“Love Jones?” Hazel guessed.
Richard slapped his thigh. “Indeed! This feels quite like that movie.”
Hazel supported his claim while Nella studied him through watchful eyes. The man looked downright moved. Like he might cry. What do you know about Love Jones? a vexed Angela Davis asked in Nella’s head. Not a damn thing.
But Nella didn’t dare utter a word. Maybe he had a soft spot for ’90s rom-coms, or for Nia Long.
Or… maybe Richard was dating his own Nia Long. Maybe Kenny’s agent—his mistress—was of the melanin persuasion. Nella grinned in spite of herself as Hazel said to Richard, “Isn’t this space great? I’ve been compiling a mental list of all of the authors we could have here for readings and stuff, if you’d like to talk about it.”
“Let’s plan on it. How about before the week ends?”
Nella breathed out a loud, fake yawn, made a show of buttoning her jacket. “Well, it’s getting late.”
Richard nodded as he turned his attention to something on the wall behind her.
Curious, Nella turned to see what was so important. It was a large poster of a beautiful woman with bone-straight, just-blow-dried hair. A beautiful ebony woman.
“Um… I’m going to head home now,” Nella said. “Nice to see you both.”
She lingered as long as her dignity would let her, which happened to be the same amount of time it took Richard to point to the poster, turn to Hazel, and ask, “Does this woman work here?”
Nella ambled away, queasy. The snub stung more than Vera’s or even India’s had, because it hadn’t just been a snub. It was a slap on the wrist, a punishment, an answer to the question that had been bugging her for weeks: Yes, Richard had heard about her problems with Colin’s book—maybe from Vera, but also quite possibly from Hazel, too. I wish all of our editorial assistants worked as hard as you, he used to say to her in that first year, a glow in his eye whenever he saw her burning the midnight oil at her desk. Vera’s very lucky to have you.
The sentiment seemed to have blown away in the wind.
Feeling a bit out of whack, Nella scanned the room until she spotted her boyfriend and best friend. They waved at her, thrilled at the prospect of leaving, before abruptly lowering their hands. Owen leaned over and murmured something to Malaika, who shook her head and closed her eyes.
Nella felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Hey—girl?”
Nella spun around. It was Hazel again. She was holding a small, bright blue jar in her hands that hadn’t been there before. “I meant to give this to you before you left,” she said, handing it over. “Remember how you were talking about how dry your ends get in the fall? This will help with that.”
Nella accepted it, turning it around in her hands beneath the overhead light closest to her. There was no label, no ingredients listed. Just the blue of the plastic. “What’s this?” she asked, unscrewing the cap and sniffing the jar’s contents. It smelled a little like Brown Buttah, but a tad bit sweeter. A deeper inhale granted her a syrupy whiff of molasses.
“It’s called Smooth’d Out. I swear by this stuff. Juanita uses it, too.”
So this was the hair grease that Hazel was always wearing. More pomade than grease, Nella realized, as she dipped the tip of her pinky nail into the substance. “It’s a leave-in conditioner?”
“Yep. Use it twice a day, or just once if you want. It’s pretty great.”
“Thanks.” Nella wiped the bit of grease she’d accrued on her nail onto the napkin she still had scrunched in her hand. “Maybe I’ll try it when my Brown Buttah runs out.”
“You really should. Honestly, if I were you, I would start integrating it into your regimen now. Lock in that moisture, prep for the dryness of winter, you know? And this stuff is way better than Brown Buttah. Maybe you can start off by using half-and-half?”
It was Hazel’s version of an olive branch, but Nella didn’t say a word as she dropped the jar in her bag. When she looked up again, she noticed the nearly bald woman had moved toward the door of Curl Central. Their eyes met briefly before Hazel started speaking again.
“I know things just got kind of weird between us, but I just wanted to say that they don’t have to be.”
“I—”
“Wait,” said Hazel, holding up a finger. “Let me finish.” She sighed, casting a glance over her shoulder at Richard. Then she lowered her voice. “It’s just… it’s really so damn unfair. White people never have to be as hyperaware of themselves as we do. When they walk into a room, they don’t have to instantly clock the demographics and analyze what they see. They don’t have to worry about having to represent however many million Black perspectives there are in this country just because hiring managers were too lazy to bring in a few others. They can enter a small store without worrying about being followed around. They never have to worry about having car troubles in the South when they’re driving around back roads at night. Or any time of day, really. You know?”
Nella nodded.
“Half the time, I don’t even think about any of these things,” Hazel continued, lifting her chin. “Not consciously. But that stress, that anxiety—that underlying weight is there. Right?”
“I feel that,” said Nella, “I really do. But going back to the Shartricia thing… you must get why I feel like you turned me into the bad cop at work. Everyone is talking about—”
“I do, trust,” said Hazel, “but forget them. The bottom line is, at the end of day, Colin’s book is going to be better. Because of you and me. We did that, sis. Together.
“Anyway… I guess this is all my way of saying we don’t need to see each other as competition. We already have enough stress being two young Black women in a crazy white environment. And so…” Hazel put her hand on Nella’s shoulder. “What are you doing on October twenty-fifth?”
The question came from way far out of left field. “October twenty-fifth? Um. I’m not sure.”
“I’m having some girlfriends over for a natural hair party at my place. Just a small get-together. Some wine, some cheese. A little Maxwell. Juanita is going to come and show us some new products from Curl Central, and my cousin Tanya is going to braid some hair for free. I could even have Juanita bring some scarves over, too, if you wanted to learn how to tie one.”
