ZAKIYA DALILA HARRIS The Other Black Girl. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Zakiya Dalila Harris has made good use of her experience as a Black woman working in New York publishing in this impressive debut novel.
The Preface to this story is headed ‘December 1983, Grand Central Station, Midtown, Manhattan’. A Black woman is fleeing from something that has put her photograph in all the papers. She scratches obsessively at her head, terrified that someone is following her, and panics when the white conductor on the train claims to recognise her:
‘I was just reading about you this morning,’ he said, pointing at something in his back pocket. A rolled-up newspaper. The twinkle in his eye went out, and when he spoke again, the words came slowly, like he was deciding if I was worth wasting them on. ‘I was a big fan of yours. So I was really surprised to learn how you really feel’….
I did something that surprised him and surprised myself even more.
I looked him in the face and smiled.
‘Oh heavens – you mean that witchy lady from the news, right?’ I crowed. ‘Why that happened to me on the way here. My taxi driver made the same mistake. Can you imagine that? Twice in one day!’
She buys a ticket which will take her as far from New York as possible. Where to? Anywhere, but as far north as the train will take her.
That is all we know about this woman until much later in the book.
Part 1 jumps to ‘July 13, 2018, Wagner Books, Midtown, Manhattan’, and we meet Nella Rogers. Nella is a young Black American woman who, two years earlier, and much to her surprise, had landed a job as an editorial assistant at Wagner Publishing, one of the most prestigious publishers in New York. She is a little proud of being ‘the only Black person in the room’ but she is passionate about Black rights and works hard to promote awareness of diversity in her workplace. A ‘Diversity Town Hall’ meeting for staff, organised by the firm’s boss, Richard Wagner, seems like a step in the right direction, but:
The definition of ‘diversity at Wagner’ managed to mystify everyone – roughly 30 percent 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 …
By the time the fourth meeting rolled around, its attendees were just Nella and a blue-eyed publicity assistant whose name Nella no longer remembered, because she was no longer with the company …
‘Maybe we should offer doughnuts or something to get more people to come?’ the blue-eyed assistant had meekly suggested …
Nella is a sharp-eyed, likeable, acute and witty observer of the office life around her. She knows the idiosyncrasies of the various editors – the one who leaves greasy thumb marks on manuscripts; the one who is a friend of the owner and is never there – and she knows how to quickly get rid of a ‘Cubicle Floater’ like Sophie:
As Cubicle Floaters went, she wasn’t the worst. She didn’t play favourites, which meant your chances of seeing her more than once a week were slim. She was too busy hovering beside the cubicle of another assistant, her lazy smile reminding you of how good you didn’t have it.
Nella is well aware that the only other ‘Persons of Colour’ (POC) at Wagner Books work in reception or in the mail-room or as cleaners. She is friends with them all, but when she discovers that another Black woman has just joined the editorial staff she is thrilled. Nella and Hazel-May McCall quickly find things in common. Hazel is super-cool; she seems to share Nella’s Black activist interests; and she knows all about Burning Heart, a book about a headstrong Black teenager that Nella devoured at the age of 14 and hadn’t been able to put down ‘for the entire month of August, and even though it rounded out at a whopping five hundred pages, she’d read three times in rapid succession’. Burning Heart was published by Wagner and it was their first book to have been written and edited by Black women. Nella had also written papers (unpublished) about it.
Hazel’s Black credentials are impeccable, far more so than Nella’s: born in Harlem, a grandfather who died in a protest march – ‘Mentors Black women … goes on poetry retreats … makes signs with all-cap letters … definitely suspicious,’ jokes Nella’s best friend, spiky and smart Malaika, with whom she shares her everyday woes, and who refers to Wagner’s as ‘White Man’s Paradise’. Her joke, however, touches on something that does begin to disturb Nella, even as her relationship with Hazel continues to flourish.
There is something puzzling about the way Hazel seems to fit in so easily with everyone, especially with the editors and with the boss, Richard Wagner. She also seems to know more about Nella’s life than Nella has told her. She begins to take over some of Nella’s jobs for Nella’s superior, Vera, and when Nella upsets the bestselling author of Vera’s latest big-book project by voicing her concerns about the Black character he has written into his book, Vera, who had previously valued her honest opinion, begins to favour Hazel.
Nella’s doubts about Hazel become worse when she receives of an anonymous note saying, ‘in Comic Sans Font, LEAVE WAGNER NOW’. She is thrown into confusion. Did Hazel send it, as Malaika suggests? If not, who did? And why?
This is the first sign that there is more to this book than office politics and social satire. Interspersed between chapters, and first suggested by the Preface, there is another story altogether. Previously unknown characters appear and this is disconcerting at times, but gradually the two stories are woven together and the book turns into something much more serious and interesting.
Towards the end, a seemingly unbelievable scenario emerges, but Harris manages to realistically immerse the reader in Nella’s disorientation and confusion. The final inevitable confrontation with Hazel is so strongly written that it can be almost as upsetting for the reader as it clearly is for Nella. Finally, the Epilogue, headed ‘Jan. 2019, Scope Magazine, Portland, Oregon’, sets another scene altogether, and the end is shocking.
The Other Black Girl is an impressive first novel. Zakiya Dalila Harris started writing this book when she was working for the publishers Knopf Doubleday and, she tell us, ‘after the rare occurrence of running into another young Black woman in the bathroom’ she began to wonder ‘What if there can only be one of us?’ She knows the publishing world, is an excellent storyteller whose characters come alive, and this book is inventive, easy-reading and fascinating.
As a White woman (Harris always gives Black a capital letter, so I will reciprocate), living in a predominantly White Australian city, I found that being immersed in the cultural nuances of the life of a young Black American woman was an interesting experience. There were names I did not recognise and at times I needed Nella to do some ‘Blacksplaining’, as she calls it. What, for example, are an ‘electric slide’, and a ‘Yankee Candle’? I was certainly like the White woman (‘Maybe-Ella’) who shared a lift with Nella and Hazel and overheard their conversation about Black hair:
‘I’m just too tired to twist my hair up every night, you know? But this 4C hair … you can’t just go sleeping on it all loose without expecting the next morning to be a struggle.’
‘Oh, I remember that struggle. Trust,’ said Hazel.
‘I’m type 4B mostly, but my kitchen is 4C,’ Nella smiled….
She closely eyed Maybe-Ella’s plain light-brown bob and wondered how much Black hair talk she had ever been exposed to. Was she Googling ‘twisting’ and ‘4B’ and ‘kitchen’?
I certainly had to do that. I was also left with the thought that although Nella’s life reflects that of a young Black American woman, her dilemmas raise the perennial question for anyone actively working for the rights of a minority group: do you dissimulate and assimilate yourself into the majority, get an influential job, then use your position to make changes, or do you remain a radical outsider and fight for the cause?
Zakiya Dalila Harris The Other Black Girl Bloomsbury 2021 PB 368pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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