This is by Zakiya Dalila Harris, and it was published in 2021, but I first became aware of it while reading reviews of Rebecca Kuang's Yellowface. My audio-version was nicely narrated by Aja Naomi King, with Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Bahni Turpin, and Heather Alicia Sims playing supporting roles.

What follows is spoiler-laden, so beware:

Jumps in time are a little problematic in audiobooks, and I always end up double-checking the dates. But we start with a brief Prologue, set in 1983, in which a woman boards a train, obviously in fear of pursuers, and bugged by an itchy scalp. Then we fast forward to July 2018, Wagner Books, Manhattan. Where we meet Nella Rogers, an overworked, underpaid, but still ambitious editorial assistant. Nella was originally inspired by the publishing successes of Black editor Kendra Rae (an admiration that has gained in piquancy since Rae's apparent disappearance).

Nella has long been the only Black person of any rank in this typically white-dominated publishing house. Other non-whites are mail-room workers or cleaners... So it's a bit lonely. Microaggressions abound, and she's always having to pick her way through beds of eggshells.

But then she's joined by the other Black girl of the title. Hazel.

Which should be wonderful. Solidarity at last. It rapidly starts to seem, however, that there's something off about Hazel. She seems a little devious, more than a little two-faced. It seems as though she's always ready to do Nella down, usurping her role with seniors, and manoeuvring to be trusted with tasks that should by rights be Nella's.



This is all good. I've worked in publishing. It can definitely be confidence-testing. If you also -- because of systemic injustice -- have an even steeper slope to climb, I can imagine it can often be very demoralizing indeed.

The scene where Nella very gently confronts the best-selling author who has included a horrible stereotype of a Black woman in his latest novel is beautifully (ie cringe-makingly) done. Oh, these self-satisfied white liberals... They're totally confident they're getting it right, while incapable of spotting when their (probably well-meaning) efforts are missing the mark; and they're wildly, self-righteously ready to take offence if called out.

Anyway, it's after this ruckus that Nella starts receiving anonymous notes, instructing her to "LEAVE WAGNER. NOW." Hate mail, we initially think... During this testing time Nella has two allies: Malaika, her very likeable, tell-it-straight Black friend; and Owen, her supportive white boyfriend.

Meanwhile, various interludes have told us more about Kendra Rae (ostracized for calling out racism), and about Shani, who has joined some sort of shadowy Resistance dedicated to tracking down "OBGs", ie "Other Black Girls". It's counter-intuitive, but these Other Black Girls, it seems, are negative forces, who infiltrate workplaces with the aim of debilitating and neutralizing Black women, and turning them into compliant white-pleasers. Eventually it emerges that the notes Nella is receiving are not threats but well-meant warnings from the Resistance: Get out because bad things are happening.

At this point, I still wasn't sure what to make of it all. There's lots of tension in the story, and I definitely wanted to find out more about this struggle going on in the shadows, and see how it developed. But there were bits where I was starting to feel less on board. At one point Nella is anonymously given what turns out to be Kendra Rae's phone number, and -- unsure who she's even talking to -- pours out her heart about all the shitty things that are happening to her. At the time, I registered: Hmmm, not sure about this. It brings the in-hiding Kendra Rae into the fray, but it feels somehow forced.


The author

After that, though, the genre split became ultra-disconcerting. I thought the realism was brilliant (I could absolutely imagine that publishing house, and Harris's own experience at Knopf/Doubleday means she knows exactly what she's talking about...). Similarly, the psychological thriller elements were working very suspensefully (what's Hazel's game, and who seems to be pursuing Nella?). But when we get onto the hair grease, we veer into altogether different, quasi-magical territory...

Hair has been a theme from the beginning. That fleeing person we saw in the opening scene had an uncomfortable scalp, if you remember. And Nella's first realization that there's another Black girl in the office comes in the shape of the distinctive smell of Brown Buttah, a hair product generally used on Black hair.

So far, so naturalistic. Hair is often a theme in Black literature. It's a Big Thing in Americanah, for example, and also comes up in Sankofa and My Name Is Maame. And I'm sure it's the case that white people clock a mere fraction of the nuances surrounding this issue.

