1.
I could rely on Sam Cooke to tell my story, his music or his melanin or his murder. The song Saint picked to sing the night we fell in love was a Sam Cooke song, “Bring It On Home to Me.” It was only two weeks prior that Saint asked me if the woman who killed Sam was Black or White. At the time, I didn’t know the details and stood slack-jawed at the question in front of our rainbow coalition of coworkers.
“Well, Black, I think. But it was an Asian woman who lured him into the whole ruse.” I’d corrected Saint when he said Sam died for being a womanizer, told him he hadn’t heard the full story, that there was more to it than that, that Sam may have been set up. And now that Saint was asking me about the details, I didn’t want to place the blame on a Black woman. Sure, she was the one who’d pulled the trigger, but I thought White men were to blame. “What does that matter anyway?” I asked Saint. What did it matter to him, if she was Black or White?
“I don’t know. Sorry, I don’t know why I asked.” He was doing the thing he did at our team meetings, when it was his turn to report, blinking quickly so his eyelashes fluttered like tiny bumblebee wings.
▴ ▴ ▴
When Saint was hired, I could barely look him in the eye, he was so tall and rich-Black and his locs hung low, past his butt. Plus, I was already friendly with Sasha, and that seemed like enough socializing for the workplace. Sasha and I took our lunches together and I would unload on her, all of the shit that came with being one of the only Black employees, and she would chain smoke, downwind, talk about how her father, a Russian immigrant, had just been laid off. We were both always worried about money. We split lunch often or made the trek to the spot on Columbus where everything was two dollars. We made fun of Jamie the Receptionist who had all of the money that we didn’t, even though she made less. A twenty-four-year-old whose parents paid her rent, she ordered delivery every day from full-service restaurants, and Sasha and I called her “Daddy’s little girl” under our breaths.
Sometimes Sasha would talk about her high school years and the Dominicans who slicked her hair into a high bun with baby hairs like a Washington Heights jeva. I knew it was in those moments that she assumed she connected with me most—overshadowing our conversations about Maggie Nelson’s latest book or that we could both spend upward of an hour sifting through jeans at Nordstrom Rack for a Hudson high-rise pair. Not to mention, we both loved Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, iced, with a hint of hazelnut.
We worked at a nonprofit dedicated to saving bees. Saint got the job a year after negotiating, I got the job after my second time applying, and Sasha got the job because she knew our executive director, a Serbian woman whose dedication to the cause was disgustingly palpable.
At best the job was mildly demanding, but on an average day it felt ridiculous, and Sasha and I often talked about how neither of us was really dedicated to the mission, and how could we be, when there were so many other things in the world to be stressed about? Money most of all, bees least. So when Sasha went to our ED asking for a two-thousand-dollar raise, and our ED said she didn’t think Sasha truly understood the cause if she thought we could just throw money around, Sasha sent me a photo of her sticking her middle finger up in front of a dead bee. Her blushing pink face was leaned down and her tongue was out in the way of old eighties rock bands. I laughed and told her that our ED would shit herself if she saw, but Sasha said she didn’t care.
▴ ▴ ▴
Though I was the only Black woman, Saint made the third Black guy in the office. The other two, Blake and Joel, had been around longer than me and were both nice enough, quickly giving me the inside scoop on what not to do if I wanted to make things easy on myself. I went to them with all of my small questions, and they never made me feel stupid or incompetent. Only unseen, when I realized they were both dating White women, and I hadn’t sniffed that out about them. I found out about Joel when he said his girlfriend’s grandma called him a slave, and about Blake two weeks later when we followed each other on Instagram, and I saw a Becky graced every other photo. I turned my phone every which way, trying to see what he saw in her, then trying to see what she saw in him.
▴ ▴ ▴
Once, before we really got to know each other, Saint referred to himself as a Black guy with an unapproachable face but a name White people found amusing, and I smiled, immediately understanding what he meant. I came to know his face well, and most noticeably, the errant wrinkles that situated themselves between his brows when he was deep in thought or confused or simply squinting from the sun. When he smiled, the wrinkles disappeared like dandelion seeds, and he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. It made me think of the image I’d stored from the cover of one of my dad’s albums, The Best of Sam Cooke, red words on a yellow background. But most distinct, a caramel-colored Black man, shaved clean, hair low cut but not texturized, and a half-open smile, disarming, real. A row of glaringly white teeth.
