The Other Black Girl(10)
Nella eased back into her chair and squared her shoulders. She waited an appropriate amount of time before saying, firmly, “So. Needles and Pins. I’m going be candid here: One of the characters really didn’t—”
“Listen, Nella…” Vera rubbed her temples and exhaled. “I think Colin will be coming into the office soon, maybe next week. How about you just share your thoughts with both of us then? That way we can take his response to your critique into account when we prepare our offer for Needles and Pins.”
Nella wasn’t sure what made her queasier, the fact that she’d have to speak with Colin in person about her feelings without flying them by Vera first, or the fact that Vera already seemed so set on buying this book. “Um… okay. I just wonder if maybe you and I should talk about it, um, first—just maybe the—um—weaknesses, or…”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll just tell Colin in person,” Vera said, now fully closing her eyes. “It’s just, I can’t focus now with… with this.” She gestured at the wall through which the fiery riff of “Edge of Seventeen” was blaring.
“Good god, this place sometimes,” Vera continued. “Is it me, or are they putting something weird in our water?”
* * *
Vera was right. There was something in the water at Wagner. But Vera had had a hand in that. She and pretty much all of the higher-ups at Wagner who earned livable incomes—they were all messing with the water, making it difficult and sometimes impossible for smaller fish like Nella to survive. Lurking beneath many of the friendly seeming meetings was an environment of pettiness and power plays; cold shoulders and closed-door conversations.
The most fascinating part was that they all thought everyone else was crazy. At least, that’s what Yang, the girl who’d been assisting Maisy when Nella had first started at Wagner, had intimated to her. Yang had taken on the noble task of not only training her on editorial procedures, but also giving her the scoop about all of her new coworkers—whom to watch out for at holiday parties, whom to avoid in the elevator, whom to get coffee with. All the important intel.
Yang had been an incredibly helpful guide, and as a first-generation Chinese American, she’d also been the only other POC Nella had ever gotten to work with at Wagner. Together, they made cracks about how hard it must be for everyone to tell them apart and rolled their eyes at the higher-ups constantly walking outsiders through their side of the office—purposely, they half-joked, to showcase the company’s diversity.
It all came to an end six months later, when Yang quit to go get her PhD. Three days after Yang’s last day at Wagner, another shooting of yet another unarmed Black man—this time, an elderly one—went viral. He had been pulled over by a white police officer hours before sunrise in rural North Carolina. Minutes later, he was dead, and hours later, the world was on fire. Numerous reports said he’d been reaching to turn up his hearing aid. One day after Nella watched Jesse Watson’s livid response to the shooting blow up on Twitter, Richard Wagner sent out a company-wide email announcing an upcoming series of Diversity Town Halls.
Very rarely did the editor in chief of Wagner Books send emails to his employees; he either popped into your office unexpectedly or sent you a note handwritten in impeccable cursive. The very existence of this email was thrilling, and its contents were so promising that Nella had printed out the email and thumbtacked it up in her cube. The news of the shooting had outraged the country and it had particularly outraged her, too—not only because the man had been hard of hearing and in his seventies, but also because he’d borne a subtle resemblance to a grandfather she’d never met. It was comforting to know, then, that all Wagner employees had received a directive to start talking to each other about the major elephant in the room.
But there was just one problem: No one really knew what the elephant was. Or where the elephant was. Or if there was even an elephant at all. The definition of “diversity at Wagner” managed to mystify all of Nella’s colleagues, and Natalie from HR and the British moderator she’d brought in as a “neutral party” spent the first hour of the first town hall trying to pinpoint what they were really supposed to be talking about. “Do we mean diverse employees or diverse books?” asked Alexander, one of Wagner’s most literal editors. “Or do we mean diverse authors?” “Didn’t we publish this book by that Black writer just last year?” others asked. And so on.
Their confusion was understandable enough, and Nella did her best to rein everyone back in toward the task at hand with her own small “objective” observations. But she couldn’t bring herself to say that maybe higher-level employees shouldn’t primarily hire people with Ivy League degrees or personal connections, because her own résumé had been boosted by an editor friend of one of her professors at the University of Virginia. And the zinger she really wanted to deliver—Yes, we just published “that Black writer” last year, but that writer, along with the last six Black people we’ve published here at Wagner, was not a Black American, he was from an African country, and while that’s definitely an example of diversity, it’s also really not—wouldn’t work, either. It would only unleash a whole new slew of gradations that Nella didn’t even feel comfortable grappling with on her own yet, let alone with her white employers.