Nella Rogers

Nella is a young Black editorial assistant at Wagner Books. At the beginning of the novel, she struggles to find space for herself within a corporate culture that is overwhelmingly white, and desperately wants to ascend the corporate ladder so that she can become a full-time editor. When she learns that another Black woman, Hazel-May McCall, has been hired to begin working at Wagner, she is excited at the chance to have an ally in the office with her.

As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Nella has a number of anxieties about her own relationship with Blackness. She fears that her relatively privileged upbringing in Connecticut, her string of white boyfriends, and her corporate style of dress and presentation do not hold up with expressions of Blackness that she has come to revere in her literary heroes. Hazel's easy ability to embody these Black...