So it's not that surprising when Hazel invites Nella to a hair event, and gives her an unlabelled pot of hair grease as a peace offering.


Frankfurt Book Fair, 1993. Publishing is a challenging and competitive environment, even before you start to add racism...

But then Harris's hair grease takes on a whole new dimension. It is revealed to be the vehicle by which the OBGs are realizing their goals. It's a "social lubricant", a form of mind control, and it makes Black women more compliant, more willing to shut off their race consciousness, fit in, and stop making waves.

By the end, Nella is so battered down by all the conflicts and suspicion and tension that she gives in, and accepts the hair cream Hazel is urging upon her. She's simultaneously "simply accepting her fate, rather than fighting it", so that she can finally be free of the onerous burden of fighting workplace racism.

E. Solaire Denaud puts this dynamic very nicely:

"After years of enduring microaggressions, stagnating in her career, and witnessing daily violence against Black people, Nella is left with a choice: would she prefer enduring daily white-supremacist violence and be aware of it or would she rather turn off her Black consciousness and become a black-skinned-white-masked overachiever, complacent with white people and threatening for other Black girls? With Nella’s final decision to join Hazel in the OBG conspiracy and shut down her political consciousness, Harris offers a different perspective on current conversations around Black horror, as she suggests that -- considering the draining daily lives of Black women and the horror already present in it -- the sunken place might be attractive to some of them.

"Yet -- even though the main character chooses the sunken place over her political awareness -- Harris is not arguing that Nella’s choice is a quick fix to Black suffering. Instead, she questions the validity of the notion of 'choice' in this context... Nella’s daily life is already a type of horror story. Nella chooses the sunken place out of exhaustion and awareness that her intelligence and skills will never be valued, neither in Wagner’s publishing house nor elsewhere. With her dream of becoming Wagner’s first Black editor out of reach, Nella feels that she might as well choose ignorant happiness over bitterness. Thus, the horror does not arise from the sunken place itself but from the exhaustion; a relentless weariness Nella, and highly intelligent Black women like her, continuously endure..."

Instead of showing us a young woman who has miraculously triumphed over all the opposition, the epilogue offers us -- refreshingly, I have to say, as I'm not a fan of pat endings -- someone who has become a collaborator. The Resistance is still in force. But the last thing we see is a revamped Nella apparently about to do a Hazel on young Shani... OK, there's tiny bit of ambiguity here -- enough wiggle room for a sequel, anyway -- but the author certainly talks of the ending as being dark (and, interestingly, by this point, Malaika and Owen, Nella's real supporters, have faded into the background).


You need your team...

Here's Harris herself on the grease device and the ending:

"When I started writing The Other Black Girl, I already had an ending in sight. I knew for sure that there were going to be these two Black women in this very white workplace, and I knew there would be something wrong with one of them, Hazel -- that she’d be off. And I knew that I wanted my protagonist, Nella, to fail. I wanted the reader to care about her and root for her, but I also wanted to show the price of working in these white corporate spaces. By the time I was writing the first draft, I already knew that publishing wasn’t for me. I enjoyed it when I started, but it beat me down... A lot of people were just not interested in talking about how we can help lower-level employees move up the ladder, how we can specifically help bring in more diverse voices. In my experience, a lot of Black women do not stay in these spaces...

"I did not nail the ending on the first try. I wanted the reader to understand why Nella would go under in the way that she did, because we’ve already seen her get really excited about Hazel and their friendship and then the friendship fizzles out. We’ve seen her get embarrassed at the office. I worked to make sure that we understood her insecurities and how Hazel stirs them up -- about not being Black enough and about Nella’s desire to be the next big Black editor. I knew Nella and Hazel would connect over hair; Nella feels as though she has been on the outside of Black culture and Blackness her whole life, and I wanted this to be the thing the women would bond over. I also knew that Hazel would be some kind of robot. I just didn’t know exactly how.

