Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

So Piper arrived early with notes and wrote out and printed the articles she'd researched and outlined the day before, then spent the rest of the day preparing articles for the following morning. It wasn't that anyone else would need to get on the computer later, just that it was in the executive editor's office and, although he was pleasant, the space was simply not big enough for two people. The executive editor shared Mr. Cole's name plus a Jr. to go with it, was hired for the position for his inability to stand up to Mr. Cole Sr. and to provide a front to allow his father to say whatever the chemicals in his head dictated and pass it off as a "letter to the editor" when the paper was inevitably sued for libel in response. Whole days went by when the executive editor kept his door closed, which was appreciated by his staff because watching the graying thirty-five-year-old Junior get yelled at was nearly as uncomfortable as when Mr. Cole chose one of them for belittlement.

In addition to Piper, the New Holland Herald had three full-time employees, Segun Diop, Bill Sims, and Gil Manly, two other part-timers, Carleen Wilson and Shandy Gomes, and a rotating legion of freelancers willing to pump out four-hundred to eight-hundred word stories for thirty-two dollars a pop. Piper was the only staff writer under forty, the only one more accustomed to a monitor's windy hum than the insect percussion of the manual typewriter. Carleen and Shandy spent their moments in the office slumped nearly level to their desks, in turn harassing and being harassed by the writers who wrote their sections. Aside from Mr. Cole, the fact that the writers were paid so little was enjoyed by no one. The writers, obviously, found this an annoyance, particularly when much of their work was printed with far too many errors to be used as clips to entice other, better-paying publications. (The New Holland Herald was not a premiere African-American periodical, such as its fierce competitor the Amsterdam News, the Philadelphia Tribune, or Washington, D.C.'s renowned News Dimensions) For the editors it was extremely difficult as well, since the freelancers invariably tried to compensate for the low wage by hacking out the fastest pieces they could manage. This technique the writers would employ with greater and greater desperation until they were submitting paragraphs of disjointed gibberish. When asked to rewrite the piece and read it at least once before handing it back, the freelancers would do so but then quit, refusing to invest any more time in their submissions in the future.

Charlie Awuyah and Gil Manly were two of the main reasons the entire paper wasn't trash. Charlie Awuyah ate red pistachios all day and had been at the same desk for twenty-five years, before Mr. Cole even bought the place. In each issue he filled the last three pages of the paper with some of the most intelligent sports writing done anywhere. Gil Manly was barely in the office, was sixty, and dressed like reporters did when he was a boy, always kept a yellow pencil in his mouth in the building and a cigarette in it outside. Gil got to cover every single news event that didn't involve a press release. Piper wanted his job. She thought he was good, but each week the first thing she did was pore over his work and tell herself that she was better, or at least she would be some day soon. That was what Piper would do: stare at his desk, calculate how long it would be till he retired. Two years — there was no way he could hold out more than that; Piper'd caught him resting halfway up the long straight stairs that went from the ground to the third floor. Then, really, how long would it be until Mr. Cole Sr. would follow? His rage, his hatred, his obesity. If the man lived another five years it would be due only to his other bad habit, his stubbornness.

In particularly optimistic moments Piper imagined one day taking the helm, gathering investors, maybe Dumbass and his friends, restoring the paper to its former glory. Or maybe she would just follow the pattern and get a dumbass of her own for security, be his artistic wife, a trophy to hold up, breed with, and eventually cheat on. Conquering conformity by complying with it completely. Piper was surprised at her lack of discomfort with the notion, until she thought of the look of smug affirmation etched in the wrinkles that had grown to accentuate her mother's expressions. Piper knew just the face she would make, too, the one that always formed when some event unfolded as she had contradicted it would, positive or negative. It was such a jarring image, her mother sitting in the front pew at some Episcopalian church in her wedding lace, the hat and everything, that face that said, "See, I told you, is it so bad really?" and Piper would realize that it was, but it would be too late not to say "I do."

The image was so clear, so alarming, that Piper left the copy room with it floating behind her, and when she happened to notice the cute guy who'd helped her move into her place months before she went right up to him and asked him over for dinner. Her boldness, which intoxicated her on the long ride to the ribbon cutting at the new CVS in BedStuy, started haunting her with remembrances of sentences like "get to know you better," which seemed absurd without that guy before her, not quite looking at her in the face like he was alternately threatened by and ignoring her, both of which made the attraction stronger. His hands felt so thick with calluses that Piper was sure he could juggle live coals, the arms swollen and rounded from repeated use, making her giggle aloud at the irrationality of her desire to be lifted by him. If they never kissed that would be fine, but not if she never got to feel what it was like to be lifted from the earth in those hands, held in those arms from it.

Piper's idea of housekeeping was to keep all her papers on raised surfaces like the counter, dining room table, and lid on the toilet basin, and all her clothes in piles on the floor, organized by the place she was standing when she took them off. There were no dishes to wash because she used paper plates and plastic forks, and couldn't cook. She walked to the take-out counter at Bamboo and they said, "Piper, you should really get the greens with that, you're not eating enough vegetables." She dialed their number from memory. There was a place on her tongue that was lobbying heavily for Thai, but what Piper wanted even more was a dish she could pour into her own cold pots and claim credit for. While Piper was quick to brag that she couldn't cook, she was equally willing to passively pretend she had. Not cooking Creole food was her specialty.

When Snowden arrived, Piper was laid out on the sofa, the effort of removing half her debris from sight rendering her unconscious. It was after nightfall and the light coming through the glass door to the outer hall pushed her toward waking, but it was the sound of Dee knocking on the door as she pushed through it (a fascist trait inherited from the mother, Abigail Goines) that brought Piper completely to reality. From a quick glance at her sister, the ever astute Piper could tell several things: that the food had arrived, that Dee had paid for it but not brought it up till now, that in the short walk up the stairs Dee had found time to ask Piper's guest his occupation (because she would surely not recognize random help) and he had told her, because she was wearing that face (one their mother created as well). It seemed that on 122nd Street, for all intents and purposes Dee was Abigail Goines.

Snowden was gracious, smiling and nodding to Dee until she closed the door behind her. His pacing of the room before seating himself was polite, complimentary. The curiosity Snowden displayed was in the acceptable manner of casually walking over to Piper's paintings along the back wall, smiling with polite befuddlement before heading over to the bookshelf to see what tides were in the mind of the person he was dealing with. Piper encouraged this by drawing out the process of microwaving the dinners because that's what that bookcase was for. All the junk that would give him any real insight, the seedy true crime stories and painfully embarrassing personal growth memoirs, were carefully hidden in the bedroom within a trunk, beneath several sedimentary levels of dirty laundry, exactly where they belonged.