2.
This story could also be told from the beginning of the end, using I-don’t-give-a-fuck-about-her-nows, the way Dad talked about Mom after they divorced my first year of college. When Sasha said that I was treating her like some random White girl, I said it was only because she was acting like one.
“I told you I didn’t want to talk about it,” I said. We were on our way home from work, and I was walking past her, away from her, toward the uptown 2 train to Harlem.
Sasha was practically running to keep up with me. “But I don’t understand why you can’t talk to me like a mature adult,” she said.
It was the mature part that got me, as if I was throwing some two-year-old tantrum, as if all of this shit wasn’t her fault, as if she hadn’t sent me a text message the night before, at midnight no less, telling me she had a good friend for Saint, that she wanted to hook her up with him. “You want to hook Saint up with a culture vulture of a White girl, that’s your business,” I said now, taking the steps like a true New Yorker.
I’d met Kendall, knew who she was immediately at Sasha’s last birthday dinner because Sasha had talked her up, said she was the sultry, voluptuous type, that guys always thought she had a nice ass, that Black men especially loved her. Needless to say, I wasn’t overly impressed.
“You must really like him. If I’d known that you really liked him…,” Sasha said.
I did really like him. I liked him so much that I could barely string two coherent sentences together when we talked. Drinking had led us to a solitary moment of deep connection, and now Sasha was trying to take it away from me and hand it over on a charcuterie plate to her White girlfriend. I swiped my Metro card and, with nowhere else to go, I finally met her face. “If only I’d proposed, right?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“No, I don’t know what I know anymore. Because I could’ve sworn you knew I liked Saint, didn’t you?” I’d told her just the day before, the night after karaoke and the intense eye contact.
“You’re making this bigger than it has to be. Now that I know how you really feel…”
“You don’t know shit about how I feel. If you did, you wouldn’t be trying to hook our last Black coworker up with a White woman. I guess the fact that you guys have the other two isn’t enough.” We’d talked about Joel and Blake, hadn’t we? Many times. I’d asked wasn’t it funny that they both had White girlfriends. I said I wasn’t against interracial dating but hated to see them so on-trend. I said it hurt to feel like men who looked like me would never love me. Those guys would be so lucky to date a queen like you, Sasha had said. Those guys don’t know what they’re missing.
Now she scoffed. “You’re making this about color.”
The train was coming, and I had to yell to be heard over it. “Wake up. Everything is about color. I’m not making it that way. Society is making it that way. Society has made it that way for centuries now, and you want to pin it on me?”
I didn’t tell her that Saint had asked me out just hours ago, and I said, yes, yes, fuck yes! I stepped onto the last train car. The AC hit me like a wall of bulletproof glass, the train doors closed on Sasha’s pleading eyes, and I was reminded of an episode of Women Behind Bars.
▴ ▴ ▴
I’d thought my friendship with Sasha was bigger than that, but all of my real friends said a million I-told-you-sos, you can never fully trust a Becky. Except for Rachel, who I guess was a Becky herself but different from the rest in that she saw me, had seen me since we met in high school, AP Lit. She lived far away, on the west coast now, and we didn’t get to catch up often, but she just-so-happened to call me the night of my fight with Sasha.
Assuming the body of a Black mama for a singular moment, Rachel told me to pray for Sasha, and I asked her when the last time she prayed for anyone was, and she said she prayed for her advanced statistics professor her last semester of graduate school.
“The woman set unreal expectations, and then tried to make you feel like an idiot when you couldn’t meet them.”
“Yeah, but this is different. I just don’t get Sasha. What was she trying to do? Why wouldn’t she want me to win? I’m thirty years old. Don’t I deserve a man?” Sasha had to have seen how struck I was when I told her I was crushing on Saint last weekend.
“You do.”
I nodded, knowing it but not really knowing it. Sometimes I needed someone to tell me what I deserved. “Then why? Why would she even?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Because you’re living in her world?”
“Fuck. What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.”
I sighed, shook my head, though I knew Rachel couldn’t see me through the phone.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t be pissy mad. It doesn’t mean you can’t tell her the fuck off,” she said.
“I’ve already done that.”
“And?”
