The Other Black Girl(83)
Leonard ventured to catch Amy’s eye and bow his head, but he said nothing. A member of the old guard of senior-level employees at Wagner, Leonard had headed the design department for nearly four decades, even won numerous awards for his innovative work on covers for books that would become classics. But he seemed truly, deeply unhappy, carried a limited number of smiles around in his pocket—at least when he was at the office—and only whipped them out at very particular occasions. Nella was quite positive he kept the majority of his smiles to himself, when he was alone in his office, door closed, creative gears turning.
Nella studied Leonard for a bit longer, taking in his unassuming checkered shirt, the golf pencil behind his ear, the gray hair that would have grown in patches on his scalp if he didn’t shave it regularly. His head, which almost always hung low. She was quite certain that he made three times what she made, probably more than that. She was also pretty sure that he didn’t have any children. Why didn’t he just retire? Was he simply holding on until he could physically hold on no longer? How could someone be so settled, but so clearly miserable?
Amy broke the awkward silence that had befallen the meeting since she posed her question. “Great. Vera, we’ve got some really awesome cover proposals for you this morning! You’re going to love them all, I promise. Len, hon, want to show us what you came up with for Needles and Pins?”
“Yes! Show me what ya got, Leonard!” Vera gave him a forceful wink, a peace offering after all the Sam Lewis drama she’d thrown his way. Nella found it unnatural, but there was an ever-so-slight decrease in Leonard’s hunch.
“Sure.” He unearthed a manila folder that had been sitting in his lap and showily pulled out three glossy pieces of paper. He stood and placed each page on the table, spinning them around so that they were facing Vera, with a slight tilt toward Richard.
“So, I’ve done up a few different approaches here,” Leonard said, swaying just a tiny bit left and a tiny bit right. “These first two are along a similar vein of his last few books: minimalistic, striking color dichotomies, sans serif. If we want to keep with the branding we started doing for him in 2011, we may want to go this route. I think readers who are used to his books looking a certain way—and readers who like having books that look like they belong together—will flock to something simple like this: melon-red words against a black backdrop.”
Should’ve made the words chartreuse, thought Nella sourly.
“Nice,” said Vera.
“The black background definitely works well with this topic. It’s desolate. It’s despair. It’s the opioid crisis,” added Josh.
Nella rolled her eyes at her lap.
“And then we have one other option, in case he decides he wants to completely dismantle the format that worked for his last few books. Here. This one isn’t even a little bit close to the route we’ve traditionally taken with Colin’s books, but I think it might be worth exploring.”
Nella looked at the piece of paper that Leonard was pointing at. Its background was a watercolor rendering of the American flag, with illustrations of various faces weaved among the red and white stripes so that only pieces of faces were visible.
Immediately, Nella was drawn to the third one—how fragmented, how disjointed it looked. She leaned forward to examine the faces more closely, a decent indicator, she recognized, that someone might be inclined to do this in a bookstore. But suddenly she felt herself recoil, moving backward in her seat as quickly as she’d moved forward.
That was when she really saw it: The dark brown face. The wide nose. The thick lips. The wide-open, almost frightened eyes. The wild tufts of black hair pulled into Bantu knots. All presented in pieces, scattered among the stripes, but placed front and center.
Shartricia.
Hesitant, Nella peered over at the cover again to confirm that her gut had been right. No other character in the novel had been featured quite as prominently as the Black one. Shartricia was the most realized, the loudest on the page.
Nella glanced up across the table at Hazel, who raised her pierced eyebrow in reply.
“We’re thinking it could be smart to go for a new approach here,” Amy explained as Vera took in the two nontraditional covers with some hesitation. “This opioid crisis has been so debilitating to this country. It has painted so many Americans as being less than human. We thought that if consumers picked up this book and saw the array of people Colin writes about on the cover itself, they’d be inclined to spend more time with it.”
“I see.” Vera nodded, although she still didn’t seem too convinced. Her eyes were still trained on the cover. “Well, I will say, it really is a… different approach. Much more artistic than the others.”
“And with artsy covers, it can sometimes be a risk,” Josh said. “But I really dig this—from a marketing perspective at least. Did anyone see that recent article in BookCenter about how few books have characters of color on the cover?” Nella held her hand up directly in Josh’s line of vision, but he ignored it. “This is going to stand out from the pack. It’ll definitely be a draw for broader audiences of today—sort of like we discussed at our marketing meeting. But it also looks back unflinchingly on the past, forcing us to reckon with our country’s racist roots.”
You think so? Nella thought, scratching at an itch that had been set off by Josh’s showboating speech. She glanced across the table at Hazel again. But this time, Hazel was looking at Amy.