eva.