“And it doesn’t feel like enough.” Nothing would be enough until Sasha understood, really understood what it meant for a friend to spit on your feelings. And even worse, for her to recognize misogyny and ignore misogynoir. Sasha needed to feel for every little Black girl who thought she wasn’t pretty enough, who wanted her hair to grow down instead of out, who questioned why the boys always wanted girls with light eyes and the books they read in school co-signed this ridiculous semblance of beauty. Fuck Sasha, fuck fuck fuck her.
“Yeah, it’s out of your control. I really think you should pray for her,” Rachel said.
▴ ▴ ▴
The worst part is, about a week later Sasha brought that twenty-five-year-old tramp to an office party in celebration of a donation from a billionaire who wanted recognition more than bee restoration. It was like Sasha was stuck on being shitty to prove something, maybe that she wasn’t racist or hadn’t misjudged the current situation but was actually a proponent of love. Sasha flaunted Kendall around like a tender piece of steak, and Saint was ever the nice guy, smiling and nodding at them but then walking off a few minutes later. I watched Sasha and Kendall corner him at the buffet, then in the line for drinks, and finally while eating his dessert. Who the fuck corners a man while he eats a cupcake with yellow icing and bee wings made of fondant?
▴ ▴ ▴
I was global warming, and Sasha did all she could to ignore me at work the next day, though she kept my name in her mouth. I overheard her talking to Blake about how cute mixed babies were. They were standing by the water cooler, and I peeked at them from around the corner. My face planted against the hallway’s honeycomb wallpaper, I hated their nerve more than anything.
“And because their parents have, like, totally different DNA, they’re healthier,” Sasha said, her voice lilting in all the wrong places.
“Yeah,” Blake said nodding.
“And smarter.” Sasha tapped her temple.
“Yeah.”
“And funnier.” Sasha laid her hand on Blake’s shoulder, and I cringed, but he didn’t seem to mind it.
“Really?” he asked, as if she was a doctor or something.
“No, there’s no telling if they’ll be funnier, but it couldn’t hurt, right? Like, it might be true.”
Blake laughed too hard, and I hated him more than ever.
“See, I’m glad you understand. Yolanda doesn’t get it, but it’s facts. You know? Facts.” The comment was so pointed that I wondered if Sasha had seen me. But she finally reached down to fill her cup with water, and I walked away knowing I would do something I regretted if I stayed.
▴ ▴ ▴
Still, the office grew colder without Sasha by my side. Saint’s job was physically demanding and we weren’t often in the same space together, so he wasn’t there to fill the void, though the night out drinking had broken the ice, and we began to talk in full paragraphs. I spent more money than I should have on lunch, fifteen dollars on tikka masala from the Indian place on Amsterdam or Szechuan dan dan noodles and dumplings ordered online, with no one to split the cost. And when our ED said absurd things in our weekly team meeting, like that we could market bees as a secondary man’s best friend, I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye and scoff through pupil dilation alone.
▴ ▴ ▴
In 2019, it takes a lot to get on your knees for a man. I’ll never forget when I was fourteen years old and my Mom took me to see The Brothers, and I held my breath when Tamala Jones’s character finally gave her husband a blow job. But kneeling at my bedside alone wasn’t about sucking a man off, this was about talking to God. Burying all of the demands framed as questions—why haven’t we gotten rid of racism yet or when will it be my turn—there I was, praying for a White girl’s salvation, knees ashing against my bedroom’s hardwood floors, shoulders hunched in annoyance, fingers so tightly interlocked that my hands went numb.
3.
But really, this is a love story. Before Sasha went full Basic Becky on me, and before I told her off at the 79th Street train station, when everything was Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney’s “Ebony and Ivory,” I called Sasha, like we sometimes did after a night out with our officemates, but this time I was beaming. This was the night after karaoke.
“I think I like Saint,” I said.
“Wait, what?”
“I think I like him. Well, I’d be interested in getting to know him better.” It felt good to say it aloud, to do more than think about him.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. I’ve heard him talk about women. It doesn’t seem like he’s really looking for anything serious,” Sasha said.
But I was in too good of a place to really hear her. I squinted my eyes, knowing that we’d gotten to know two different Saints. It was the way that Saint spoke to me, his zeroed-in attention that made me feel like I already knew him. “I don’t know, but I have a feeling about him, a good one.”
“Well, yeah, if you say so,” Sasha said, and I laughed her off, thinking she was projecting. All of the crap she withstood from her ex had her bullshit metric system on perpetually high.