“That sounds fun,” said Nella. And it did, even if it did hurt her some to admit it.
“Great. We’ll chat more about it tomorrow at work. You can bring your friend, too. What’s her name, again? Something with an ‘M’?”
“Malaika.”
“Malaika. Right.” Hazel patted her on the shoulder. Nella took this as a gesture that their conversation was finished, but before she could wish her a good night again, Hazel was speaking once more. “By the way,” she said, tugging at one of her locs, “you mentioned something about ‘notes,’ and I was wondering—what did you mean by that?”
“Notes?”
“You said something like, ‘What the fuck is your deal with Richard, and the notes…’ ”
“Oh. Right.” Nella hadn’t meant to let that slip, but the words had already escaped her lips and made it into Hazel’s cognizance. “I’ve just been getting some weird notes from some anonymous person,” she said as nonchalantly as she could.
“Weird notes? What kind of weird?”
“Essentially, they’ve been notes telling me to leave.”
“Leave Wagner?”
Nella studied Hazel. The girl had gone pale, her face shifting from a healthy shade of hickory to an uneasy walnut. For the first time during their interaction that evening, Nella noticed that the deep red lipstick on her upper lip, which was almost always impossibly perfect, had faded.
“Yes,” said Nella. “One told me to leave Wagner.”
Hazel stared at her. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed—deep, resounding belly laughs that were louder than any sound Nella had ever heard her make. “And you thought I did that?” she practically yelled. “That’s crazy! I definitely didn
’t do any of that. You know that, right? Definitely by now, you must.”
Nella stared at her for a moment. “Yes. I do,” she finally said, even though she really didn’t.
“That’s some crazy, hate-crime stuff, you know,” said Hazel, putting her hands in the pockets of her corduroy overalls.
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.
Eva.
I’d looked left, then right, searching for her in the sea of faces that had quickly accumulated outside of Anna’s office. I was the zoo animal on display, and people I’d worked with for nearly two years—people I’d publicly called friends but had also privately called ‘self-important vampires’ because in corporate life, these things weren’t mutually exclusive—had their noses pressed against the walls as they merrily watched me eat my own shit.
The only thing worse than that was knowing that dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other young Black women were experiencing this same kind of humiliation, too… and young Black women were the cause of it. Hundreds of young Black women, probably more, were undergoing severe personality changes all over the world. The degree to which they were changing varied from person to person. Some spoke differently, others dressed differently. But the most important thing was that the change wasn’t superficial. It went down to each and every one of their souls.
OBGs. “Other Black Girls,” Lynn had dubbed them, “because they’re not our kind.” They were something else entirely. Something close to alien, although Lynn wasn’t out-there enough to suspect that these OBGs—or whatever it was that was changing them—had landed here from outer space. She just knew there was a deeper explanation for why these young women were suddenly no longer beholden to anyone but themselves and the white people they worked for. Why they were so obsessed with success—and with taking down any Black women who got in their way.
Twice a month, Lynn held early morning meetings at Joe’s so she could tell us what she heard from her people who were keeping tabs on other parts of the country. The verdict was that the OBGs were spreading far, and they were spreading fast. When Lynn first learned about these OBGs five years ago, they’d been contained to just a few northeastern cities: New York, Boston, Philly. But now, they were being sighted as far south as Miami, as far north as Portland, and as far west as Los Angeles.
Joe himself confirmed it at our last meeting, after visiting his daughter out in California. There’d been a wetness in his eyes as he’d stood in Lynn’s usual spot at the front of the room and explained how it was as though a layer of his baby girl had been peeled away and replaced by a fake, transparent sheen that bore no resemblance to the person he’d raised. “And I know it ain’t just that basic
Hollywood bullshit that’s gotten her, either,” Joe had promised us vehemently. “Her goddamn agent got her auditioning for three slave parts this month alone. Three.”
Pen poised above her signature orange notebook, Lynn had pressed Joe about the symptoms his daughter was exhibiting. The smile-and-nod? The helpless shrug? The glassy-eyed stare?
“There was some of the glassy-eyed stare. But when I asked her if she knew what she was doing, my daughter actually said that she didn’t like the idea of playing a slave. And she started explaining it all to me… justifying it. Spouted all this crap about ‘playing the game’ until she didn’t need to play no more. Said she letting them think they pulling the strings, when really she is.”
This got to Lynn. To all of us. This meant OBGs were blending in easier with non-OBGs. Blending in meant they were advancing in numbers. They were radically different now than they were twenty years ago, which was when Lynn suspected OBGs—or some form of them—had first come into existence. But at least they were keeping to themselves back then. Heads down, eyes on the top spot. Now, anyone who got in their way to the top got stepped on.
Or worse, if you weren’t careful.
When I’d searched for Eva in that crowd outside Anna’s office, I’d found her toward the back, her arms tight across her body, her eyes two hard spheres of onyx. I’d heard the screeching sound of life as I knew it coming to a halt; the words, narrated softly but certainly, of the woman I’d met on the train hours earlier: You said too much. You’re fucked. Only then did I realize far, far too late, that something was wrong with Eva. No Black woman would ever do that to another Black woman. Not without being deeply, deeply disturbed. Not while seeming so down. So human.
We’d have to come up with more complex ways to separate ourselves from them, said Lynn. And we’d have to be even more vigilant of my least favorite Resistance Rule: Never confront an OBG or potential OBG unless directed.
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