Zakiya Dalila Harris - The Other Black Girl

Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 38º

Jul 11, 2024

Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought

Genre: Thriller, Suspense

“She’d committed one of the real ultimate sins by trying to be herself: Black. Unapologetic. Someone who told it like it was. Someone who rejected what was expected of her as a Black woman in a predominantly white industry.”
— Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

Back Cover (Atria Paperback):

“Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rodgers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and micro-aggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born-and-bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle besides hers. They’ve only just begun comparing natural hair care regiments, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to office darling and Nella is left in the dust. As Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes there’s a lot more at stake than her career. Having joined Wagner Books to honor the legacy of Burning Heart, a novel written and edited by two Black women, she thought this animosity was a relic of the past. Is Nella ready to take on the fight of a new generation?”

The Other Black Girl, the 2021 debut comedy/drama/mystery/thriller novel by American author Zakiya Dalila Harris, follows a young Black woman, Nella Rogers, the only Black person working at a prestigious publishing company in Manhattan, New York, and the mysterious and sensational happenings that take place soon after another Black woman, Hazel, is hired in a similar role as Nella’s.

Sold at auction to Atria Publishing Group for over $1 million1, The Other Black Girl has since been adapted into a TV series for Hulu, starring actors: Sinclair Daniel, Ashleigh Murray, Brittany Adebumola, Hunter Parrish, Bellamy Young, and Eric McCormack.

In a praise-worthy review, Variety magazine’s Aramide Tinubu called the series “clever” and the cast “engaging,” stating, “Since the series is told from Black women’s perspectives over a sumptuous soundtrack that includes artists like Anita Baker, SZA, TLC and Busta Rhymes, it offers something entirely unique to the genre.”2

“It wouldn’t be enough to simply show up to work; to simply wear the right clothes. You had to wear the right mentality. You had to live the mentality. Be everyone’s best friend. Be sassy. Be confident, but also be deferential. Be spiritual, but also be down-to-earth. Be woke, but still keep some of that sleep in your eyes.”
— Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl

Did You Know?

Did you know that, like many young Black folk, Zakiya Dalila Harris struggled with the decision of “relaxing” her hair vs. wearing it natural?

Tell Me More…

Zakiya Dalila Harris grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, nicknamed, “The Land of the Sleeping Giant.”3 Harris received her MFA in creative writing from The New School, New York, where Harris stated, “I wouldn’t think to change [my hair style] until more than a decade later, when I moved to Brooklyn for graduate school. Everywhere I went, it seemed, I ran into a protest or a deeply disturbing headline about another police officer who’d killed a Black person without any repercussions. The unrest in the city was palpable, and I was starting to feel it in my own bones. It began to affect what I wrote, what I cared about. And it affected how I saw myself.”4

Some Food For Thought:

Did you know that one of the first documented histories of the relaxer began in 1909 with Black American inventor Garrett Augustus Morgan?5 His hair straightening cream was found accidentally when trying to find a solution to ease friction on sewing machines inside his tailoring shop.

Garrett Augustus Morgan also known as “Big Chief Mason”

Sidenote: A relaxer is a type of lotion (or cream) generally used by people with tight curls or very curly hair which makes hair easier to straighten by chemically “relaxing” the natural curls. The active agent is usually a strong alkali, although some formulas are based on ammonium thioglycolate or formaldehyde.

As the story goes, Garrett Augustus Morgan tested his cream on a neighboring dog’s fur and, with its resulting success, created his own business, the G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company, in 1913.