▴ ▴ ▴
Karaoke was a going-away party for three of our coworkers, what we referred to around the office as the mass exodus. It was a Friday night and we had just finished singing our second rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” when I leaned close enough to Saint to smell the Jameson on his breath. I asked, “Who are you going to hang out with now that Jerry won’t be around?” It was the most intimate thing I’d ever asked him, and I would’ve spent the rest of the night blushing had I not been four or five drinks in.
He seemed happy with the question. “You,” he said.
I moved away from him, not knowing where we would go next.
“You want to sing a song together?” he asked in that shy way of his.
I nodded and he led to me to the bar, to a big binder of songs. We flipped past Aretha Franklin and Elton John and Michael Jackson until we came to Sam Cooke. Saint chose “Bring It on Home to Me,” and I didn’t know the song that well, but I went with it anyway. Holding our microphones close, like security blankets, warmed from the performers before us, Saint sang while I swayed back and forth to the rhythm. Mostly, we looked out on the small crowd of our drunken coworkers, but every now and then, I peeked over at Saint and saw the words like a promise, his lips on me. It was so cold in that bar then, I gripped the microphone tighter and bit my lip, seeing who we could be together, seeing how easy it would come.
▴ ▴ ▴
On the next Monday, the sun was out, and I felt like a high-schooler again, back when secrets made you giggle instead of cry. I was early leaving my apartment, and the crisp fall air smelled like street trash, but I didn’t curse New York like usual. Instead, I gave the neighborhood regulars more attention. I waved to the older guy who sat on a crate in the sun, holding a cane to the ground as if he would get up at any moment but never moving; the woman who wore baggy jeans in front of the liquor store, her broad smile missing one front tooth; the short man with a speaker booming from a grocery cart, playing “I Wanna Be Where You Are” by the Jackson 5. It was a nice day to be in Harlem; it was a nice day to be in love.
When I got to work, Saint was already there, making coffee, and I went to grab a couple of cups. “Did you have a nice weekend?” he asked. I nodded, and then we were mostly silent until the coffee was ready. He held his hand out for a cup, and I accidentally gave him both. He handed an empty cup back to me and then poured our coffee gingerly. I could tell he put a lot of thought into saying, “Do want to go out sometime, outside of work?”
“Yeah,” I said.
So we did, neither of us knowing the argument Sasha and I would have on this very same day.
▴ ▴ ▴
Weeks later, it was already dark when Saint met me on the corner of 141st and Adam Clayton, but from across the street I could tell it was him from the way he walked, back straight, knees turned out. When we got to the Senegalese restaurant, he ordered pork shoulder, and I ordered mussels. I sat close to the table, elbows resting on top, and he kept his eyes wide, arms crossed on his lap when he wasn’t eating. At first we talked about nothing—the weather, New York, the bee nonprofit. But then we talked about everything—our families, things we loved, things that spiraled us, movies that made us think, songs that made us sing. We made our way back to Sam Cooke but only for a moment. “I knew I liked you when I found out the kind of music you listened to,” I said.
And he nodded. “I always turned it up because I thought it might attract you.”
▴ ▴ ▴
There’s this note that Sam Cooke hits, and Saint thought it was where Ron Isley must have gotten the impetus for most of his runs. Back at my apartment one night, we listened to “Summer Breeze” with our foreheads pressed together, the jerk sauce from the Caribbean spot around the corner spicing our mouths; we were anxious to kiss.
I gathered his locs between my hands and counted them. There were nineteen in total, many of which were the sum of smaller locs that he let grow together. Then when Saint and I kissed, I stuck my hand in the thick of those kinky locs and gripped tightly. Eventually, he drew his head back to come up for air—to look at me—and found my arm linking the two of us, hand still attached to his head. “I almost didn’t get the job,” he said. “I could tell they were on the fence about me.”
“I almost didn’t apply,” I said. “Imposter syndrome.”
Then we listened to Sam Cooke and the Four Tops and Macy Gray and The Stylistics. We listened to Brandy and DeBarge and Sly and the Family Stone, and I could tell he felt it too, how good it was to be together, how good it was to be Black.
▴ ▴ ▴
Saint and I brought our romance to work fast. The first time we walked into the office holding hands, our ED’s face flatlined, not knowing what to do or say about our new romance. That same day, Saint said Joel took him aside and said, “I bet your mom would be proud, Yolanda is every Black mama’s dream.” Then Joel asked what my apartment looked like, if it was full of books, if I had a TV in my bedroom and if I slept with it on or off at night.
