Black Girls Must Have It All by Jayne Allen

Author:Jayne Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

16

TWO DAYS LATER, TRUE TO HER WORD, LISA ARRANGED A MEETING at the station with Chris Perkins, and more important, Doug Reynolds, KVTV’s general manager. Chris might have acted like he was the center of gravity in the newsroom, but Doug was the sun, and all things rotated around him. If he was in the room, Chris was as good as invisible. For me, that was a good thing. Chris was the news director who told me to use my voice, then backed down later when I needed an advocate. He was the voice of the viewer when there was criticism about my hair and left it to me to figure out how to reconcile ratings against my rights.

After my last broadcast, right before my maternity leave, Chris and I were far from being on good terms. Lisa and I had openly defied him, which I was sure was more than just a knock to his ego. I could only imagine whose idea it was to hire another anchor while I was away. Who’d orchestrate my return from leave to find my position had been all but filled by someone who was supposed to be a temporary stand-in. Truly, with Chris at the helm at KVTV, if I didn’t find a way around him, I was going to have to find somewhere else to build the rest of my career.

Sleep deprived, and still considering a full shower a luxury, I prepared for battle—the new mother version of it. I’d pumped, pulled my hair into a reasonable puff, and slapped a decent polish job on my filed-down nails. As a finishing touch, I managed a little war paint—a reasonable application of makeup in most of the right places to look like a recognizable version of myself

“I’ll be back in a couple of hours, I think. Milk is in the fridge,” I whispered to my mother, my head popped in the den’s doorway. She had the television on a low murmur with the voices just audible. I remember her saying once she thought the sound soothed the baby. To me it seemed like it lulled both of them to sleep.

“Good luck,” my mother whispered back. I waited for the follow-up to come, an Are you going to wear your hair like that? Or some other echoing of the doubts that had taken residence in my own mind. The always-on internal assessment of the risks of nonconformity. I’d stood in the mirror and thought as much, wondering whether I was disadvantaging myself. I considered the idea of wearing a wig, or if I had enough time for a blow dry and flat iron. I wondered if this meeting needed me to be somebody else, to pretend once again, to wear the mask. But once motherhood makes two of you, the eyes that you know are watching every move you make are so much more important than the pair staring back at you in the mirror. The message I would convey to Evie was much more meaningful than me being judged.

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