Chapter 6 #3
Teresa was verbalizing exactly how I’d been feeling. “Yep, that’s it. It’s the absolute worst to get positive reinforcement from the very soul-sucking things that we’re least sure about.”
“The workaround is not giving a fuck, boo.”
I paused for a second, then jumped up. “Let me show you something.”
Like most families in Harlem, we’d had Essence, Ebony, and Jet delivered to our brownstone with utility-bill regularity.
Having grown up with a mom too cerebral and distracted to pay attention to fashion, I used to revere the models in those magazines.
For years, I’d been ripping out the pages I found interesting and beautiful, keeping them in meticulous folders.
After Lucinda’s “Black girls don’t sell” comment, I’d expanded my collection by adding entire magazines that featured Black women.
It didn’t matter the topic or even the language; I would buy any magazine that put someone who looked like me or my mother on the cover.
When I added Sugar to the mix, I began to analyze each issue, slapping Post-it notes with scribbles over badly phrased story titles and design disasters, writing down ideas for issue themes, investigative features, and possible covers.
I kept everything in a large box, which I hauled out and placed on the coffee table in front of Teresa.
“Is there a severed head in here?” Teresa asked, removing the lid from the box. “What is all this stuff? Is it porn?”
“Oh my god, will you just tell me what you think!” I called over while I looked through my stack of local restaurant menus, settling on jerk chicken with rice and peas from our favorite Jamaican spot. “You want a veggie roti?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm” was all I got back. She was deep into my notes on cover concepts.
By the time I put in our order, Teresa was on the floor, the box’s contents surrounding her, and she had rifled through most of it. I had mentioned Sugar to her in passing, but this was a whole ’nother level.
“Nik, you put a lot of time into this.” Teresa was staring at me hard. “What are we doing here, girl?”
“Don’t know, Tee. I can’t stop thinking about Sugar. Their audience … it’s us, right? And I think they—we—deserve better.”
“Better than what?”
“Better than the way magazines treat us now. The few paltry pieces a year in StyleList about the flashiest Black people in New York or LA are almost worse than nothing because they think they’re being so inclusive.
I’m sick of being trotted out at sales lunches and investor meetings when Park Ave Pub wants to look like they give a shit.
” I flipped open an issue of Sugar. “And better than this too: Typos on every page and lame Q and As with background dancers counting as journalism.”
“So StyleList thinks we’re irrelevant and Sugar thinks we’re stupid.” Teresa hit the nail on the head.
“Ugh, exactly.”
“I guess I never really thought about it. You’re right, though,” she said thoughtfully. “Where do we belong? Literally nowhere.”
I fell silent, this time not sure if we were still talking about publishing.
Teresa and I had bonded in our high school years over feeling like outsiders: she, a brown-skinned native-Spanish-speaking immigrant; me, a biracial Black private school–educated Harlem girl.
She wasn’t Spanish enough, I wasn’t rich enough, neither of us was Black enough.
We still quoted some of Halle Berry’s choice lines from Alex Haley’s Queen miniseries whenever we felt that we were being treated like impostors.
“Hep me, hep me. I’se nigra.” I pantomimed the scene where Halle begs for help in the Black church, which shouldn’t have cracked us up the way it did every single time.
“Hep me!” Teresa immediately started laughing. “I needs me a magazine.”
“Oh man, we are going straight to hell.” I had pantomimed my way into the kitchen so I could grab some chips.
Unsurprisingly, the Jamaican restaurant was slow with deliveries, and tonight we had broken our rule of never ordering from them when we were actually hungry.
I sat next to Teresa on the floor and plopped the bag between us.
“Laughing burning, burning laughing.” Teresa shrugged and grabbed a handful of chips. A minute of contemplative crunching went by before she turned to face me with a more serious look. “You told me that you met the woman who owns Sugar at a party, right? What happened when you called her?”
“I haven’t yet.” Months later, Barbara Porter’s business card was still in my wallet.
Every time a story I cared about was shot down at StyleList, I pulled it out, memorizing every detail of the black matte cardstock, the gold embossed sans serif writing, the shiny outline of a megaphone on the back.
Then I’d think about the rare air I was now breathing in the fashion magazine world, how I had finally started paying down my credit card debt, how my parents and Joseph had celebrated my new role. And I’d put it back in my wallet.
“What’s the holdup?”
I had no good answer for her. Avoiding her eyes, I mumbled, “Back to the positive reinforcement I’m getting from soul-sucking things, I guess.”
“So, you know what you have to do tomorrow,” Teresa pronounced. She replaced the lid on the box, leaned over, and hugged me. “Stop fucking around with your life, bonita.”