We became Saint-and-Yolanda, two names almost always said together, such a togetherness nothing short of a revolutionary act. It was like the time the ED told the team that humans would only have four years to live if all of the bees died off, and Joel asked her, What about Black people? What would the life expectancy be for us?
4.
It’s important to know that this isn’t just my story but the story of whoever tells it.
With my window open to let in an early winter breeze, Saint and I watched a Netflix documentary about Sam Cooke and nodded our heads at how nothing added up, we were so used to life being that way.
“They use us against us,” Saint said, grabbing my hand and rubbing his thumb against it.
“And it makes things really hard to sort out,” I added.
“You think it all played out like that, the way that woman said?” Saint asked me.
“Does it matter? Either way, Sam was trying to be bigger than they wanted him to be and wound up dead.”
Saint’s face curled, and the usual wrinkle between his eyes deepened. “You’re right. Dead is dead,” he said.
▴ ▴ ▴
Dead was my relationship with Sasha. I watched her like a hawk at team meetings, walked by her desk more than necessary, stopped at the water cooler if she was already there. I hummed happy melodies to show how in love I was. When no one else was watching but her, I grabbed Saint’s butt and laughed when he swatted my hand away. “Hey,” he said. “Professionalism.” I bought Saint and me T-shirts that said black love, and we wore them on the same casual Friday. Albeit completely innocent to Saint, parading was purposeful. It mattered to me that I’d won, and Sasha knew it.
One day, Sasha caught up with me walking to work from the 2 train. She tapped me on the shoulder, and I swatted her away. Tap, tap. Swat, swat. She was a nuisance with a stinger. Tap, tap. Swat, swat. She eventually got the picture and let me alone, though I can’t say that alone was what I wanted. I wanted my friend back, or at least the friend I thought I had. But you never really know who people are until they tell you.
5.
After everything went down, I watched Stung: The True Story of Yolanda Watkins alone in my bedroom, on top of the covers, knees tucked to my chest. All of the filming wrapped up so quickly, in just a few months, like that was all the time it took to know a love story so interwoven with inherent bias.
Like the Sam Cooke documentary, so goes mine.
An image of the ED in her office, a laminated poster of a bee on top of honeycombs and the text save the bees behind her. She smooths down her skirt, tucks her hair behind her ears. She tells her violent version of the story in less than two breaths, says I unleashed a thousand killer bees and watched them attack Sasha. She says they swarmed Sasha’s body like that scene in My Girl where Thomas J goes looking for Vada’s ring, and from fifty feet away, I just stood there smiling like a caricature. The ED is passionate, convincing.
I thought, maybe she’s right. Maybe that did happen. Maybe I just stood by staring as the bees attacked Sasha, thinking of the nights I spent under the air conditioning in my parents’ room watching a nineties comedy-drama. Maybe I watched the bees, who knew a little something about swarm theory, sting Sasha a million, trillion times, my eyes sticky with malice.
Then, zooming in on the ED’s face, “How do you know what she was thinking?” the producers ask. I recognized their voices from the first call. They’d read my review of the nonprofit on Glassdoor and offered me 10K to let them unfold the story.
“Yolanda said what she was thinking. She always did. Not to me, of course, but the office talks,” the ED says over B-roll of an office full of employees more diverse than the bee nonprofit.
“So, everything between Yolanda and Sasha is just hearsay?”
“Reasonable hearsay.”
Either way, the bees, or lack thereof, didn’t kill Sasha. Still people said Sasha grew to looking over her shoulder, hearing the bees like backstabbing whispers, turning around to find nothing there. Or at least nothing she could see, nothing she could point out.
The ED looks innocent when she adds, “I don’t know what Sasha did to make Yolanda so mad, but yes, I did hear that there was an issue between them. Maybe jealousy did them in.” She pauses to think then adds, “What I don’t understand is why Yolanda even cared, if Saint truly loved her. What does it matter if Sasha throws some floozy at him?”
“I thought you said you didn’t know what Sasha did,” an unrecognizable voice-over, a face hidden behind the camera.
“Well, not really, no, I don’t.” The ED attempts to smile but even that seems to fluster her, and she eventually excuses herself to grab a cup of ice water or to relieve herself or to check her cell phone, one of those reasons, though it’s not important which. The awkwardness of her exit gives the documentary a homey feel, like you’re behind the scenes, like it’s possible to glean what’s what.