"The revelation came from my partner, now my fiance. I would walk him through all the different pieces of the plot: There was something controlling the women, but robots felt too easy and obvious... And my fiance said, 'Well, what if it’s in the grease?' I was so mad. Why didn’t I think of this myself? I’m always twisting my hair with grease and talking about hair products -- taking care of Black natural hair is such a big part of my identity. Many Black women see hair grease as this benign thing. It’s such a part of us. It made the ending easier to write: What ultimately transforms her wasn’t a pill Nella had to take. She was already using it. I also added a prologue, where you see another woman dealing with the effects of the grease before you meet Nella. I wanted to plant a moment of horror right at the beginning as a way of pointing to Nella’s transformation at the very end. A good twist needs to be set up in the opening pages -- you need to hold this thing up in front of the reader so it’s right before their eyes but they can’t see it until you pull back the invisible curtain."

To be sure, there's a kind of satire in using hair grease as the big anaesthetizing weapon. It has its funny side. But somehow it didn't -- I was going to say gel, but that would be a terrible pun -- it didn't sit well with me. I didn't hate it quite as viscerally as this blogger, who really resents the "magic hair cream" device. But I didn't love it.

The downbeat close, on the other hand, I really applaud. Speaking in 2021, Harris says: "I was revising that scene last summer, which was when I had edits back at my desk. It was George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and COVID-19, obviously. Everything was happening. I was in a particularly not great space. Mentally, I felt betrayed. I felt hopeless. I felt numb. I felt a lot of feelings about what was going on. So that scene where Hazel is telling Nella, 'Don't you want to be free?' That scene was me taking my own personality and my own perspective of what it was like to work on my book and feel like it mattered when, on the other side of it, people are dying."

"Original" Nella's and Hazel's diverging paths, says Bethanne Patrick, illustrate "success" and "authenticity": "If you choose the first path, as a young Black woman, you may find yourself sublimating your true self -- not just style and taste, but the very ideas and principles at your core. If you choose the second path, as a young Black woman, you'll own your identity, but you'll never sit in the corner office -- you'll cause too much friction along the way."


There were good moments for me, but those who are systemically disadvantaged will struggle so much more to secure them

What this all boils down to is that I was ambivalent bordering on negative about the genre switching and the central plot device, but I enjoyed the book, and salute its message. Others were far from ambivalent: "There was a 14-way bidding war among publishing houses to land the book, leading to a reported seven-figure deal for Harris. The irony should not be lost on anyone who has read or plans to read this novel -- the very types of publishing houses that are targeted in the novel were fighting to bring Harris on as an author."

I also appreciate that it gave me lots to think about. I've included more Black literature in my reading menu over the last few years, and it always shocks me to realize how unaware I've been... And I hope that, if challenged, I'd at least have the humility to admit my ignorance.

Here's Harris, for example, on well-meaning but crazily defensive white people: "One example is the 'I don’t see color' comment. I think at this point everybody knows that's not the thing you say. I'd like to think people would know that. It’s one of those comments where you're trying to seem like an ally, but you're also diminishing the facts. There are so many other things you're ignoring to make this point... [She highlights] the ridiculousness of this idea that we're in a postracial society, which is another phrase I think most people don’t use anymore for good reason. I really wanted to get at those spaces of unspoken subtext and microaggressions. I think of it this way: When I go into small stores or really, any store, I always make sure my hands are out of my pockets. I say hi to the shop owner because I don't want to be seen or assumed that I'm going to steal something."

How mind-bogglingly awful that this is STILL happening. For men, it's worse, as Ross Gay harrowingly testifies. And of course, it's this "weight" of Blackness that the magic grease is supposed to alleviate...

Then there's the issue of "not being Black enough"... Harris again: "When I started writing Hazel, I asked myself, 'Who is the cool Black chick that I wish I could be?' Sometimes I wish I had been raised in Brooklyn or Harlem, rather than in the suburbs of Connecticut. I grew up like Nella, in a very white neighborhood and went to a very white elementary school. I was told in high school I talked like a white girl by other Black people. That was a lot to navigate. I was in AP classes and other high level classes and most times, it was me and one other Black person... Once I got older, ... what I really hated was that I was seen as not Black enough."

Oy vey...