The Other Black Girl(5)
Nella fought back a snort. Maisy hadn’t attended this aforementioned event; what’s more, Nella was willing to bet her middle name that the Museum of Natural History was as far north as Maisy had ever traveled in Manhattan. Maisy was a kind enough woman—she made bathroom small talk as well as the next senior-level employee—but she was fairly limited in her sense of what “the city” entailed. Just the mention of Williamsburg, despite its Apple Store, Whole Foods, and devastating selection of designer boutiques, caused Maisy to recoil as though someone had just asked to see the inside of her vagina. Surely this dreadlocked girl could sense that Maisy had no true sense of Harlem’s “culture.”
Nella wished she could see the look on the Black girl’s face, but they’d already started to enter Maisy’s office, so she had to settle for a chuckle in its place. It was subtle, but in the milliseconds that passed before Maisy shut her door, Nella was able to detect amusement at the end of that chuckle—an exasperated kind of amusement that asked, without asking, You don’t spend time with Black people often, do you?
Nella crossed her fingers. The girl probably didn’t need it, but she wished her luck, anyway.
2
August 6, 2018
Nella cleared her throat and ran her left thumb down the edge of the manuscript, then across its bottom. She knew that she might cut herself deep enough to bleed if she moved her finger any faster, but she also knew that with this risk came the possibility of a reward—an excuse to flee and win a few precious minutes of stall time—and such a possibility was tempting.
“Well?” Vera placed both elbows on her desk and craned her head forward, too, a tic that justified her biweekly appointments with her chiropractor. “Tell me what you thought about it.”
“Well… there’s a lot to talk about. Where do I begin?”
It was a question Nella had spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to answer. There was no way she could begin with the truth: that it had been difficult for her to finish Needles and Pins without stomping across the kitchen floor in her socked feet, opening a window, and throwing the pages out onto Fourth Avenue so they could be chomped into bits by oncoming traffic. That at around midnight, she’d taken a break to jot down a list of all of the things she’d hated about it, then torn the list up before feeding the pieces of paper to a Yankee candle. How she’d taken a ten-second video of the burned bits and sent it to Malaika, who texted back, in all caps, GREAT. NOW GO TO BED, WEIRDO.
Nella might have deserved this scolding a tiny bit. The book wasn’t altogether terrible. It did a nice job conveying the bleakness of the countrywide opioid epidemic, and it contained a few particularly moving scenes rife with moving dialogue. A family of ten finally confronted long-buried secrets; a baby escaped a precarious situation unscathed. The book’s heart appeared to be in the right place.
It was just that one of its characters was not: Shartricia Daniels.
Nella would never be able to confirm it, but she sensed that Colin Franklin’s first draft had been written exclusively about frustrated white characters living frustratingly white lives in a frustratingly white suburban town. After reading this draft, someone—a friend or an agent or maybe even Vera herself—must’ve suggested he throw some color in there.
Now, Nella was no fool. She understood that characters of color were en vogue, as was maintaining vigilance when it came to calling out anything that lacked proper representation. Nella wasn’t the one doing the calling out, but she closely monitored social media so she could support whoever did. She read think pieces by day and retweeted that the Oscars were indeed too white by night, and following the infamous Black-boy-in-a-monkey-hoodie incident, she took a six-month-long break from shopping at H&M—a big deal for someone who loved buying cheap basics in the summertime. She could see the common thread of perceived subhumanity that ran between the cultural faux pas of major corporations and the continuous police killings of Black people.
And of course, she wasn’t alone. She could always count on the Internet to cry foul on the latest trend. Perhaps the loudest voice of all was Jesse Watson, a nationally known, outspoken blacktivist whom Nella and Malaika and over a million other people followed on YouTube. The mere mention of his name, which rested quite comfortably on the more extreme side of the social activism spectrum, often tinted dinner table atmospheres faster than Cheetos-stained fingertips, and his supercharged manner of speaking suggested that this was exactly what he wanted.
Sometimes, Nella felt Jesse went just a tad too far in his YouTube videos, like the time he made a ninety-minute video on why all Black people should abandon CP Time. But in other instances, he made so much sense that it hurt, like his post on why “well-meaning white folks” were sometimes far worse than white folks who wore their racist hearts on their sleeves. So, as Nella considered why she distrusted Needles and Pins so much, she also considered what Jesse had said about white people who went out of their way to present “diversity”: “With heightened awareness of cultural sensitivity comes great responsibility. If we’re not careful, ‘diversity’ might become an item people start checking off a list and nothing more—a shallow, shadowy thing with but one dimension.”
Shartricia was less than one-dimensional. She came off flatter than the pages she appeared on. Her white male creator had rendered her nineteen and pregnant with her fifth child, with a baby daddy who was either a man named LaDarnell or a man named DeMontraine (Shartricia could not confirm which because both men had fled town as soon as they’d heard). She cussed and moaned in just about all of her scenes, isolating herself from the reader just as much as she isolated herself from her family and non-opioid-addicted friends (of which she had few). Then, there was the kicker: Her name, “Shartricia,” was her uneducated crack addict mother’s attempt to honor the color of the bright green dress she’d been wearing at the club when her water broke.