6.
When they interview Joel, he has a supernatural version of the after-effects of my falling out with Sasha, but to put things into perspective, his recount was given when he no longer worked for the bee nonprofit but was still dating a Becky. He says I did nothing, even though Sasha was really buggin’ for trying to hook up a guy that everyone in the office knew was in love with me. He says when you do nothing to set people right, the world accounts for misdoings on its own. For my negligence, I was haunted by the ghost-of-White-girls past. Joel says it’s worse than hearing rats in the ceiling and imagining them crashing down on your face and that that same ghost came around the bee nonprofit after I’d left. The bagels left over from the board meeting, gone. The bee posters vandalized with pictures of White girls he’d never seen before and others who are well-known celebrities—Amy Schumer, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson. And who else but a White girl’s ghost wrote “free the nipple” with dry erase marker on the office refrigerator? He says the ghost wasn’t a blond-haired, blue-eyed Barbie doll like you might presume. Joel leans back in his chair and spreads his legs wide, stretches his arms back like what he is about to say is taking everything out of him. “A ghost, like some shit from a movie.”
“How do you know what it looked like?” the voice-over asks, the microphone boom accidentally falling into the shot. The production guy pulls it back quickly, repositioning himself.
I moved to two inches from the screen, popcorn in hand but often missing my mouth; I couldn’t look away, had to see every breath, every beat. Joel’s truth is better than what actually happened. He tells my story more eloquently than I ever could, disarming people with his White girlfriend, his proposed distance from mad Black women.
“When Black people see wild shit, we talk,” Joel says smugly. “And Yolanda is my nigga. After it all played out, we rapped on the phone for hours, and she said it was like she couldn’t get away from this shit, like the shit just wouldn’t die. I knew exactly what she meant.” Joel sinks down low and shakes his head. He lets out a big sigh. “She should’ve never been fired, but this is America, right? After she left, I felt this stinging in my chest every time I walked into the office.”
“What did she get fired for?”
“Lack of enthusiasm,” Joel says, smiling.
“Lack of enthusiasm?”
“Yeah, it’s some real White people shit.”
B-roll of honeybees mating, the male drone dying quickly after ejaculation, while waiting for Joel to say more. After a solid minute of thinking, he claps his hands together, gearing up to break things down and reclaiming his screen time. His face shines like a new penny.
“It’s hard to say what Sasha did to get on Yolanda’s bad side. But if you know Yolanda, you know she’s a walking storm waiting to happen. Yolanda watches. She’s one of those people who seems to break over something small, but it’s really a million tiny things built up. Like bee wings. They move so quickly; they gather air, and then whoop, she’s off, riding all of the bullshit. And you’re just the dust beneath her. And she looks crazy or angry, and I get it, she is. If you paid close attention to shit, you’d be angry too.” Joel considers what he’s just said with closed eyes, as if he is imaging it all. Then he opens them and shakes his head. “Plus she reads a lot, and readers are always skeptical. So it’s a wonder, almost unbelievable, that she didn’t do anything, nothing, but it’s the God’s-honest truth. And if you don’t believe it, that’s on you.”
No voice-over here, but Joel eventually asks, “Being Black means having your life on trial, doesn’t it?”
7.
When Jamie the Receptionist tells the story, she says it doesn’t have much to do with Saint or Sasha, but is about Blake and me, go figure. Jamie the Receptionist is stereotypically pretty, with deep brown hair that isn’t too full or frizzy but lays flat against her back. Her eyes are emerald green, and all of her trendy clothes seem to match them.
In Jamie the Receptionist’s first clip, she is wearing a skirt set. A satin blouse with wildflowers on it halfway tucked into a matching midi. Flipping her hair over her shoulder, leaning against a stark white wall, Daddy’s Little Girl says I went after Blake before Saint was even in the picture. I asked Blake to leave his girlfriend, and she has the receipts to prove it. She pulls out her phone to show the text messages.
Jamie: saw you getting a little close to yolanda the other day. anything going on there?
Blake: nah! i have a girlfriend, remember?
Jamie: yeah but yolanda doesn’t seem to mind.
Blake: man, i’ve been trying to keep my distance. she’s told me more than once that she’s single.
Jamie: of course she has.
Blake: well, i’m only trying to be nice.
