The Other Black Girl(93)
That wasn’t how it quite happened, though. To my surprise, Dick had been right. Kenny and I were perfectly fine on our own. Not perfectly fine—perfectly incredible. Everything started to come together: the story, the publicity, the positioning. Kenny took Burning Heart and elevated it to new, fantastic heights—heights I hadn’t even imagined when I’d first started writing it back at Howard. “You’re playing the short game with this draft, Di,” Kenny had written in her first set of notes back to me. “You need to be playing the long game. Write for yourself, nobody else. Pull no punches with Evie. Give her more breath.”
I did. And after a few more revisions, we were able to come up with a book that readers devoured. It was hard to find a copy of Burning Heart in any library or bookstore after it came out, and when high schools started banning it for its explicit, occasionally gruesome content—it was the time of Reagan, after all—its comparisons to Native Son caused book clubs to spring up in unexpected places: white suburban homes, but also Black lower-and middle-class homes, too. Apparently, something about two Black women—one light, one dark, both college graduates—had captured the heart of America.
I clicked out of the article and clicked open the latest spreadsheet of young Black women who needed fixing. Teachers at a women’s college in Atlanta, I noticed. The thought was unappealing—women’s colleges were new territory for us, and we didn’t have as much experience working with fortysomethings as we did with twenty-and thirty-year-olds—but if Dick hadn’t told the dean no, I couldn’t, either.
I hit Print, spun my chair around, and glanced out the window, comforted by the mechanical sounds of hidden gears and shifting paper. But rather than the cool, sparkling blue water of the McMillan Reservoir, I saw Kenny the last time I’d seen her: her sickly brown face held in place by flat, glassy eyes. A dull, monotonous voice. The effect was supposed to be a purely temperamental one; Imani had promised me that. But we were both frighteningly optimistic then, I suppose. Neither of us could know it would take her years to fashion a less harsh formula.
A ding signaled a finished print job—the most recent of many. Sometimes, when Dick gave me assignments that seemed particularly difficult, I contemplated getting out. Telling Dick that he’d have to find himself a new connect—something he’d never be able to do because Imani had always been good about keeping her lab affairs on lock. But how could I do that to him? Dick took care of me after Kenny disappeared. He’d connected me with a new publisher so I could have a clean slate. He’d helped me land the talk shows, the television adaptations, the movie deals.
Most importantly, he’d funded the whole thing. Once I got him to believe it would work.
“I know, I know,” I’d said into the phone that winter night in 1983, keeping one ear attuned to Elroy’s snores in the next room. “The whole thing sounds unlikely.”
“More like impossible. What Kendra Rae needs to do is just suck it up. Apologize for what she said and be grateful for what we’ve all been able to achieve here so that we can get back to business as usual. I’ve got four—no, five authors who’ve told me they’re holding on to their work until Kendra Rae gets with the program. One of them is Black, too, you may be interested to know.”
“But Kenny’s not going to say she’s sorry,” I’d said, not taking the bait. I hadn’t wanted to know who the sellout author was. “She’d literally do anything else on this earth instead of say sorry, even if it means being blackballed from the entire industry. We both know that. And we both know where she’s coming from, right? You’ve said it yourself how suffocating this place can be. If you were in her shoes—”
“I wouldn’t be. I’d never shit where I eat, and it serves the damn bitch right.”
“Jesus, Dick. She’s been getting death threats. Everybody’s been putting her through the ringer, and—”
“Oh, she’s being put through the ringer? After all the crap she told people about the ‘frigid racial climate’ here, you think she’s the one being put through the ringer?”
This was why I’d approached him about this topic over the phone: I knew just the mention of her name would set him off, and I knew that his explosion would make me want to hit him, hard. It wasn’t that he didn’t have empathy. No. It was that he used it as a weapon whenever it benefited him. I knew this firsthand.
But could I judge him for that? Just because I’d spent so many of those days whispering into his neck about how guilty I felt leaving Kenny to fend for herself didn’t excuse me from the fact that I had. I hadn’t spoken out against her, but I hadn’t defended her, either, because I’d known it was in everyone’s best interest not to get involved.
“Alright,” Dick said. “If she’s not going to apologize, then you know what you need to do.”
“We’ve been over this. I’m not denouncing her, either.”
“Why not?”
“That’d never work. Some Black people will see me as a traitor and they won’t buy my book if I do that. Look,” I’d said practically, “do you want to end the media circus or not?”
I’d imagined Dick sticking his pinky in his ear and giving it a little turn, a tick I’d never gotten used to, not even after watching him come so many different ways, so many times, with the most inscrutable of expressions.