Jamie: just don’t be too nice. your girlfriend is a gem.
Blake: i know. ☺
8.
Maybe revenge is what this story depends on, low hanging fruit, strange fruit even. When I sent the e-mail, I knew Sasha wouldn’t get fired, not that the producers cared to ask. Around that time, the bee nonprofit had lost too many people, and I thought the weight of losing another would drive the nonprofit into the ground. Sasha and I had each other’s passwords, so that if one of us was running late, we could log into the other’s computer, and if someone came around asking about whereabouts, we could look over and say, “Hmm. She has to be around here somewhere. She’s logged into her computer.”
I was just sitting at my desk, and Sasha was late for three days in a row, and for the first two days it seemed enough to dramatically say, “Hmm, I think she’s late again,” when people asked about her. But on the third day, when Sasha still wasn’t in the office after I finished a full cup of coffee and two chocolate-frosted donuts, I knew it was time to step my game up. Playing “A Change is Gonna Come” for all of the office to hear, I pressed send like pouring a bottle out for the lost homies.
I imagined Sasha’s dead bee photo zipping through the atmosphere, flying around the water cooler and across the lobby until it reached the ED’s desk. But I didn’t know what I really wanted to come of it. Maybe I just wanted to embarrass her.
▴ ▴ ▴
I was called into the ED’s office early the next day. I’d walked in five minutes late, and for once, Sasha was already there. She’d turned on my computer for me, and I reluctantly thanked her.
When I stepped into the ED’s office, she was sitting behind her desk, jowls tensed like a rottweiler. It wasn’t her usual MO; she was more of a leader by apology, like she was sorry to ask you to do your job. I immediately knew things were off. The vibe felt similar to a time when a former coworker said the nonprofit was bullshit, that we weren’t really making an impact.
The ED asked me to sit down, and I did, at the edge of a plastic folding chair directly across from her.
“It’s been brought to my attention that you sent an e-mail.”
“Me?”
“You’re the only one sitting in front of me right now.”
“What e-mail?”
“An e-mail from Sasha’s account. Blake says he saw you sending it.”
That fucker. “I don’t think he knows—”
“We have to let you go.”
“You’re letting me go? For what?”
“A breach in privacy, confidentiality, and honesty.”
“You’re making this up. Where is any of that in the handbook?”
“You can’t send e-mails from other people’s accounts.” She held her eyebrows up as if that was a given. Her lips were thin slices, and I frequently wondered if she ever entertained the idea of fillers, if she looked at my lips in awe the way I looked at hers, barely enough canvas for lipstick. Now, I hated her lips more than ever, her face too, everything about her.
“You don’t care about the bees. You don’t give a flying fuck about those bees. If you did, Sasha would be in here, and you’d be asking her about her dedication to the cause. But no, you’re worried about me, and for what?”
The ED asked me to leave a final time, and I stood up, not wanting to make a scene. But before I left, unprompted, the ED said her firing me had nothing to do with who dates who, she’s doesn’t give a hot man’s hoot about romance, or a lack thereof. I stared at her then, trying to gauge what she knew. She seemed so different on this end of things, not like a woman who loved bees at all, not like a woman who wanted power either. I saw it in the way her eyes narrowed and she looked like she might cry; she was begging for sympathy. A shadow sliced her pale face, and I saw her more clearly than I ever had before. A woman who didn’t want me to win, who thought it might mean her losing.
9.
Either way the story goes, the situation is fucked up, and White men are to blame.
10.
Saint nibbled at my ear. He did this often, in bed while I was deep in thought and he couldn’t guess what was on my mind. Months after the whole debacle had come and gone, documentary and all, knowing I should have been able to let the shit go, I thought without saying…
No one talks about Barbara Campbell. She lost her fucking husband like a drone bee. And when I googled her to get a better understanding of who she was before Sam Cooke and what became of her after, I got a deep sense of dread. In a picture with Sam Cooke, she looked like my mother, and not in the way that White people think all Black people look alike or the way that Black people think all other Black folk are family. It was in her piercing eyes, crafted eyebrows, a nose and lips not meant for missing, large and demanding as they were. Hair cropped to her head like a halo, and I knew this woman for sure. I fucking knew this woman like I knew every Black woman I’d ever met. Fuck fuck, fuck fuck fuck. I knew Barbara Campbell like I knew my own damn self.